The Project Gutenberg eBook ofOne DayThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: One DayDubious author: Elinor GlynRelease date: October 18, 2004 [eBook #13776]Most recently updated: October 28, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Suzanne Shell, Steven Michaels and the Online DistributedProofreading Team.*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ONE DAY ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: One DayDubious author: Elinor GlynRelease date: October 18, 2004 [eBook #13776]Most recently updated: October 28, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Suzanne Shell, Steven Michaels and the Online DistributedProofreading Team.
Title: One Day
Dubious author: Elinor Glyn
Dubious author: Elinor Glyn
Release date: October 18, 2004 [eBook #13776]Most recently updated: October 28, 2024
Language: English
Credits: Produced by Suzanne Shell, Steven Michaels and the Online DistributedProofreading Team.
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ONE DAY ***
FOREWORD TO MY AMERICAN FRIENDS
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIV
CHAPTER XXV
CHAPTER XXVI
CHAPTER XXVII
CHAPTER XXVIII
CHAPTER XXIX
Successful Novels from Famous Plays
The Night of Temptation
The Secret of the Night
Guardian Angels
The Crown Novels
Now after spending some very pleasant weeks in your interesting country, I feel sure that this book will find many sympathetic readers in America. Quite naturally it will be discussed; some, doubtless, will censure it—and unjustly; others will believe with me that the tale teaches a great moral lesson.
Born as the Boy was born, the end which Fate forced upon him, to me, was inevitable. Each word and act of the three weeks of his parents' love-idyl must reflect in the character and life of the child. Little by little the baby King grew before my mental vision until I saw at last there was no escape from his importunity and I allowed the insistent Boy—masterful even from his inception—to shape himself at his own sweet will. Thus he became the hero of my study.
This is not a book for children or fools—but for men and women who can grasp the underlying principle of morality which has been uppermost in my mind as I wrote. Those who can see beyond the outburst of passion—the overmastering belief in the power of love to justify all things, which the Boy inherited so naturally from his Queen mother—will understand the forces against which the young Prince must needs fight a losing battle. The transgression was unavoidable to one whose very conception was beyond the law—the punishment was equally inevitable.
In fairness to this book of mine—and to me—the great moral lesson I have endeavored to teach must be considered in its entirety, and no single episode be construed as the book's sole aim. The verdict on my two years' work rests with you, dear Reader, but at least you may be sure that I have only tried to show that those who sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind.
—THE AUTHOR.
The Prince tore the missive fiercely from its envelope, and scowled at the mocking glint of the royal crown so heavily embossed at the top of the paper. What a toy it was, he thought, to cost so much, and eventually to mean so little! Roughly translated, the letter ran as follows:
"Your Royal Highness will be gratified to learn that at last a satisfactory alliance has been arranged between the Princess Elodie of Austria and your royal self. It is the desire of both courts and councils that the marriage shall be solemnized on the fifteenth of the May following your twenty-first birthday, at which time the coronation ceremony takes place that is to place the crown of the kingdom upon the head of the son of our beloved and ever-to-be-regretted Imperatorskoye. The Court and Council extend greetings and congratulations upon the not far distant approach of both auspicious events to your Royal Highness, which cannot fail to afford the utmost satisfaction in every detail to the ever-beautiful-and-never-to-be-sufficiently beloved Prince Paul.
"Imperator-to-be, we salute thee. We kiss thy feet."
The letter was sealed with the royal crest and signed by the Regent—the Boy's uncle—the Grand Duke Peter, his mother's brother, who had been his guardian and protector almost from his birth. The young prince knew that his uncle loved him, knew that the Grand Duke desired nothing on earth so much as the happiness of his beloved sister's only son—and yet at this crisis of the Boy's life, even his uncle was as powerless to help as was Paul Verdayne, the Englishman.
"The Princess Elodie!" he grumbled. "Who the devil is this Princess Elodie, anyway? Austrian blood has no particular charm for me! They might at least have told me something a little more definite about the woman they have picked out to be the mother of my children. A man usually likes to look an animal over before he purchases!"
Known to London society as Monsieur Zalenska, the Prince had come up to town with the Verdaynes, and was apparently enjoying to the utmost the frivolities of London life.
At a fashionable garden party he sat alone, in a seclusion he had long sought and had finally managed to secure, behind a hedge of hawthorn where none but lovers, and men and women troubled as he was troubled, cared to conceal themselves.
