"Tell me about her!"
A dull, hopeless agony came into the eyes of the older man. And so his Gethsemane had come to him again! Every life has this garden to pa.s.s through--some, alas! again and yet again! And Paul Verdayne had thought that he had long since drained his cup of misery to the dregs. He knew better now.
"Yes, I will tell you of your mother, Boy," he said, and there was a strained, guarded note in his voice which his companion"s quick ear did not fail to catch. "But you must be patient if you wish to hear what little there is, after all, that I can tell you. You must remember, my Boy, that it is a long time since your mother--died--and men of my age sometimes--forget!"
"I will remember," the Boy said, gently.
But as he looked up into the face of his friend, something in his heart told him that Paul Verdayne did _not_ forget! And somehow the older man felt confident that the Boy knew, and was strangely comforted by the silent sympathy between them which both felt, but neither could express.
"Your mother, Boy, was the n.o.blest and most beautiful woman that ever graced a throne. Everyone who knew her must have said that! You are very like her, Paul--not in appearance, a mistake of Fate to be everlastingly deplored, but in spirit you are her living counterpart. Ah! you have a great example to live up to, Boy, in attempting to follow her footsteps!
There was never a queen like her--never!"
The young prince followed with the deepest absorption the words of the man who had known his mother, hanging upon the story with the breathless interest of a child in some fairy tale.
"She knew life as it is given few women to know it. She was not more than thirty-five, I think, when you were born, but she had crowded into those years more knowledge of the world, in all its myriad phases, than others seem to absorb during their allotted three score and ten. And her knowledge was not of the world alone, but of the heart. She was full of ideals of advancement, of growth, of doing and being something worthy the greatest endeavor, exerting every hope and ambition to the utmost for the future splendor of her kingdom--your kingdom now. How she loved you!--what splendid achievements she expected of you! how she prayed that you might be grand, and great, and true!"
"Did you always know her?"
"Always?--no. Only for three weeks, Boy!"
"Three weeks!--three little weeks! How strange, then, that you should have learned so much about her in that short s.p.a.ce of time! She must indeed have made a strong impression upon you!"
"Impression, you say? Boy, all that I am or ever expect to become--all that I know or ever expect to learn--all that I have done or ever expect to accomplish--I owe to your mother. She was the one inspiration of my life. Until I knew her, I was a nonent.i.ty. It was she who awakened me--who taught me how to live! Three weeks! Child! child!--"
He caught himself sharply and bit his lip, forcing back the impetuous words he had not meant to say. The silence of years still shrouded those mysterious three weeks, and the time had not yet come when that silence could be broken. What had he said? What possessed the Boy to-day to cling so persistently to this. .h.i.therto forbidden subject?
"Where did you meet her, Uncle?"
"At Lucerne!"
"Lucerne!" echoed the Boy, his blue eyes growing dreamy with musing.
"That says nothing to me--nothing! and yet--you will laugh at me, I know, but I sometimes get the most tantalizing impression that I remember my mother. It is absurd, of course--I suppose I could not possibly remember her--and yet there is such a haunting, vague sense of close-clinging arms, of an intensely white and tender face bending over me--sometimes in the radiance of day and again in the soft shadows of night, but always, always alight with love--of kisses, soft and warm, and yet often tearful--and of black, l.u.s.trous hair, over which there always seems to shine a halo--a very coronet of triumphant motherhood."
Verdayne"s lips moved, but no sound came from them to voice the pa.s.sionate cry in his heart, "My Queen, my Queen!"
"I suppose it is only a curious dream! It must be, of course! But it is a very real vision to me, and I would not part with it for the world.
Uncle, do you know, I can never look upon the pictured face of a Madonna without being forcibly reminded of this vision of my mother--the mother I can see only in dreams!"
Verdayne found it growing harder and harder for him to speak.
"I do not think that strange, Boy. Others would not understand it, but I do. She was so intensely a mother that the spirit of the great Holy Mother must have been at all times hovering closely about her! Her deepest desires centred about her son. You were the embodiment of the greatest, sweetest joys--if not the only real joys--of her strangely unhappy life, and her whole thought, her one hope, was for you. In your soul must live all the unrealized hopes and crucified ideals of the woman who, always every inch a queen, was never more truly regal than in the supreme hour that crowned her your mother."
"And am I like her, Uncle Paul? Am I really like her?"
