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Updated: May 11, 2025
No! there could be no question about it; the boy was the living image of what he himself had been at that age, as all his portraits could prove! and his eldest son, his rightful heir, stood before him, but forever and irrecoverably disinherited and delegalized by his own rash and cruel act.
Was ever son so accursed as I am? Other sons have been disinherited, outlawed but I! I have been delegalized and degraded from my birth!" The fine mouth closed with a spasmodic jerk, the brow grew darker, the eyes glittered with intenser fire. He resumed: "It will be difficult, if not impossible, but I will be restored to my rights, or I will ruin and exterminate the ducal house of Hereward!
Had you been less bitterly incredulous of my statements, less cruel in your judgment of me, less murderous in your vengeance upon one much more sinned against than sinning, I should have ventured to write to you of my condition and my prospect of giving you an heir to your dukedom, in time to prevent your rash and fatal act by which you unconsciously delegalized your own lawful son!
Those fond hopes were destined to be fulfilled by me, but doomed to be ruined by you. "Yes, Duke of Hereward, your son stands before you, strong, healthy, beautiful, perfect as ever wife bore to her husband; yet denied, delegalized, and defrauded by you, his father! "If you are inclined still to deny him, turn and look upon him, as he stands, and you can no longer do so.
"As for the divorce I so much lamented, it was to be regretted only for the sake of the son whom it had outlawed, for he was the son of a lawful marriage in the eyes of the world, if not a sacred one in the eyes of the church. "For the boy thus cruelly wronged there seemed no opening on earth. He was disowned, disinherited, delegalized, deprived even of a name in this world.
"You cruelly and unjustly disowned, disinherited, and even delegalized, and degraded your son before he was born! So that your son was not born in wedlock, could not bear your name, or inherit your title! And this misfortune came upon him by no fault of his, or of his most unhappy mother's but by the jealousy, vengeance, and fatal rashness of his father!
He was the rightful heir of his title and estates, yet he could never inherit them; he had been delegalized by his father's own hasty, reckless and cruel act; and for no fault of the boy's own before he was capable of committing any fault before his birth he was disinherited. All this so worked upon the duke's conscience that he could not give his mind to his ordinary vocations.
During the latter portion of the mother-superior's story the portion that related to the delegalized elder son of the Duke of Hereward a light had dawned upon the mind of Salome, but so slowly that no sudden shock of joy had been felt, no wild exclamation of astonishment uttered: yet that light had revealed to the amazed and overjoyed young wife, beyond all possibility of further doubt, the blessed truth of the perfect freedom of her worshiped husband from all participation in the awful crimes of which over-whelming circumstantial evidence had convicted him in her own mind, but of which it was now certain that his miserable brother, his "double" in appearance, was alone guilty.
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