The Lily of the Valley Part 12

I read her mind, and answered to its secret thought by saying, "Am I not allowed to be your faithful slave?"

She took my arm, left the count, the children, and the abbe, and led me to a distance on the lawn, though still within sight of the others; then, when sure that her voice could not be heard by them, she spoke.

"Felix, my dear friend," she said, "forgive my fears; I have but one thread by which to guide me in the labyrinth of life, and I dread to see it broken. Tell me that I am more than ever Henriette to you, that you will never abandon me, that nothing shall prevail against me, that you will ever be my devoted friend. I have suddenly had a glimpse into my future, and you were not there, as. .h.i.therto, your eyes shining and fixed upon me--"

"Henriette! idol whose worship is like that of the Divine,--lily, flower of my life, how is it that you do not know, you who are my conscience, that my being is so fused with yours that my soul is here when my body is in Paris? Must I tell you that I have come in seventeen hours, that each turn of the wheels gathered thoughts and desires in my breast, which burst forth like a tempest when I saw you?"

"Yes, tell me! tell me!" she cried; "I am so sure of myself that I can hear you without wrong. G.o.d does not will my death. He sends you to me as he sends his breath to his creatures; as he pours the rain of his clouds upon a parched earth,--tell me! tell me! Do you love me sacredly?"

"Sacredly."

"For ever?"

"For ever."

"As a virgin Mary, hidden behind her veil, beneath her white crown."

"As a virgin visible."

"As a sister?"

"As a sister too dearly loved."

"With chivalry and without hope?"

"With chivalry and with hope."

"As if you were still twenty years of age, and wearing that absurd blue coat?"

"Oh better far! I love you thus, and I also love you"--she looked at me with keen apprehension--"as you loved your aunt."

"I am happy! You dispel my terrors," she said, returning towards the family, who were surprised at our private conference. "Be still a child at Clochegourde--for you are one still. It may be your policy to be a man with the king, but here, let me tell you, monsieur, your best policy is to remain a child. As a child you shall be loved. I can resist a man, but to a child I can refuse nothing, nothing! He can ask for nothing I will not give him.--Our secrets are all told," she said, looking at the count with a mischievous air, in which her girlish, natural self reappeared. "I leave you now; I must go and dress."

Never for three years had I heard her voice so richly happy. For the first time I heard those swallow cries, the infantile notes of which I told you. I had brought Jacques a hunting outfit, and for Madeleine a work-box--which her mother afterwards used. The joy of the two children, delighted to show their presents to each other, seemed to annoy the count, always dissatisfied when attention was withdrawn from himself. I made a sign to Madeleine and followed her father, who wanted to talk to me of his ailments.

"My poor Felix," he said, "you see how happy and well they all are. I am the shadow on the picture; all their ills are transferred to me, and I bless G.o.d that it is so. Formerly I did not know what was the matter with me; now I know. The orifice of my stomach is affected; I can digest nothing."

"How do you come to be as wise as the professor of a medical school?"

I asked, laughing. "Is your doctor indiscreet enough to tell you such things?"

"G.o.d forbid I should consult a doctor," he cried, showing the aversion most imaginary invalids feel for the medical profession.

I now listened to much crazy talk, in the course of which he made the most absurd confidences,--complained of his wife, of the servants, of the children, of life, evidently pleased to repeat his daily speeches to a friend who, not having heard them daily, might be alarmed, and who at any rate was forced to listen out of politeness. He must have been satisfied, for I paid him the utmost attention, trying to penetrate his inconceivable nature, and to guess what new tortures he had been inflicting on his wife, of which she had not written to me. Henriette presently put an end to the monologue by appearing in the portico. The count saw her, shook his head, and said to me: "You listen to me, Felix; but here no one pities me."

He went away, as if aware of the constraint he imposed on my intercourse with Henriette, or perhaps from a really chivalrous consideration for her, knowing he could give her pleasure by leaving us alone. His character exhibited contradictions that were often inexplicable; he was jealous, like all weak beings, but his confidence in his wife's sanct.i.ty was boundless. It may have been the sufferings of his own self-esteem, wounded by the superiority of that lofty virtue, which made him so eager to oppose every wish of the poor woman, whom he braved as children brave their masters or their mothers.

