“It was soon after the loss of this kind friend, who had been the strong prop of my weakness, the wise counsellor of my ignorance, that my own health began to fail.  The seeds of pulmonary consumption, inherited from my mother, began to develop, and nothing could arrest their progress.  For the last three years I have been an invalid, growing worse and worse every year.  Perhaps in no other climate, under no other treatment, could I have lived so long as I have been permitted to live here by the help of the pure air and the grape cure.

“My boy, now fifteen years of age, is everything that I could wish him to be, except in one respect.  He will not consent to enter the church.  He wants to be a soldier, poor lad!  Well, we cannot coerce him into a life of sanctity and self-denial.  Such a life must always be a voluntary sacrifice.  Neither do I wish to cross him, now that I am on my death-bed and doomed so soon to leave him.

“In these last days on earth, lying on my dying bed, travailing for his good, it has come to me like an inspiration that I must send him to his father.  I must not leave him friendless in the world.  And now that the priest Antonio has long passed away, and I am so soon to follow, he will have no friends except these poor, helpless Italian peasants among whom he has been reared.  Therefore I must send him, in the hope that you will recognize him by his exact likeness to yourself, and prove his identity as your son, by all the testimony you can be sure to gather in Paris and at San Vito.  I have written this long letter, in the intervals between pain and fever, during the last few weeks.

“Yesterday, my faithful physician warned me that my days on earth had dwindled down to hours; that I might pass away at any moment now, and had therefore best attend to any necessary business that I might wish to settle.

“This warning admonishes me to finish and close my letter.  I end as I began, by swearing to you, by all the hopes of salvation in a dying woman, that Archibald Scott is your own son.  You can prove this to your own satisfaction by coming to San Vito and examining the church register as to the dates of his birth, baptism, and so forth; by which you will find that he was born just five months after I left your roof, and just six months after our return from our long yachting cruise, and the renewal of my acquaintance with Count de Volaski, at the British minister’s dinner.  You see, by these circumstances, there cannot be even the shadow of a doubt as to his true parentage.

“I repeat, that I have not told the boy the secret of his birth; to have done so might have been to have embittered his mind against you, and I would not on my death-bed do anything to sow enmity between father and son.

“I leave to yourself to tell him, if you should ever think proper to do so, and with what explanations you may please to add.

“I have constituted you his sole guardian, and trustee of the moderate property I bequeath him.  He wishes to enter the army, and he will have money sufficient to purchase a commission and support himself respectably in some good regiment.  I hope that when the proper time comes you will forward his ambition in this direction.