The letter, long-expected and dreaded, had finally crossed the continent to his hand. It was only the written confirmation of the sentence Fate had pronounced upon him, even as it had pronounced similar sentences upon princes and potentates since the beginning of thrones and kingdoms.
While the Prince—or Paul Zalenska, as I will now call him—sat in his brooding brown study, clutching the imperial letter tightly in his young hand, his attention was arrested by the sound of voices on the other side of the hawthorn hedge.
He listened idly, at first, to what seemed to be a one-sided conversation, in a dull, emotionless feminine voice—a discourse on fashion, society chit-chat, and hopeless nonentities, interspersed with bits of gossip. Could women never talk about anything else? he thought impatiently.
But his displeasure did not seem to affect the course of things at all. The voice, completely unconscious of the aversion it aroused in the invisible listener, continued its dreary, expressionless monotone.
"What makes you so silent, Opal? You haven't said a word to-day that you didn't absolutely have to say. If all American girls are as dreamy as you, I wonder why our English lords are so irresistibly attracted across the water when in search of brides!"
And then the Boy on the other side of the hedge felt his sluggish pulse quicken, and almost started to his feet, impelled by a sudden thrill of delight; for another voice had spoken—a voice of such infinite charm and sweetness and vitality, yet with languorous suggestion of emotional heights and depths, that he felt a vague sense of disappointment when the magnetic notes finally died away.
"Brides?" the voice echoed, with a lilt of girlish laughter running through the words. "You mean 'bribes,' don't you? For I assure you, dear cousin, it is the metallic clink of American gold, and nothing else, that lures your great men over the sea. As for my silence,ma belle, I have been uncommunicative because there really seemed nothing at all worth saying. I can't accustom myself to small-talk—I can't even listen to it patiently. I always feel a wild impulse to fly far, far away, where I can close my ears to it all and listen to my own thoughts. I'm sorry if I disappoint you, Alice—I seem to disappoint everybody that I would like to please—but I assure you, laugh at my dreams as you may, to me my dream-life is far more attractive and beautiful than what you term Life. Forgive me if I hurt you, cousin. I'm peculiarly constituted, perhaps, but I don't like this twaddle, and I can't help it! Everything in England is so beautiful, and yet its society seems so—so hopelessly unsatisfactory to one who longs tolive!"
"To live, Opal? We are not dead, surely! What do you mean by life?"
And so her name was Opal! How curiously the name suited the voice! The Boy, as he listened, felt that no other name could possibly have matched that voice—the opal, that glorious gem in which all the fires of the sun, the iridescent glories of the rainbow, and the cold brilliance of ice and frost and snow seemed to blend and crystallize. All this, and more, was in that mysteriously fascinating voice.
"To live, Alice?" echoed the voice again. "To live? Why, to live is tofeel!—to feel every emotion of which the human soul is capable, to rise to the heights of love, and knowledge, and power; to sink—if need be—to the deepest depths of despair, but, at all costs, at all hazards, tolive!—to experience in one's own nature all the reality and fullness of the deathless emotions of life!"
The voice sank almost to the softness of a whisper, yet even then was vibrant, alive, intense.
"Ah, Alice, from my childhood up, I have dreamed of life and longed for it. What life really is, each must decide for himself, must he not? Some, they say, sleep their way through a dreamless existence, and never, never wake to realities. Alice, I have sometimes wondered if that was to be my fate, have wondered and wondered until I have cried out in real terror at the hideous prospect! Surely Fate could not be so cruel as to implant such a desperate desire in a soul that never was to know its fulfilment. Could it, Alice? Tell me,couldit?"
The Boy held his breath now.
Who was this girl, anyhow, who seemed to express his own thoughts as accurately as he himself could have done? He was bored no longer. He was roused, stirred, awakened—and intensely interested. It was as though the voice of his own soul spoke to him in a dream.
The cold, lifeless voice now chimed in again. In his impatience the Boy clenched his fists and shut his teeth together hard. Why didn't she keep still? He didn't want to miss a single note he might have caught of the voice—that other! Why did this nonentity—for one didn't have to see her to be sure that she was that—have to interrupt and rob him of his pleasure?
"I don't understand you, Opal," she was saying. (Of course she didn't, thought the Boy—how could she?) "I am sure that I live. And yet I have never felt that way—thank goodness! It's vulgar to feel too deeply, Mamma used to say, and as I have grown older, I can see that she was right. The best people never show any excess of emotion. That is for tragedy queens, operatic stars, and—the women we do not talk about! Ladies cultivate repose!"