"So much so, Boy, that she sometimes seems to live again in you. Like her, you believe so thoroughly in the goodness and greatness of a G.o.d--in the beauty and glory of the world fraught with lessons of life and death--in the omnipotence of Fate--in the truth and power and grandeur of overmastering love. You believe in the past, in all the dreams and legends of the Long Ago still relived in the Now, in the capabilities of the human mind, the kingship of the soul. Your voice is hers, every tone and cadence is as her own voice repeating her own words. Be glad, Paul, that you are like your mother, and hope that with the power to think her thoughts and dream lier dreams, you may also have the power to love as she loved, and, if need be, die her death!"
"But you think the same thoughts, Uncle Paul. You believe all I believe!"
"Because she taught me, Paul--because she taught me! I slept the sleep of the blind and deaf and soulless until her touch woke my soul into being. You have always been alive to the joy of the world and the beauty of living. Your soul was born with your body and lived purposefully from the very beginning of things. You were born for a purpose and that purpose showed itself even in infancy."
A silence fell between the two men. A long time they sat in that sympathetic communion, each busy with his own thoughts. The older Paul was lost in memories of the past, for his life lay all behind him--the younger Paul was indulging in many dreams of a roseate future, for his life was all ahead of him.
It was a friendship that the world often wondered about--this strange intimacy between Paul Verdayne, the famous Member of Parliament, and the young man from abroad who called himself Paul Zalenska. None knew exactly where Monsieur Zalenska came from, and as they had long ago learned the futility of questioning either of the men about personal affairs, had at last reconciled themselves to never finding out.
Everyone suspected that the Boy was a scion of rank--and some went so far as to say of royalty, but beyond the fact that every May he came with his faithful, foreign-looking attendant to Verdayne Place and spent the summer months with the Verdayne family, nothing definite was actually known. His elderly attendant certainly spoke some beastly foreign jargon and went by the equally beastly foreign name of Vasili.
He was known to worship his young master and to attend him with the most marked servility, but he was never questioned, and had he been, would certainly have told no tales.
The parents of Paul Verdayne--Sir Charles and Lady Henrietta--were very fond of their young guest, and made much of his annual visits. As for Paul himself, he never seemed to be perfectly happy anywhere if the young fellow were out of his sight.
He had made himself very much distinguished, had this Paul Verdayne. He had found out how to get the most out of his life and accomplish the utmost good for himself and his England with the natural endowments of his energetic and ambitious personality. He had become a famous orator, a noted statesman, a man of brain as well as brawn. People were glad to listen when he talked. He inspired them with the idea--so nearly extinct in this day and age of the world--that life after all was very much worth the living. He stirred languid pulses with a dormant enthusiasm.
He roused torpid brains to thought. He had ideas and had also a way of making other people share those ideas. England was proud of Paul Verdayne, as she had good reason to be. And he was only forty-three years old even now. What might he not accomplish in the future for the land to which he devoted all his talents, his tireless, well-directed activities?
He had given himself up so thoroughly to political interests that he had not taken time to marry. This was a great disappointment to his mother, Lady Henrietta, who had set her heart upon welcoming a daughter-in-law and a houseful of merry, romping grandchildren before the sun of her life had gone down forever. It was also a secret source of disappointment to certain younger feminine hearts as well, who in the days of his youth, and even in the ripeness of later years, had regarded Paul Verdayne with eyes that found him good to look upon. But the young politician had never been a woman"s man. He was chivalrous, of course, as all well-bred Englishmen are, but he kept himself as aloof from all society as politeness would permit, and the attack of the most skillfully aimed glances fell harmless, even unheeded, upon his impenetrable armor. He might have married wherever he had willed, but Society and her fair votaries sighed and smiled in vain, and finally decided to leave him alone, to Verdayne"s infinite relief.
As for the Boy, he was always, as I have said, a mystery, always a topic for the consideration of the gossips. Every year since he was a little fellow six years old he had come to Verdayne Place for the summer; at first, accompanied by his nurse, Anna, and a silver-haired servant, curiously named Dmitry. Later the nurse had ceased to be a necessity, and the old servant had been replaced by Vasili, a younger, but no less devoted attendant. As the Boy grew older, he had learned to hunt and took long rides with his then youthful host across the wide stretch of English country that made up the Verdayne estates and those of the neighboring gentry. Often they cruised about in distant waters, for the young fellow from his earliest years shared with the elder an absorbing love of nature in all her varied and glorious forms; and in February, always in February, Verdayne found time to steal away from England for a brief visit to that far-off country in the south of Europe from which the Boy came. Many remembered that Verdayne, like an uncle of his, Lord Hubert Aldringham, had been much given to foreign travel in his younger days and had made many friends and acquaintances among the n.o.bility and royalty of other lands, and although it was strange, they thought it was not at all improbable that the lad was connected with some one of those great families across the Channel.
