"I accept it," said Richard.
"I knew you would, and so I sent for you. I have a son whom I have never seen, and never shall see. His mother is a high-born lady; you will find her name in the papers that are in my pocketbook. She was beautiful, but heartless. I was a young lieutenant when we first met. We were both thoughtless and self-willed. My father was alive then, and he would not consent to our marriage, although it would have atoned for the indiscretion of an unguarded hour. Well, it can't be helped now. Yet she needn't have torn a piece of her heart out, and thrown it into the gutter. She, my wife before God and by the laws of nature, went on a journey with her mother and came back again as a maiden. I learned only that the hapless being sent into a world where there are already too many of its kind, was a boy. What became of him, I did not find out at the time. Later I won for myself a good station in my military career, my father died, and I was independent; and, by heaven, I would have married the woman if she could only have told me where my child was. She besieged me with letters, she begged for an interview, she used every entreaty; but to each of her letters I only replied: 'First find my child.' I was cruel to her. She could have married more than once; suitors were about her in plenty. 'I forbid you to marry,' I wrote to her. 'Then marry me yourself,' she answered. 'First find my child,' I repeated. I tortured her, but she had no heart to feel the infliction very keenly. She said she didn't know what had become of the child. She had not tried to find it; nay, she had taken the utmost pains to destroy all traces that could lead to its discovery, either by herself or by another. But, nevertheless, I found the clue. I spent years in the search. I came upon one little baby footstep after another,—here a nurse, there a scrap of writing, in another place a child's hood, and finally the end of the search seemed at hand. But right there I am stopped; I must die."
The rough man's breast heaved with a deep sigh. The rude exterior covered a tender heart. Richard listened attentively to every word.
"Comrade," said the dying soldier, "give me your hand, and promise that you will do the errand I can no longer execute."
Richard gave his hand.
"In my pocketbook you will find papers telling where the persons are who will help you to find the boy. He was, at last accounts, in the care of a peddler woman in Pest. I learned this from a Vienna huckster. But I failed to find the woman in Pest, as she had removed to Debreczen. I could not follow her, but I learned that she had sent the child to a peasant woman in the country. Where? She alone can tell. Yet I learned this much from a girl that lived with her,—that the peasant woman into whose care the boy was given, and who made a business of taking such waifs, was often at the peddler woman's house, and complained that she didn't receive enough money to pay for the child's board. The woman lives poorly, I was told, and the boy goes hungry, and in rags."
The speaker paused a moment, and his eyes filled with tears.
"But it is a pretty child," he resumed. "The peasant woman brought the little fellow to town with her now and then, to prove that he was alive; he can always be identified by a mole in the shape of a blackberry on his breast. The peddler, out of pity and fondness for the child, used to pay the woman a little money—so I was told—and in that way the poor boy was kept alive. The mother has long ago forgotten him. Comrade, I shall hear the child's cries even after I am under the sod."
"Don't worry about him," said Richard, "he shall not cry."
"You'll find him, won't you? And there is money in my pocketbook to support him until he grows up."