I cried out, in my hopeless agony of destitution, “Oh! that my brother were here to intercede for me,”—and, as I uttered these words, I fell. My head struck against a marble table, and I sunk on the floor covered with blood.
The domestics (of whom, according to the custom of the Spanish nobility, there were about two hundred in the palace) found me in this situation. They uttered outcries—assistance was procured—it was believed that I had attempted to kill myself; but the surgeon who attended me happened to be a man both of science and humanity, and having cut away the long hair clotted with blood, and surveyed the wound, he pronounced it trifling. My mother was of his opinion, for within three days I was summoned to her apartment. I obeyed the summons. A black bandage, severe headache, and an unnatural paleness, were the only testimonies of my accident, as it was called; and the Director had suggested to her that this was the time to fix the impression. How well religious persons understand the secret of making every event of the present world operate on the future, while they pretend to make the future predominate over the present.
Were I to outlive the age of man, I should never forget my interview with my mother. She was alone when I entered, and seated with her back to me. I knelt and kissed her hand. My paleness and my submission seemed to affect her—but she struggled with her emotions, overcame them, and said in a cold dictated tone, “To what purpose are those marks of exterior reverence, when your heart disowns them?”
“Madam, I am not conscious of that.”
“Not conscious! How then are you here? How is it that you have not, long before this, spared your father the shame of supplicating his own child—the shame, still more humiliating, of supplicating him in vain; spared the Father Director the scandal of seeing the authority of the church violated in the person of its minister, and the remonstrances of duty as ineffectual as the calls of nature? And me—oh! why have you not spared me this hour of agony and shame?” and she burst into a flood of tears, that drowned my soul as she shed them.
“Madam, what have I done that deserves the reproach of your tears? My disinclination to a monastic life is no crime?”
“In you it is a crime.”
“But how then, dear mother, were a similar choice offered to my brother, would his rejection of it be deemed a crime?” I said this almost involuntarily, and merely by way of comparison. I had no ulterior meaning, nor the least idea that one could be developed by my mother, except a reference to an unjustifiable partiality.
I was undeceived, when she added, in a voice that chilled my blood, “There is a great difference between you.”
“Yes, Madam, he is your favourite.”
“No, I take Heaven to witness—no;” and she, who had appeared so severe, so decisive, and so impenetrable before, uttered these words with a sincerity that penetrated to the bottom of my heart;—she appeared to be appealing to Heaven against the prejudices of her child.
I was affected—I said, “But, Madam, this difference of circumstances is inexplicable.”
“And would you have it explained by me?”
“By anyone, Madam.”
“By me!” she repeated, not hearing me; then kissing a crucifix than hung on her bosom, “My God! the chastisement is just, and I submit to it, though inflicted by my own child. You are illegitimate,” she added, turning suddenly towards me; “you are illegitimate—your brother is not; and your intrusion into your father’s house is not only its disgrace, but a perpetual monitor of that crime which it aggravates without absolving.” I stood speechless. “Oh! my child,” she continued, “have mercy on your mother. Has not this confession, extorted from her by her own son, been sufficient to expiate her offence?”
“Go on, Madam, I can bear anything now.”
“You must bear it, for you have forced me to this disclosure. I am of rank far inferior to your father—you were our first child. He loved me, and forgiving my weakness as a proof of my devotion to him, we were married, and your brother is our lawful child. Your father, anxious for my reputation, since I was united to him, agreed with me, as our marriage was private, and its date uncertain, that you should be announced as our legitimate offspring. For years your grandfather, incensed at our marriage, refused to see us, and we lived in retirement—would that I had died there. A few days before his death he relented, and sent for us; it was no time to acknowledge the imposition practised on him, and you were introduced as the child of his son, and the heir of his honours. But from that hour I have never known a moment’s peace. The lie I had dared to utter before God and the world, and to a dying parent—the injustice done to your brother—the violation of natural duties and of legal claims—the convulsions of my conscience, that heavily upbraided me, not only with vice and perjury, but with sacrilege.”
“Sacrilege!”
“Yes; every hour you delay the assumption of the habit is a robbery of God. Before you were born, I devoted you to him, as the only expiation of my crime. While I yet bore you in my bosom without life, I dared to implore his forgiveness only on the condition of your future intercession for me as a minister of religion. I relied on your prayers before you could speak. I proposed to entrust my penitence to one, who, in becoming the child of God, had atoned for my offence in making him the child of sin. In imagination I knelt already at your confessional—heard you,
