“It is past and over, dear friend. These paragraphs have cleared up something that was obscure to me before,” said Dunoisse—“conveyed a hint of his that was never again made. One cannot pretend to judge him. He has always been a law unto himself.”
The bitterness of the words, and the ironical smile that curved the speaker’s lips as he uttered them, were lost upon the simple woman who answered:
“I have always felt that. There are characters so highly elevated above the crowd of ordinary individuals, that one can hardly expect them to be influenced by the ordinary considerations, the commonplace principles that guide and govern the rest of us——”
“Fortunately for ourselves!” interpolated Dunoisse.
“—That, my dear, we who know ourselves their inferiors in intellect, as in personal advantages, cannot pretend to judge them,” finished the poor lady.
“And in proportion with the baseness of their motives and the mean selfishness of their aims,” said Dunoisse, “the admiration of their more moral and upright fellow-creatures would appear to be lavished upon them.”
“Too true, I fear, my dear Hector,” admitted Miss Smithwick, flushing inside the neat frills that bordered her cap. “But had you beheld your father in the splendor of his earlier years, you would”—she coughed—“have perhaps regarded the devotion with which it was his fate to inspire persons of the opposite sex, with greater leniency and tolerance.”
“How did his path cross my mother’s?” asked Dunoisse, amused, in spite of himself, at the unremitting diligence with which the Marshal’s faithful votary availed herself of every opportunity that presented itself, to spread a brushful of gilding on her battered idol. “I have often wondered, but never sought to learn.”
“During the last years of the Emperor Napoleon’s sequestration at St. Helena, my dear, your father, chafing at the lack of public appreciation which his great talents should have commanded, and his distinguished martial career certainly had earned, found distraction and interest in traveling as a private gentleman through the various countries he had visited in a less peaceful character. And, during a visit to the country estate of a Bavarian nobleman, whose acquaintance he had made during—unless I err—the second campaign of Vienna, as the result of one of those accidents which so mold our after-lives, Hector, that one cannot doubt that Destiny and Fate conspire to bring them about, he crossed your mother’s path.”
“To her most bitter sorrow and her son’s abiding shame!” commented Dunoisse, but not aloud.