("Repose!—mon Dieu!" thought Paul, behind the hedge. He wished that she would!)
"And yet, Alice, you are—married!"
"Married?—of course!—why not?" and the eavesdropper fancied he could see the wide-open gaze of well-bred English surprise that accompanied the words. "One has to marry, of course. That is what we are created for. But one doesn't make a fuss about it. It's only a custom—a ceremony—and doesn't change existence much for most women, if they choose sensibly. Of course there is always the chance of amésalliance! A woman has to risk that."
"And you don't—love?"
The Boy was struck by a note that was almost horror in the opaline voice so near him.
"Love? Why, Opal, of course we do! It's easy to love, you know, when a man is decent and half-way good to one. I am sure I think a great deal of Algernon; but I dare say I should have thought as much of any other man I had happened to marry. That is a wife's duty!"
"Duty!—and you call that love?" The horror in the tones had now changed to scorn.
"You have strange ideas of life, Opal. I should be afraid to indulge them if I were you—really I should! You have lived so much in books that you seem to have a very garbled idea of the world. Fiction is apt to be much of a fairy tale, a crazy exaggeration of what living really consists of!"
"Afraid?Why should I be afraid? I am an American girl, remember, and Americans are afraid of nothing—nothing! Come, cousin, tell to me, if you can, why I should be afraid."
"Oh, I don't know! really I don't!" There was a troubled, perplexed note in the English voice now. "Such notions are apt to get girls into trouble, and lead them to some unhappy fate. Too much 'life'—as you call it—must mean suffering, and sorrow, and many tears—and maybe,sin!"
There was a shocked note in the voice of the young English matron as she added the last word, and her voice sank to a whisper. But Paul Zalenska heard, and smiled.
"Suffering, and sorrow, and many tears," repeated the American girl, musingly, "and maybe—sin!" Then she went on, firmly, "Very well, Alice, give me the suffering and sorrow, and many tears—and the sin, too, if it must be, for we are all sinners of greater or less degree—but at any rate, give me life! My life may still be far off in the future, but when the time comes, I shall certainly know, and—I shalllive!"
"You are a peculiar girl, Opal, and—we don't say those things in England."
"No, you don't say those things, you cold English women! You do not evenfeelthem! As for sin, Alice, to my mind there can be no worse sin under heaven than you commit when you give yourself to a man whom you do not love better than you could possibly love any other. Oh, it is a sin—itmustbe—to sell yourself like that! It's no wonder, I think, that your husbands are so often driven to 'the women we do not talk about' for—consolation!"
"Opal! Opal! hush! Whatareyou saying? You really—but see! isn't that Algernon crossing the terrace? He is probably looking for us."
"And like a dutiful English wife, you mustn't fail to obey, I suppose! Lead the way, cousin mine, and I'll promise to follow you with due dignity and decorum."
And the rustle of silken skirts heralded the departure of the ladies away from the hedge and beyond Paul's hearing.
Then he too started at an eager, restless pace for the centre of the crowd. He had quite forgotten the future so carefully arranged for him, and was off in hot pursuit of—what? He did not know! He only knew that he had heard a voice, and—he followed!
As he rejoined the guests, he looked with awakened interest into every face, listened with eager intensity to every voice. But all in vain. It did not occur to him that he might easily learn from his hostess the identity of her American guest; and even if the thought had presented itself to him, he would never have acted upon it. The experience was his alone, and he would have been unwilling to share it with any one.
He was no longer bored as earlier in the afternoon, and he carried the assurance of enthusiasm and interest in his every glance and motion. People smiled at the solitary figure, and whispered that he must have lost Verdayne. But for once in his life, the Boy was not looking for his friend.
But neither did he find the voice!
Usually among the first to depart on such occasions as these, this time he remained until almost all the crowd had made their adieux. And it was with a keen sense of disappointment that he at last entered his carriage for the home of the Verdaynes. He was hearing again and again in the words of the voice, as it echoed through his very soul, "When my time comes, I shall certainly know, and I shall—live!"
The letter in his pocket no longer scorched the flesh beneath. He had forgotten its very existence, nor did he once think of the Princess Elodie of Austria. What had happened to him?
Had he fallen in love with a—voice?
