One Day | Page 7

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