“When you are travelling in the desert, where there is no beaten track, are you not guided by the course of streams, by the character of the trees, by the conformation of their trunks, by the growth of the moss which clothes them, and by the stars of heaven? and when at another season, or even twenty years afterwards, should the rains have swelled the streams, or the sun have dried them up, should the once naked trees be clothed with leaves, should their trunks have expanded, and moss covered their roots, even should the north star have changed its position in the heavens, and you again beheld it, would you not recognise both star and stream?”
“Doubtless,” replied Diaz, “the man who has experience in the desert, is seldom deceived.”
“When you meet a stranger in the forest, who answers you with the cry of a bird or the voice of an animal, which is to serve as a rallying signal to you or your friends, do you not immediately say, ‘This man is one of us’?”
“Assuredly.”
“Well, then; I recognise the child in the grown man, just as you recognise the small shrub in the tall tree; or the stream that once murmured softly in the roaring and swollen torrent of to-day. I know this child again by a mode of speech, which twenty years have scarcely altered.”
“Is not this meeting a somewhat strange coincidence?” interrupted Diaz, now almost convinced of the Canadian’s veracity.
“God,” cried Bois-Rose, solemnly, “who commands the breeze to waft across the desert the fertilising seeds of the male palm to the female date-tree—God, who confides to the wind which destroys, to the devastating torrent, or to the bird of passage, the grain which is to be deposited a thousand miles from the plant that produced it—is he not also able to send upon the same path two human beings made in his image?”
Diaz was silent a moment; then having nothing more to advance in contradiction to the Canadian’s truthful words whose honest manner of speech carried with it an irresistible conviction, he turned towards Pepé:
“Did you,” said he, “also recognise in Arellanos’ adopted child, the Countess de Mediana’s son!”
“It would be impossible for any one who ever saw his mother long to mistake him. Enough! let the Duke de Armada contradict me.”