Jacques was taking his lessons, and Madeleine was being dressed; I had therefore a whole hour to walk with the countess alone on the terrace.

"Dear angel!" I said, "the chains are heavier, the sands hotter, the thorns grow apace."

"Hush!" she said, guessing the thoughts my conversation with the count had suggested. "You are here, and all is forgotten! I don't suffer; I have never suffered."

She made a few light steps as if to shake her dress and give to the breeze its ruches of snowy tulle, its floating sleeves and fresh ribbons, the laces of her pelerine, and the flowing curls of her coiffure a la Sevigne; I saw her for the first time a young girl,--gay with her natural gaiety, ready to frolic like a child. I knew then the meaning of tears of happiness; I knew the joy a man feels in bringing happiness to another.

"Sweet human flower, wooed by my thought, kissed by my soul, oh my lily!" I cried, "untouched, untouchable upon thy stem, white, proud, fragrant, and solitary--"

"Enough, enough," she said, smiling. "Speak to me of yourself; tell me everything."

Then, beneath the swaying arch of quivering leaves, we had a long conversation, filled with interminable parentheses, subjects taken, dropped, and retaken, in which I told her my life and my occupations; I even described my apartment in Paris, for she wished to know everything; and (happiness then unappreciated) I had nothing to conceal. Knowing thus my soul and all the details of a daily life full of incessant toil, learning the full extent of my functions, which to any one not sternly upright offered opportunities for deception and dishonest gains, but which I had exercised with such rigid honor that the king, I told her, called me Mademoiselle de Vandenesse, she seized my hand and kissed it, and dropped a tear, a tear of joy, upon it.

This sudden transposition of our roles, this homage, coupled with the thought--swiftly expressed but as swiftly comprehended--"Here is the master I have sought, here is my dream embodied!" all that there was of avowal in the action, grand in its humility, where love betrayed itself in a region forbidden to the senses,--this whirlwind of celestial things fell on my heart and crushed it. I felt myself too small; I wished to die at her feet.

"Ah!" I said, "you surpa.s.s us in all things. Can you doubt me?--for you did doubt me just now, Henriette."

"Not now," she answered, looking at me with ineffable tenderness, which, for a moment, veiled the light of her eyes. "But seeing you so changed, so handsome, I said to myself, 'Our plans for Madeleine will be defeated by some woman who will guess the treasures in his heart; she will steal our Felix, and destroy all happiness here.'"

"Always Madeleine!" I replied. "Is it Madeleine to whom I am faithful?"

We fell into a silence which Monsieur de Mortsauf inconveniently interrupted. I was forced to keep up a conversation bristling with difficulties, in which my honest replies as to the king's policy jarred with the count's ideas, and he forced me to explain again and again the king's intentions. In spite of all my questions as to his horses, his agricultural affairs, whether he was satisfied with his five farms, whether he meant to cut the timber of the old avenue, he returned to the subject of politics with the pestering faculty of an old maid and the persistency of a child. Minds like his prefer to dash themselves against the light; they return again and again and hum about it without ever getting into it, like those big flies which weary our ears as they buzz upon the gla.s.s.

Henriette was silent. To stop the conversation, in which I feared my young blood might take fire, I answered in monosyllables, mostly acquiescent, avoiding discussion; but Monsieur de Mortsauf had too much sense not to perceive the meaning of my politeness. Presently he was angry at being always in the right; he grew refractory, his eyebrows and the wrinkles of his forehead worked, his yellow eyes blazed, his rufous nose grew redder, as it did on the day I first witnessed an attack of madness. Henriette gave me a supplicating look, making me understand that she could not employ on my behalf an authority to which she had recourse to protect her children. I at once answered the count seriously, taking up the political question, and managing his peevish spirit with the utmost care.

"Poor dear! poor dear!" she murmured two or three times; the words reaching my ear like a gentle breeze. When she could intervene with success she said, interrupting us, "Let me tell you, gentlemen, that you are very dull company."

Recalled by this conversation to his chivalrous sense of what was due to a woman, the count ceased to talk politics, and as we bored him in our turn by commonplace matters, he presently left us to continue our walk, declaring that it made his head spin to go round and round on the same path.

