Days of cloudless delight ensued; Ossi grew to manhood, left her protecting arms, and launched forth upon the broad, perilous stream of life, while she, gazing after him anxiously, was forced to stay upon the shore. The time was past when tenderly, delicately, and yet with a certain shyness of the son already a head taller than herself, she could ask to know all of his life, could extort from him his small confessions. She had to leave him to himself, with, at times, a secret tremor. Only secret, however; she would not interfere with his freedom of action. Praise of him greeted her on all sides; she was satisfied with her work.
He was like her in every way, even in his faults; but those faults which had wrought her ruin,--pride, and passionate blood--became him well. There was no throne upon earth that she did not consider him worthy to fill, and which should not have been his if she could have given it to him; there was no conceivable torture that she would not have borne willingly if thereby she could have added to his happiness.
His excellence was her justification; her maternal love was her religion.
She still sat in the same arm-chair where she had resolved to utter the falsehood, which, after all, her lips had refused to speak! Her heart seemed to have burst in twain, and from it had fallen the whole treasury of fair memories which she had stored within it; her slain joys lay about her in disarray, shattered, dead. She tried to collect them, groping for them in memory; all at once her thoughts hurried to the future,--the confusion subsided,--she understood!
She moaned, and stroked back the hair from her temples; her wandering glance fell upon a newspaper lying on her table. The date caught her eye,--the sixth of August,--she started, the morrow was his birthday! She remembered the little surprise she had prepared for him; she had selected from among her jewels something very rare and beautiful which he could give to his betrothed. Rising from her chair, she said to herself aloud, "The marriage is impossible!" Then followed the question, "What will he do, how will he live on?"--"Live?" she repeated, and on the instant a wild dread assailed her. "For God's sake!" she groaned, "that must not be, I must prevent it."
Again her thoughts hurried confusedly through her mind. She would go to him, and on her knees before him entreat, "Despise me, curse me, but be happy, live to bless those whose fate lies in your hands, and who could find no better master. The injustice of it I will answer for here, and before God's judgment-seat! Or--if you cannot sustain the burden of these unlawful possessions, cast it off. Let my name be blasted, I deserve nothing better. But you,--you live, take everything that is mine and that is yours of right, and found a new existence for yourself wherever it may be!"
She hurried out into the corridor, wild, beside herself. Before his door she paused, overcome by a horrible sense of shame,--she could never again look him in the face! What would have been the use? Another might perhaps compromise philosophically with circumstances. But he,--detestation of the blood flowing in his veins, would kill him! She raised her arms, and then dropped them at her sides, like some wounded bird, that, dying in the dust, makes one last vain effort to stir its wings to bear it to its lost heaven. Then she kneeled down and pressed her lips upon the threshold of his door before groping her staggering way back to her room.
CHAPTER XIII.
The mood in which Conte Capriani took his place beside Kilary in the victoria that was to carry him to the place of meeting, was a very strange one. Never had he felt such pride of victory; his thoughts reverted to his first meeting with the beautiful Countess Lodrin at the beginning of his career, when with his keen scent for all that was lowest in human beings, he had divined her passionate nature, a nature held in check with despotic resolution after the great disappointment of her early life.