BELLA. Promise to send Dominique to me and I will tell you.
BEL. May be.
BELLA. It is the picture of a man my mother loved.
BEL. Tell me the story.
BELLA. It was over in Spain. He was a Frenchman, but it seems he had been intrusted by the Spanish government with important papers with instructions not to let them leave his hands except to the proper authority. My mother with a girl’s caprice, begged to take them; was refused; begged, pouted and finally had them read to her. She had been outspoken in her love for this man, though my grand-parents had betrothed her to my father. They must have overheard the reading of the papers, for a few hours later my mother’s lover was arrested and thrown into prison and his life saved only on condition of mother’s immediate marriage to my father.
BEL. (starts.) What!
BELLA. So you see, he must have believed—this man whom my mother loved—that she betrayed him. (Beluche bows his head.) And she, knowing that all hope was over, and knowing too, his merciless, just nature did not dare to try to undeceive him. Then my grand-parents died and when I was still a young baby, my father died, leaving mother penniless. But the world was bright for her once more, because for the first time in two years, she had hope. She tried to find the man she loved. She prayed to be able to tell him why she had seemed to forsake him; to be able to beg his forgiveness for all the misery she had entailed by her foolish insistence. But when at last she came to a place where they had heard of him, she was told that he was dead. And so, to lift me out of the stress of dire poverty, she finally yielded and married Leon Duval. They came to America and he made her a good husband to the end.
BEL. (in a choked voice.) She is dead.
BELLA. Yes—Poor mother!—Don’t you think it a fine face? (showing Beluche the locket.)
BEL. No—an idiotic face.