My sad conjectures were true. The soft landscape, the warm atmosphere, the cloudless skies, the soothing poetry of this valley, which for fifteen years had calmed the stinging fancies of that diseased mind, were now impotent. At a period of life when the asperities of other men are softened and their angles smoothed, the disposition of this man became more and more aggressive. For the last few months he had taken a habit of contradicting for the sake of contradiction, without reason, without even trying to justify his opinions; he insisted on knowing the why and the wherefore of everything; grew restless under a delay or an omission; meddled with every item of the household affairs, and compelled his wife and the servants to render him the most minute and fatiguing account of all that was done; never allowing them the slightest freedom of action. Formerly he did not lose his temper except for some special reason; now his irritation was constant. Perhaps the care of his farms, the interests of agriculture, an active out-door life had formerly soothed his atrabilious temper by giving it a field for its uneasiness, and by furnishing employment for his activity. Possibly the loss of such occupation had allowed his malady to prey upon itself; no longer exercised on matters without, it was showing itself in more fixed ideas; the moral being was laying hold of the physical being. He had lately become his own doctor; he studied medical books, fancied he had the diseases he read of, and took the most extraordinary and unheard of precautions about his health,--precautions never the same, impossible to foresee, and consequently impossible to satisfy. Sometimes he wanted no noise; then, when the countess had succeeded in establishing absolute silence, he would declare he was in a tomb, and blame her for not finding some medium between incessant noise and the stillness of La Trappe. Sometimes he affected a perfect indifference for all earthly things. Then the whole household breathed freely; the children played; family affairs went on without criticism. Suddenly he would cry out lamentably, "They want to kill me!--My dear," he would say to his wife, increasing the injustice of his words by the aggravating tones of his sharp voice, "if it concerned your children you would know very well what was the matter with them."

He dressed and re-dressed himself incessantly, watching every change of temperature, and doing nothing without consulting the barometer.

Notwithstanding his wife's attentions, he found no food to suit him, his stomach being, he said, impaired, and digestion so painful as to keep him awake all night. In spite of this he ate, drank, digested, and slept, in a manner to satisfy any doctor. His capricious will exhausted the patience of the servants, accustomed to the beaten track of domestic service and unable to conform to the requirements of his conflicting orders. Sometimes he bade them keep all the windows open, declaring that his health required a current of fresh air; a few days later the fresh air, being too hot or too damp, as the case might be, became intolerable; then he scolded, quarrelled with the servants, and in order to justify himself, denied his former orders. This defect of memory, or this bad faith, call it which you will, always carried the day against his wife in the arguments by which she tried to pit him against himself.

Life at Clochegourde had become so intolerable that the Abbe Dominis, a man of great learning, took refuge in the study of scientific problems, and withdrew into the shelter of pretended abstraction. The countess had no longer any hope of hiding the secret of these insane furies within the circle of her own home; the servants had witnessed scenes of exasperation without exciting cause, in which the premature old man pa.s.sed the bounds of reason. They were, however, so devoted to the countess that nothing so far had transpired outside; but she dreaded daily some public outburst of a frenzy no longer controlled by respect for opinion.

Later I learned the dreadful details of the count's treatment of his wife. Instead of supporting her when the children were ill, he a.s.sailed her with dark predictions and made her responsible for all future illnesses, because she refused to let the children take the crazy doses which he prescribed. When she went to walk with them the count would predict a storm in the face of a clear sky; if by chance the prediction proved true, the satisfaction he felt made him quite indifferent to any harm to the children. If one of them was ailing, the count gave his whole mind to fastening the cause of the illness upon the system of nursing adopted by his wife, whom he carped at for every trifling detail, always ending with the cruel words, "If your children fall ill again you have only yourself to thank for it."

He behaved in the same way in the management of the household, seeing the worst side of everything, and making himself, as his old coachman said, "the devil's own advocate." The countess arranged that Jacques and Madeleine should take their meals alone at different hours from the family, so as to save them from the count's outbursts and draw all the storms upon herself. In this way the children now saw but little of their father. By one of the hallucinations peculiar to selfish persons, the count had not the slightest idea of the misery he caused. In the confidential communication he made to me on my arrival he particularly dwelt on his goodness to his family. He wielded the flail, beat, bruised, and broke everything about him as a monkey might have done.

