Page:The Czar, A Tale of the Time of the First Napleon.djvu/261

Rh how hideous and revolting were some of the forms assumed by the king of terrors. Horrible details reached them, piercing the thick veil of falsehood with which Napoleon sought to hide the disasters of his army; and imagination—that magician so powerful for good and evil—exercised a fearful ingenuity in torturing their aching hearts to the uttermost.

These were pangs they endured in common; but each had besides her solitary burden of pain. That of the mother was tinged with something like the bitterness of remorse. She had been wroth with her boy for deceiving her and betraying the cause she held dearer than life. Pride and anger had kept her back from obeying the first impulse of her heart when she heard of him as amongst the conscripts who left the village. She thought of hastening after him to Paris, that he might not go forth to die without his mother's pardon and her blessing. But she put the thought aside. The difficulties in her way would have been very great, yet it was not these that deterred her. It was the persuasion that he did not deserve this sacrifice at her hands—that the first step towards a reconciliation ought to come from him. If he wished for it, why had he not written?—But now everything was changed. With vain tears that had no healing in them the broken-hearted mother mourned over "the irrevocable past."

Clémence too had her lonely sorrow. Deeply thoughtful and truly pious, after the strong, stern, self-sacrificing Jansenist fashion, she knew too well that her brother's young heart had never truly surrendered itself to its Creator and Redeemer. The "Except ye be converted" of the Divine Teacher held as real a place in the creed of Clémence as in that of any Protestant; nor, under the circumstances, could the Catholic belief in sacramentary grace interpose its soft, misleading glamour between her eyes and the truth. So her soul went down to the depths of a sorrow without hope; depths that few are strong enough to sound, and those who do sound them seldom