It was May at Verdayne Place, and May at Verdayne Place was altogether different from May in any other part of the world. The skies were of a far deeper and richer blue; the flowers reached a higher state of fragrant and rainbow-hued perfection; the sun shining through the green of the trees was tempered to just the right degree of shine and shadow. To an Englishman, home is the beginning and the end of the world, and Paul Verdayne was a typical Englishman.
To be sure, it had not always been so, but Paul had outlived his vagabond days and had become thoroughly domesticated; yet there had been a time in his youth when the wandering spirit had filled his soul, when the love of adventure had lent wings to his feet, and the glory of romance had lured him to the lights and shadows of other skies than these. But Verdayne was older now, very much older! He had lived his life, he said, and settled down!
In the shade of the tall trees of the park, two men were drinking in the beauties of the season, in all the glory and splendor of its ever-changing, yet ever-enduring loveliness. One of them was past forty, the ripeness of middle age and the general air of a well-spent, well-directed, and fully-developed life lending to his face and form an unusual distinction—even in that land of distinguished men. His companion was a boy of twenty, straight and tall and proud, carrying himself with the regal grace of a Greek god. He was a strong, handsome, healthy, well-built, and well-instructed boy, a boy at whom any one who looked once would be sure to look the second time, even though he could not tell exactly wherein the peculiar charm lay. Both men were fair of hair and blue-eyed, with clear, clean skins and well-bred English faces, and the critical observer could scarcely fail to notice how curiously they resembled each other. Indeed, the younger of the pair might easily have been the replica of the elder's youth.
When they spoke, however, the illusion of resemblance disappeared. In the voice of the Boy was a certain vibrant note that was entirely lacking in the deeper tones of the man—not an accent, nor yet an inflection, but still a quality that lent a subtle suggestion of foreign shores. It was an expressive voice, neither languorous nor unduly forceful, but strangely magnetic, and adorably rich and full, and musical, thrilling its hearers with its suggestion of latent physical and spiritual force.
On the afternoon of which I write, those two were facing a crisis that made them blind to everything of lesser import. Paul Verdayne—the man —realized this to the full. His companion—the Boy—was dimly but just as acutely conscious of it. The question had come at last—the question that Paul Verdayne had been dreading for years.
"Uncle Paul," the Boy was saying, "what relation are you to me? You are not really my uncle, though I have been taught to call you so after this quaint English fashion of yours. I know it is something of a secret, but I know no more! We are closer comrades, it seems to me—you and I—than any others in all the world. We always understand each other, somehow, almost without words—is it not so? I even bear your name, and I am proud of it, because it is yours. But why must there be so much mystery about our real relationship? Won't you tell me just what I am to you?"
The question, long-looked-for as it was, found the elder man all unprepared. Is any one ever ready for any dire calamity, however certainly expected? He paced up and down under the tall trees of the park and for a time did not answer. Then he paused and laid his hand upon the shoulder of the Boy with a tenderness of touch that proved better than any words how close was the bond between them.
"Tell you what you are to me! I could never, never do that! You are everything to me, everything!"
The Boy made a motion as if to speak, but the man forestalled him.
"We're jolly good friends, aren't we—the very best of companions? In all the world there is no man, woman or child that is half so near and dear to me as you. Men don't usually talk about these things to one another, you know, Boy; but, though I am a bachelor, you see, I feel toward you as most men feel toward their sons. What does the mere defining of the relationship matter? Could we possibly be any more to each other than we are?"
Paul Verdayne seated himself on a little knoll beneath the shade of a giant oak. The Boy looked at him with the wistfulness of an infinite question in his gaze.
"No, no, Boy! Some time, perhaps—yes, certainly—you shall know all, all! But that time has not yet come, and for the present it is best that things should rest as they are. Trust us, Boy—trust me—and be patient!"
"Patient!" The Boy laughed a full, ringing laugh, as he threw himself on the grass at his companion's feet. "I have never learned the word! Could you be patient, Uncle Paul, when youth was all on fire in your heart, with your own life shrouded in mystery? Could you, I say, be patient then?"
Verdayne laughed indulgently as his strong fingers stroked the Boy's brown curls.
"Perhaps not, Boy, perhaps not! But it is for you," he continued, "for you, Boy, to make the best of that life of yours, which you are pleased to think clouded in such tantalizing mystery. It is for you to develop every God-given faculty of your being that all of us that love you may have the happiness of seeing you perform wisely and well the mission upon which you have been sent to this kingdom of yours to accomplish. Boy! every true man is a king in the might of his manhood, but upon you is bestowed a double portion of that universal royalty. This is a throne-worshipping world we are living in, Paul, and it means even more than you can realize to be a prince of the blood!"
