Each day the veil of mystery was opening more widely before her eyes, allowing her to see things which for others were invisible.
Don Marcos, who, deserted by his former pupil, had gone back to the Princess, likewise received instructions from Lubimoff. He was to prevent the unhappy lady from perpetrating such a sacrilege on the Mediterranean. But what could the poor Colonel do with that madwoman who spent whole weeks without speaking to him, as though she did not know who he was!
The Prince returned to his yacht, and a year later being by chance in upper Norway on his return from an expedition to the Arctic Ocean, he received the sad but expected news. His mother had died, just as she saw rising from among the olive trees and pines of the rosy promontory, the beginning of huge stone walls artificially blackened like the painted panels in the antique shops, and which looked as though they were about to fall in ruins from mere age, as soon as they had risen from the ground.
CHAPTER III
MICHAEL arrived in time to receive the body of the Princess in Paris. Before her death her mind had been illuminated by the sudden flare of reason which is the signal of the end in cases of serious mental disturbances. She had left various papers on which she had noted loans made to certain persons, and judicious suggestions for her son in regard to the management of the enormous fortune. She wanted to be buried beside her husband, her first husband, "the hero," in the Père Lachaise cemetery. During the last years she had stayed in Paris, she had been seized once more by the craze for building, and had busied herself with the preparation of her final dwelling place. Beside the mausoleum of the Marquis of Villablanca, whose image, frowning and indomitable, held in one hand a broken sword, she had set up another monument no less ostentatious with a statue which was supposed to be her exact likeness and was nothing less than the semblance of the unhappy Queen of Scots, as it appears in the engraving of the Romanticist period.
During the funeral ceremonies, Michael Fedor met again many persons who formerly visited the Lubimoff palace, and whom he had thought were dead. Doña Mercedes in tears embraced him. She had become extraordinarily stout, and the coppery complexion inherited from her Aztec ancestors had taken on an unhealthy ascetic pallor. She looked like the Mother Superior of a noble convent of nuns. At her side, Monsignor, in his silk cassock and with an air of compunction, was moving his lips to save the dead woman's soul. "My son! We have all our sorrows." And as she said this, the poor lady looked at another woman elegantly dressed in mourning who stood there somewhat aloof, in the cemetery, and seemed utterly incapacitated by the ceremony which had obliged her to rise before noon.
The Duchess de Delille also came forward to meet him, taking both his hands and giving him a strange glance.
"Your mother loved me ... really loved me. During these last years we saw each other very often."
Michael nodded assent. He knew that already. The Princess Lubimoff had been the one loyal friend of this passionate unscrupulous woman, who was gradually losing every one's respect. She had defended Alicia when other high society women declared open war and closed their doors to her, fearing for their husbands' fidelity. As she used to play every winter at Monte Carlo, she had been in the company of the Princess up to the last moments.
"She loved me more than my mother ever did.... Perhaps she remembered that I might have been her daughter."