My mother was of his opinion, for
within three days I was summoned to her apartment. I obeyed the summons. A black bandage, severe head-ache, 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 any one, 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 any thing 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 intrust 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, by
the authority of the church, and the commission of Heaven, pronounce me
forgiven. I saw you stand beside my dying bed,--I felt you press the
cross to my cold lips, and point to that heaven where I hoped my vow had
already secured a seat for you. Before your birth I had laboured to lift
you to heaven, and my recompence is, that your obstinacy threatens to
drag us both into the gulph of perdition. Oh! my child, if our prayers
and intercessions are available to the delivery of the souls of our
departed relatives from punishment, hear the adjuration of a living
parent, who implores you not to seal her everlasting condemnation!” I
was unable to answer, my mother saw it, and redoubled her efforts. “My
son, if I thought that my kneeling at your feet would soften your
obduracy, I would prostrate myself before them this moment.” “Oh! madam,
the sight of such unnatural humiliation ought to kill me.” “And yet you
will not yield--the agony of this confession, the interests of my
salvation and your own, nay, the preservation of my life, are of no
weight with you.” She perceived that these words made me tremble, and
repeated, “Yes, my life; beyond the day that your inflexibility exposes
me to infamy, I will not live. If you have resolution, I have resolution
too; nor do I dread the result, for God will charge on your soul, not on
mine, the crime an unnatural child has forced me to--and yet you will
not yield.--Well, then, the prostration of my body is nothing to that
prostration of soul you have already driven me to. I kneel to my own
child for life and for salvation,” and she knelt to me. I attempted to
raise her; she repelled me, and exclaimed, in a voice hoarse with
despair, “And you will not yield?” “I do not say so.” “And what, then,
do you say?--raise me not, approach me not, till you answer me.” “That I
will think.” “Think! you must decide.” “I do, then, I do.” “But how?”
“To be whatever you would have me.” As I uttered these words, my mother
fell in a swoon at my feet.