Then, having half-destroyed his prey, he denied having touched it. I now understood the lines on Henriette's forehead,--fine lines, traced as it were with the edge of a razor, which I had noticed the moment I saw her.

There is a pudicity in n.o.ble minds which withholds them from speaking of their personal sufferings; proudly they hide the extent of their woes from hearts that love them, feeling a merciful joy in doing so.

Therefore in spite of my urgency, I did not immediately obtain the truth from Henriette. She feared to grieve me; she made brief admissions, and then blushed for them; but I soon perceived myself the increase of trouble which the count's present want of regular occupation had brought upon the household.

"Henriette," I said, after I had been there some days, "don't you think you have made a mistake in so arranging the estate that the count has no longer anything to do?"

"Dear," she said, smiling, "my situation is critical enough to take all my attention; believe me, I have considered all my resources, and they are now exhausted. It is true that the bickerings are getting worse and worse. As Monsieur de Mortsauf and I are always together, I cannot lessen them by diverting his attention in other directions; in fact the pain would be the same to me in any case. I did think of advising him to start a nursery for silk-worms at Clochegourde, where we have many mulberry-trees, remains of the old industry of Touraine. But I reflected that he would still be the same tyrant at home, and I should have many more annoyances through the enterprise. You will learn, my dear observer, that in youth a man's ill qualities are restrained by society, checked in their swing by the play of pa.s.sions, subdued under the fear of public opinion; later, a middle-aged man, living in solitude, shows his native defects, which are all the more terrible because so long repressed. Human weaknesses are essentially base; they allow of neither peace nor truce; what you yield to them to-day they exact to-morrow, and always; they fasten on concessions and compel more of them. Power, on the other hand, is merciful; it conforms to evidence, it is just and it is peaceable. But the pa.s.sions born of weakness are implacable. Monsieur de Mortsauf takes an absolute pleasure in getting the better of me; and he who would deceive no one else, deceives me with delight."

One morning as we left the breakfast table, about a month after my arrival, the countess took me by the arm, darted through an iron gate which led into the vineyard, and dragged me hastily among the vines.

"He will kill me!" she cried. "And I want to live--for my children's sake. But oh! not a day's respite! Always to walk among thorns! to come near falling every instant! every instant to have to summon all my strength to keep my balance! No human being can long endure such strain upon the system. If I were certain of the ground I ought to take, if my resistance could be a settled thing, then my mind might concentrate upon it--but no, every day the attacks change character and leave me without defence; my sorrows are not one, they are manifold. Ah! my friend--"

she cried, leaning her head upon my shoulder, and not continuing her confidence. "What will become of me? Oh, what shall I do?" she said presently, struggling with thoughts she did not express. "How can I resist? He will kill me! No, I will kill myself--but that would be a crime! Escape? yes, but my children! Separate from him? how, after fifteen years of marriage, how could I ever tell my parents that I will not live with him? for if my father and mother came here he would be calm, polite, intelligent, judicious. Besides, can married women look to fathers or mothers? Do they not belong body and soul to their husbands?

I could live tranquil if not happy--I have found strength in my chaste solitude, I admit it; but if I am deprived of this negative happiness I too shall become insane. My resistance is based on powerful reasons which are not personal to myself. It is a crime to give birth to poor creatures condemned to endless suffering. Yet my position raises serious questions, so serious that I dare not decide them alone; I cannot be judge and party both. To-morrow I will go to Tours and consult my new confessor, the Abbe Birotteau--for my dear and virtuous Abbe de la Berge is dead," she said, interrupting herself. "Though he was severe, I miss and shall always miss his apostolic power. His successor is an angel of goodness, who pities but does not reprimand. Still, all courage draws fresh life from the heart of religion; what soul is not strengthened by the voice of the Holy Spirit? My G.o.d," she said, drying her tears and raising her eyes to heaven, "for what sin am I thus punished?--I believe, yes, Felix, I believe it, we must pa.s.s through a fiery furnace before we reach the saints, the just made perfect of the upper spheres.

Must I keep silence? Am I forbidden, oh, my G.o.d, to cry to the heart of a friend? Do I love him too well?" She pressed me to her heart as though she feared to lose me. "Who will solve my doubts? My conscience does not reproach me. The stars shine from above on men; may not the soul, the human star, shed its light upon a friend, if we go to him with pure thoughts?"