As for Paul and the Boy, they knew not what people thought or said, and cared still less. There was too strong a bond of _camaraderie_ between them to be disturbed by the murmurings of a wind that could blow neither of them good or ill.
And the Boy was now twenty years of age.
Suddenly Paul Zalenska broke their long silence.
"Do you know, Uncle, I sometimes have a queer feeling of fear that my father must have done something terrible in his life--something to make strong men shrink and shudder at the thought--something--_criminal_! Oh, I dare not think of that!" he went on hastily. "I dare not--I dare not!
I think the knowledge of it would drive me mad!"
His voice sank to a half-whisper and there was a note of horror in his words.
"But, what a king he must have been!--what a miserable apology for all that royalty should be by every law, human or divine! Why isn"t his name heralded over the length and breadth of the kingdom in paeans of praise?
Why isn"t the whole world talking of his valor, his beneficence, his statesmanship? What is a king created a king for, if not to make history?"
He fought silently for a moment to regain his self-control, forcing the hideous idea from him and at last speaking with an air of finality beyond his years.
"No, I won"t think of it! May the King of the world endow me with the strength of the G.o.ds and the wisdom of the ancient seers, that I may make up by my efficiency for all my father"s deplorable lack, and become all that my mother meant me to be when she gave me to the world!"
He stretched out his arms in a pa.s.sionate appeal to Heaven, and Paul Verdayne, looking up at him, realized as he had never before that the Boy certainly had within him the stuff of which kings should be made.
The Boy was not going to disappoint him. He was going to justify the high hopes cherished for him so long. He was going to be a man after his mother"s own heart.
"Uncle," went on the Boy, wrought up to a high pitch of emotion, and throwing himself down again at Verdayne"s feet, "I feel with Louis XVI, "I am too young to reign!" Why haven"t I ever had a father to teach and train me in the way I should go? Every boy needs a good father, princes most of all, so much more is expected of us poor royal devils than of more ordinary and more fortunate mortals! I know I shouldn" be complaining like this--certainly not to you, Uncle Paul, who have been all most fathers are to most boys! But there are times, you know, when you persist in keeping me at arm"s length as you keep everyone else!
When you put up that sign, "Thus far and no further!" I feel myself almost a stranger! Won"t you let me come nearer? Won"t you take down that barrier between us and let me have a father--at least, in name? I"m tired of calling you "Uncle" who uncle never was and never could be!
You"re far more of a father--really you are! Let me call you in name what you have always been in spirit. Let me say "Father Paul!" I like the sound of it, don"t you? "Father Paul!"--"Father Paul!""
Paul Verdayne felt every drop of blood leave his face. He felt as if the Boy had inadvertently laid a cold hand upon his naked heart, chilling, paralyzing its every beat. What did he mean? The Boy was just then looking thoughtfully at the setting sun and did not see the change that his words called into his companion"s face--thank heaven for that!--but what _could_ he mean?
"You can call yourself my "Father Confessor," you know, if you entertain any scruples as to the propriety of a staid old bachelor"s fathering a stray young cub like me--that will make it all right, surely! You will let me, won"t you? In all the world there is no one so close to me as you, and such dreams as I may happily bring to fulfillment will be, more than you know, because of your guidance, your inspiration. You are the father of my spirit, whoever may have been the father of my flesh! Let it be hereafter, then, not "Uncle," but "Father Paul"!"
And the older man, rising and standing by the Boy, threw his arm around the young shoulders, and gazing far off to the distant west, felt himself shaken by a strange emotion as he answered, "Yes, Boy, hereafter let it be "Father Paul!""
And as the sun travelled faster and faster toward the line of its crossing between the worlds of night and day, its rays reflected a new radiance upon the faces of the two men who sat in the silent shadows of the park, feeling themselves drawn more closely together than ever before, thinking, thinking, thinking-in the eyes of the man a great memory, in the eyes of the Boy a great longing for life!