"Cremato the husband of your daughter?" asked the king, astonished. "Riddles multiply."
"In our humiliation and poverty in a foreign land, the strange man found us," answered the lady. "Less love than the warmest thankfulness which we owed gave him my daughter. God bless the noble man!" "God bless him!" said Julius quickly. "He was nobler than even his family knew. I was his student. To me he disclosed himself. His conscience had compelled him to discover that plot. His feelings tortured him when he discovered that Albo's innocent family had, through calumniation, become entangled in the terrible affair. Unable to disarm the anger of the insulted monarch, he sought untiringly the helpless family; found them, and compelled himself to take the yoke of marriage in order to become the protector of those whom he had undesignedly and unknowingly driven into ruin. The noble man kept his relations secret from the king, and left his court after he had proved that the hatred against the name of Albo was ineradicable. The king had never discovered that Cremato was his countryman. On his death-bed he confided to me his family and that picture which I have never seen. A picture which I finished after Cremato's plan, and had exhibited, attracted the notice of the lord chamberlain, and brought me here more quickly. Cremato's remembrance; that fatherland song that Cremato had taught his children; the sight of this worthy matron, of the noble queen, and your angel daughter's entreaties, shall finally move the heart of the king; and if I see rightly, if these be really tears which fill the eyes of the most noble-hearted monarch, then has my plan succeeded, and this night makes three happy."
The king was silent, struggling with his emotion. All eyes were fixed on him.
"Take up the flowers," said he. Then, deeply moved, to Albo's mother: "I am not able to give you anything more precious, even when I return to you all the property that you have lost. Albo's, Cremato's mother, be greeted! forget as I forget. The few days that remain to you shall be peaceful, and your granddaughters shall be my care."
"Most noble king!" cried Julius, and fell on his breast. Wife and daughter embraced him. The baroness folded her hands and prayed. … "Oh! see, my Albo, how he redeems the past! Oh! forgive him, the repentant, as I forgive him!"
As the king freed himself from this embrace, two beautiful maidens lay at his feet and moistened his hands with their tears. They were Cremato's daughters. "O sanctissima!" he sighed, and softly left the room to hide his tears.
The monarch kept his word, and peace reigned in his kingdom. But Cremato's picture he ventured not to look upon, and for long years it stood locked behind that curtain. The baroness had long since slept in her grave, and her granddaughters were happy mothers by their own firesides.
A host of blooming grandchildren, Eliza's and Sophia's sons, had made the king himself a grandfather. Then death came upon him slowly, and warned him to quit the stage of life. Joyfully he made himself ready, and willingly allowed the crown, so valueless to the dying, to glide from his hands. Satisfied with life, and resigned to death, he asked calmly to see Cremato's picture. "I am strong," he said to the weeping wife, the only one entrusted with that secret. "Myself in the arms of death, the countenance of the dead will no longer terrify me." The cover fell; courageously the king threw his glance upon the glowing background, and the light of transfiguration came over his face. "It was no ghastly figure of death. A cherub, beaming in heavenly light and glory, nodded from the clouds. Ethereally beautified, Albo's features smiled upon him; the right hand of the angel pointed above, and the left reached out conciliatingly the wreath of forget-me-nots, taken from the golden hair.
The work of the noble painter, a sign of his love for man and his trust in God, transformed the last struggle of the monarch to the gentlest peace.