“My son!—what son?—what mean you?—Mordaunt is your son—your only son!” exclaimed Norna—“is he not?—tell me quickly—is he not?”
“Mordaunt is indeed my son,” said Mertoun—“the laws, at least, gave him to me as such—But, O unhappy Ulla! Cleveland is your son as well as mine—blood of our blood, bone of our bone; and if you have given him to death, I will end my wretched life along with him!”
“Stay—hold—stop, Vaughan!” said Norna; “I am not yet overcome—prove but to me the truth of what you say, I would find help, if I should evoke hell!—But prove your words, else believe them I cannot.”
“Thou help! wretched, overweening woman!—in what have thy combinations and thy stratagems—the legerdemain of lunacy—the mere quackery of insanity—in what have these involved thee?—and yet I will speak to thee as reasonable—nay, I will admit thee as powerful—Hear, then, Ulla, the proofs which you demand, and find a remedy, if thou canst:—
“When I fled from Orkney,” he continued, after a pause—“it is now five-and-twenty years since—I bore with me the unhappy offspring to whom you had given light. It was sent to me by one of your kinswomen, with an account of your illness, which was soon followed by a generally received belief of your death. It avails not to tell in what misery I left Europe. I found refuge in Hispaniola, wherein a fair young Spaniard undertook the task of comforter. I married her—she became mother of the youth called Mordaunt Mertoun.”
“You married her!” said Norna, in a tone of deep reproach.
“I did, Ulla,” answered Mertoun; “but you were avenged. She proved faithless, and her infidelity left me in doubts whether the child she bore had a right to call me father—But I also was avenged.”
“You murdered her!” said Norna, with a dreadful shriek.
“I did that,” said Mertoun, without a more direct reply, “which made an instant flight from Hispaniola necessary. Your son I carried with me to Tortuga, where we had a small settlement. Mordaunt Vaughan, my son by marriage, about three or four years younger, was residing in Port-Royal, for the advantages of an English education. I resolved never to see him again, but I continued to support him. Our settlement was plundered by the Spaniards, when Clement was but fifteen—Want came to aid despair and a troubled conscience. I became a corsair, and involved Clement in the same desperate trade. His skill and bravery, though then a mere boy, gained him a separate command; and after a lapse of two or three years, while we were on different cruises, my crew rose on me, and left me for dead on the beach of one of the Bermudas. I recovered, however, and my first enquiries, after a tedious illness, were after Clement. He, I heard, had been also marooned by a rebellious crew, and put ashore on a desert islet, to perish with want—I believed he had so perished.”
“And what assures you that he did not?” said Ulla; “or how comes this Cleveland to be identified with Vaughan?”