Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/74

64 over the house, which seemed to have been stricken by some appalling calamity. One day the son suddenly disappeared — none knew whither, except that he had fled — oh! sacrilege of sacrilege! — with a professed nun, from the convent of the Clarisas. His gambling debts had well-nigh exhausted his father s coffers, but this time he had broken open his father s money chest, and made away with all of value he could find. This time, too, he had broken his mother's heart, and yet she died, tortured with an unextinguishable desire to see her scapegrace son once more. If a mother cannot condone her children s crimes, whatever they may be, who else shall do so? When the old hidalgo looked on the dead face of the wife of his youth, stamped with so lasting an expression of pain that death itself was powerless to efface it his soul burnt with a resentment almost as deep as the grief which bowed him to the earth.

When at the end of a few months, a ragged, travel-stained wayfarer reappeared at his father's house, the latter said nothing. Without a word, without a gesture, he accepted his son's presence at the board, as if he had never been away. A deep gulf yawned between the two which nothing could bridge. The son was too cynical to promise an amendment which he did not intend. When he had appeased his hunger, and exchanged his dirty raiments for those of a gentleman of his rank, he began his old course of dissipation and wickedness. The old hidalgo looked on and said nothing. He knew remonstrance was useless, but on his death-bed he called to him his son. They were the first words that had passed between them since the mother s death, and they were the last.

"I have," he said, "the misfortune to call you my son. Had your mother not been so holy as she was, I should have thought you had been devil's spawn. To all that you have left me, you Rh