The Boy looked around the park apprehensively. What if someone heard? For this straight young sapling, who was only the "Boy" to Paul Verdayne, was to the world at large an heir to a throne, a king who had been left in infancy the sole ruler of his kingdom.
His visits to Verdayne Place wereincognito. He did like to throw aside the purple now and then and be the real live boy he was at heart. He did enjoy to the full his occasional opportunities, unhampered by the trappings and obligations of royalty.
"A prince of the blood!" he echoed scornfully. "Bah!—what is that? Merely an accident of birth!"
"No, not an accident, Paul! Nothing in the world ever is that. Every fragment of life has its completing part somewhere, given its place in the scheme of the universe by intricate design—always bydesign!As for the duties of your kingdom, my Prince, it is not like you to take them so lightly."
"I know! I know! Yet everybody might have been born a prince. It is far more to be a man!"
"True enough, Boy! yet everybody might not have been born to your position. Only you could have been given the heritage that is yours! My Boy, yours is a mission, a responsibility, from the Creator of Life Himself. Everybody can follow—but only God's chosen few can lead! And you—oh, Boy! yours is a birthright above that of all other princes—if you only knew!"
The young prince looked wistfully upward into the eyes of the elder man.
"Tell me, Uncle Paul! Dmitry always speaks of my birth with a reverence and awe quite out of proportion to its possible consequence—poor old man. And once even the Grand Duke Peter spoke of my 'divine origin' though he could not be coaxed or wheedled into committing his wise self any further. Now you, yourself the most reserved and secretive of individuals when it pleases you to be so, have just been surprised into something of the same expression. Do you wonder that I long to unravel the mystery that you are all so determined to keep from me? I can learn nothing at home—absolutely nothing! They glorify my mother—God bless her memory! Everyone worships her! But they never speak of you, and they are silent, too, about my father. They simply won't tell me a thing about him, so I don't imagine that he could have been a very good king!Washe, Uncle Paul? Did you know him?"
"I never knew the king, Boy!—never even saw him!"
"But you must have heard—"
"Nothing, Boy, that I can tell you—absolutely nothing!"
Verdayne had risen again and was once more pacing back and forth under the trees, as was his wont when troubled with painful memories.
"But my mother—you knewher!"
"Yes, yes—I knew your mother!"
"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 pass 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 didnotforget! 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 noblest 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 space 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 nonentity. 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 hitherto 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, lustrous 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 passionate 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 God—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 nobility 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 ofcamaraderiebetween 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 gods 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 passionate 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 whatcouldhe 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!
The two friends ran up to London for the theatre that night, to see a famous actor in a popular play, but neither was much interested in the performance. Something had kindled in the heart of the man a reminiscent fire and the Boy was thinking his own thoughts and listening, ever listening.
"I'm several kinds of a fool," he thought, "but I'd like to hear that voice again and get a glimpse of the face that goes with it. I dare say she is anything but attractive in the flesh—if she is really in the flesh at all, which I am beginning to doubt—so I should be disenchanted if I were to see her, I suppose. But I'd like toknow!" Yet, after all, he could not comprehend how such a voice could accompany an unattractive face. The spirit that animated those tones must needs light up the most ordinary countenance with character, if not with beauty, he thought; but he saw no face in the vast audience to which he cared to assign it. No,shewasn't there. He was sure of that.
But as they left the building and stood upon the pavement, awaiting their carriage, his blood mounted to his face, dyeing it crimson. In the sudden silence that mysteriously falls on even vast crowds, sometimes, he heard that voice again!
It was only a snatch of mischievous laughter from a brougham just being driven away from the curb, but it was unmistakablythevoice. Had the Boy been alone he would have followed the brougham and solved the mystery then and there.
The laugh rang out again on the summer evening air. It was like a lilt of fairies' merriment in the moonlit revels of Far Away! It was the note of a siren's song, calling, calling the hearts and souls of men! It was—But the Boy stopped and shook himself free from the "sentimental rot" he was indulging in.
He turned with a question on his lips, but Verdane had noticed nothing and the Boy did not speak.
Still that laugh thrilled and mocked him all the way to Berkeley Square and lured him on and on through the night's mysterious dreams.