What a miserable spectacle France, great France, chivalric France presented now! How many pretenders were there to the throne?--to the presidential chair? There were the Legitimists, and the Orleanists, and the Napoleons, two branches of Napoleons, and a dozen aspirants to the presidency! How miserable! What waste of vigour and dignity.
Yes, he was glad he had made up his mind. He would devote himself, body and soul, to the sovereign people under the constitutional sovereign.
He would be as advanced as any man short of revolution, short of violence. His motto should be All things for the people under the people's King.
No doubt his mother's talk to him in the dining-room had set him off on such currents of thought. His mother's talk in the dining-room--by the way, he had not yet looked at the paper she had given him.
He pulled down the blind, turned up the lights over the mantel, and standing with his back to the chimney-piece, examined the packet in his hand.
It was a large envelope, tied in a very elaborate manner, and the string was sealed in three places at the back. On the front, under the string, he read his own name in his father's well-known large legible writing. He cut the string and the envelope, and drew out of the latter a long narrow parcel. This he opened, and found to consist of half-a-dozen sheets of brief-paper closely covered on both sides with the large legible writing of his father. The paper was secured at the left hand corner by a loop of red tape. He saw at a glance that the document took the form of a letter to him. It began, "My dear and only son, John," and finished with "Your most affectionate and anxious father, William Hanbury." The young man turned over the sheets slowly, glancing at each in turn. This long letter was not, from first to finish, broken in any way. There were no general heading, or divisions into sections, or even paragraphs. From beginning to end no break appeared. The wide margin bore not a single scratch. There was no mark from the address to the signature to attract attention.
He glanced at the opening words of this long letter. From them it was plain his father meant him to read them quietly and deliberately in the sequence in which they ran. The first sentence was this:
"It is of the greatest importance to the object I have in view that the facts I am about to disclose to you should reach your mind in the order I have here put them; otherwise the main fact in the revelation might have a pernicious effect upon you, my son."
The young man lowered the manuscript and mused a moment. It was obvious to him that no matter what he should think of the contents of this document his father had considered them of first-rate importance, and likely to influence his own mind and actions in no ordinary way. His father's sense and judgment! had never been called in question by any of his father's oldest and closest friends, and those who knew him most intimately never saw reason to account him liable to exaggerated estimates of the influence of ideas, except in his morbid sensitiveness to anything like popular revolutions or dynastic intrigues.
John Hanbury raised the document and recommenced where he had left off. That first sentence was cautionary: the second sentence took away the breath of the young man, by reason of the large field it opened to view, and the strange and intense personal interest it at once aroused. It ran thus: