The Lily of the Valley Part 15

She drew me into her chamber, made me sit upon the sofa, took a package from the drawer of her dressing-table, and knelt before me, saying: "This hair has fallen from my head during the last year; take it, it is yours; you will some day know how and why."

Slowly I bent to meet her brow, and she did not avoid my lips. I kissed her sacredly, without unworthy pa.s.sion, without one impure impulse, but solemnly, with tenderness. Was she willing to make the sacrifice; or did she merely come, as I did once, to the verge of the precipice? If love were leading her to give herself could she have worn that calm, that holy look; would she have asked, in that pure voice of hers, "You are not angry with me, are you?"

I left that evening; she wished to accompany me on the road to Frapesle; and we stopped under my walnut-tree. I showed it to her, and told her how I had first seen her four years earlier from that spot. "The valley was so beautiful then!" I cried.

"And now?" she said quickly.

"You are beneath my tree, and the valley is ours!"

She bowed her head and that was our farewell; she got into her carriage with Madeleine, and I into mine alone.

On my return to Paris I was absorbed in pressing business which took all my time and kept me out of society, which for a while forgot me.

I corresponded with Madame de Mortsauf, and sent her my journal once a week. She answered twice a month. It was a life of solitude yet teeming, like those sequestered spots, blooming unknown, which I had sometimes found in the depths of woods when gathering the flowers for my poems.

Oh, you who love! take these obligations on you; accept these daily duties, like those the Church imposes upon Christians. The rigorous observances of the Roman faith contain a great idea; they plough the furrow of duty in the soul by the daily repet.i.tion of acts which keep alive the sense of hope and fear. Sentiments flow clearer in furrowed channels which purify their stream; they refresh the heart, they fertilize the life from the abundant treasures of a hidden faith, the source divine in which the single thought of a single love is multiplied indefinitely.

My love, an echo of the Middle Ages and of chivalry, was known, I know not how; possibly the king and the Duc de Lenoncourt had spoken of it.

From that upper sphere the romantic yet simple story of a young man piously adoring a beautiful woman remote from the world, n.o.ble in her solitude, faithful without support to duty, spread, no doubt quickly, through the faubourg St. Germain. In the salons I was the object of embarra.s.sing notice; for retired life has advantages which if once experienced make the burden of a constant social intercourse insupportable. Certain minds are painfully affected by violent contrasts, just as eyes accustomed to soft colors are hurt by glaring light. This was my condition then; you may be surprised at it now, but have patience; the inconsistencies of the Vandenesse of to-day will be explained to you.

I found society courteous and women most kind. After the marriage of the Duc de Berry the court resumed its former splendor and the glory of the French fetes revived. The Allied occupation was over, prosperity reappeared, enjoyments were again possible. Noted personages, ill.u.s.trious by rank, prominent by fortune, came from all parts of Europe to the capital of the intellect, where the merits and the vices of other countries were found magnified and whetted by the charms of French intellect.

Five months after leaving Clochegourde my good angel wrote me, in the middle of the winter, a despairing letter, telling me of the serious illness of her son. He was then out of danger, but there were many fears for the future; the doctor said that precautions were necessary for his lungs--the suggestion of a terrible idea which had put the mother's heart in mourning. Hardly had Jacques begun to convalesce, and she could breathe again, when Madeleine made them all uneasy. That pretty plant, whose bloom had lately rewarded the mother's culture, was now frail and pallid and anemic. The countess, worn-out by Jacques' long illness, found no courage, she said, to bear this additional blow, and the ever present spectacle of these two dear failing creatures made her insensible to the redoubled torment of her husband's temper. Thus the storms were again raging; tearing up by the roots the hopes that were planted deepest in her bosom. She was now at the mercy of the count; weary of the struggle, she allowed him to regain all the ground he had lost.

"When all my strength is employed in caring for my children," she wrote, "how is it possible to employ it against Monsieur de Mortsauf; how can I struggle against his aggressions when I am fighting against death?

Standing here to-day, alone and much enfeebled, between these two young images of mournful fate, I am overpowered with disgust, invincible disgust for life. What blow can I feel, to what affection can I answer, when I see Jacques motionless on the terrace, scarcely a sign of life about him, except in those dear eyes, large by emaciation, hollow as those of an old man and, oh, fatal sign, full of precocious intelligence contrasting with his physical debility. When I look at my pretty Madeleine, once so gay, so caressing, so blooming, now white as death, her very hair and eyes seem to me to have paled; she turns a languishing look upon me as if bidding me farewell; nothing rouses her, nothing tempts her. In spite of all my efforts I cannot amuse my children; they smile at me, but their smile is only in answer to my endearments, it does not come from them. They weep because they have no strength to play with me. Suffering has enfeebled their whole being, it has loosened even the ties that bound them to me.

"Thus you can well believe that Clochegourde is very sad. Monsieur de Mortsauf now rules everything--Oh my friend! you, my glory!" she wrote, farther on, "you must indeed love me well to love me still; to love me callous, ungrateful, turned to stone by grief."

CHAPTER III. THE TWO WOMEN

It was at this time, when I was never more deeply moved in my whole being, when I lived in that soul to which I strove to send the luminous breeze of the mornings and the hope of the crimsoned evenings, that I met, in the salons of the Elysee-Bourbon, one of those ill.u.s.trious ladies who reign as sovereigns in society. Immensely rich, born of a family whose blood was pure from all misalliance since the Conquest, married to one of the most distinguished old men of the British peerage, it was nevertheless evident that these advantages were mere accessories heightening this lady's beauty, graces, manners, and wit, all of which had a brilliant quality which dazzled before it charmed. She was the idol of the day; reigning the more securely over Parisian society because she possessed the quality most necessary to success,--the hand of iron in the velvet glove spoken of by Bernadotte.

You know the singular characteristics of English people, the distance and coldness of their own Channel which they put between them and whoever has not been presented to them in a proper manner. Humanity seems to be an ant-hill on which they tread; they know none of their species except the few they admit into their circle; they ignore even the language of the rest; tongues may move and eyes may see in their presence but neither sound nor look has reached them; to them, the people are as if they were not. The British present an image of their own island, where law rules everything, where all is automatic in every station of life, where the exercise of virtue appears to be the necessary working of a machine which goes by clockwork. Fortifications of polished steel rise around the Englishwoman behind the golden wires of her household cage (where the feed-box and the drinking-cup, the perches and the food are exquisite in quality), but they make her irresistibly attractive. No people ever trained married women so carefully to hypocrisy by holding them rigidly between the two extremes of death or social station; for them there is no middle path between shame and honor; either the wrong is completed or it does not exist; it is all or nothing,--Hamlet's "To be or not to be." This alternative, coupled with the scorn to which the customs of her country have trained her, make an Englishwoman a being apart in the world. She is a helpless creature, forced to be virtuous yet ready to yield, condemned to live a lie in her heart, yet delightful in outward appearance--for these English rest everything on appearances. Hence the special charms of their women: the enthusiasm for a love which is all their life; the minuteness of their care for their persons; the delicacy of their pa.s.sion, so charmingly rendered in the famous scene of Romeo and Juliet in which, with one stroke, Shakespeare's genius depicted his country-women.

You, who envy them so many things, what can I tell you that you do not know of these white sirens, impenetrable apparently but easily fathomed, who believe that love suffices love, and turn enjoyments to satiety by never varying them; whose soul has one note only, their voice one syllable--an ocean of love in themselves, it is true, and he who has never swum there misses part of the poetry of the senses, as he who has never seen the sea has lost some strings of his lyre. You know the why and wherefore of these words. My relations with the Marchioness of Dudley had a disastrous celebrity. At an age when the senses have dominion over our conduct, and when in my case they had been violently repressed by circ.u.mstances, the image of the saint bearing her slow martyrdom at Clochegourde shone so vividly before my mind that I was able to resist all seductions. It was the l.u.s.tre of this fidelity which attracted Lady Dudley's attention. My resistance stimulated her pa.s.sion.

What she chiefly desired, like many Englishwoman, was the spice of singularity; she wanted pepper, capsic.u.m, with her heart's food, just as Englishmen need condiments to excite their appet.i.te. The dull languor forced into the lives of these women by the constant perfection of everything about them, the methodical regularity of their habits, leads them to adore the romantic and to welcome difficulty. I was wholly unable to judge of such a character. The more I retreated to a cold distance the more impa.s.sioned Lady Dudley became. The struggle, in which she gloried, excited the curiosity of several persons, and this in itself was a form of happiness which to her mind made ultimate triumph obligatory. Ah! I might have been saved if some good friend had then repeated to me her cruel comment on my relations with Madame de Mortsauf.

"I am wearied to death," she said, "of these turtle-dove sighings."

Without seeking to justify my crime, I ask you to observe, Natalie, that a man has fewer means of resisting a woman than she has of escaping him.

Our code of manners forbids the brutality of repressing a woman, whereas repression with your s.e.x is not only allurement to ours, but is imposed upon you by conventions. With us, on the contrary, some unwritten law of masculine self-conceit ridicules a man's modesty; we leave you the monopoly of that virtue, that you may have the privilege of granting us favors; but reverse the case, and man succ.u.mbs before sarcasm.

Though protected by my love, I was not of an age to be wholly insensible to the triple seductions of pride, devotion, and beauty. When Arabella laid at my feet the homage of a ball-room where she reigned a queen, when she watched by glance to know if my taste approved of her dress, and when she trembled with pleasure on seeing that she pleased me, I was affected by her emotion. Besides, she occupied a social position where I could not escape her; I could not refuse invitations in the diplomatic circle; her rank admitted her everywhere, and with the cleverness all women display to obtain what pleases them, she often contrived that the mistress of the house should place me beside her at dinner. On such occasions she spoke in low tones to my ear. "If I were loved like Madame de Mortsauf," she said once, "I should sacrifice all." She did submit herself with a laugh in many humble ways; she promised me a discretion equal to any test, and even asked that I would merely suffer her to love me. "Your friend always, your mistress when you will," she said. At last, after an evening when she had made herself so beautiful that she was certain to have excited my desires, she came to me. The scandal resounded through England, where the aristocracy was horrified like heaven itself at the fall of its highest angel. Lady Dudley abandoned her place in the British empyrean, gave up her wealth, and endeavored to eclipse by her sacrifices _her_ whose virtue had been the cause of this great disaster. She took delight, like the devil on the pinnacle of the temple, in showing me all the riches of her pa.s.sionate kingdom.

Read me, I pray you, with indulgence. The matter concerns one of the most interesting problems of human life,--a crisis to which most men are subjected, and which I desire to explain, if only to place a warning light upon the reef. This beautiful woman, so slender, so fragile, this milk-white creature, so yielding, so submissive, so gentle, her brow so endearing, the hair that crowns it so fair and fine, this tender woman, whose brilliancy is phosph.o.r.escent and fugitive, has, in truth, an iron nature. No horse, no matter how fiery he may be, can conquer her vigorous wrist, or strive against that hand so soft in appearance, but never tired. She has the foot of a doe, a thin, muscular little foot, indescribably graceful in outline. She is so strong that she fears no struggle; men cannot follow her on horseback; she would win a steeple-chase against a centaur; she can bring down a stag without stopping her horse. Her body never perspires; it inhales the fire of the atmosphere, and lives in water under pain of not living at all. Her love is African; her desires are like the whirlwinds of the desert--the desert, whose torrid expanse is in her eyes, the azure, love-laden desert, with its changeless skies, its cool and starry nights. What a contrast to Clochegourde! the east and the west! the one drawing into her every drop of moisture for her own nourishment, the other exuding her soul, wrapping her dear ones in her luminous atmosphere; the one quick and slender; the other slow and ma.s.sive.

Have you ever reflected on the actual meaning of the manners and customs and morals of England? Is it not the deification of matter? a well-defined, carefully considered Epicureanism, judiciously applied?

No matter what may be said against the statement, England is materialist,--possibly she does not know it herself. She lays claim to religion and morality, from which, however, divine spirituality, the catholic soul, is absent; and its fructifying grace cannot be replaced by any counterfeit, however well presented it may be. England possesses in the highest degree that science of existence which turns to account every particle of materiality; the science that makes her women's slippers the most exquisite slippers in the world, gives to their linen ineffable fragrance, lines their drawers with cedar, serves tea carefully drawn, at a certain hour, banishes dust, nails the carpets to the floors in every corner of the house, brushes the cellar walls, polishes the knocker of the front door, oils the springs of the carriage,--in short, makes matter a nutritive and downy pulp, clean and shining, in the midst of which the soul expires of enjoyment and the frightful monotony of comfort in a life without contrasts, deprived of spontaneity, and which, to sum all in one word, makes a machine of you.

Thus I suddenly came to know, in the bosom of this British luxury, a woman who is perhaps unique among her s.e.x; who caught me in the nets of a love excited by my indifference, and to the warmth of which I opposed a stern continence,--one of those loves possessed of overwhelming charm, an electricity of their own, which lead us to the skies through the ivory gates of slumber, or bear us thither on their powerful pinions.

A love monstrously ungrateful, which laughs at the bodies of those it kills; love without memory, a cruel love, resembling the policy of the English nation; a love to which, alas, most men yield. You understand the problem? Man is composed of matter and spirit; animality comes to its end in him, and the angel begins in him. There lies the struggle we all pa.s.s through, between the future destiny of which we are conscious and the influence of anterior instincts from which we are not wholly detached,--carnal love and divine love. One man combines them, another abstains altogether; some there are who seek the satisfaction of their anterior appet.i.tes from the whole s.e.x; others idealize their love in one woman who is to them the universe; some float irresolutely between the delights of matter and the joys of soul, others spiritualize the body, requiring of it that which it cannot give.

If, thinking over these leading characteristics of love, you take into account the dislikes and the affinities which result from the diversity of organisms, and which sooner or later break all ties between those who have not fully tried each other; if you add to this the mistakes arising from the hopes of those who live more particularly either by their minds, or by their hearts, or by action, who either think, or feel, or act, and whose tendency is misunderstood in the close a.s.sociation in which two persons, equal counterparts, find themselves, you will have great indulgence for sorrows to which the world is pitiless. Well, Lady Dudley gratified the instincts, organs, appet.i.tes, the vices and virtues of the subtile matter of which we are made; she was the mistress of the body; Madame de Mortsauf was the wife of the soul. The love which the mistress satisfies has its limits; matter is finite, its inherent qualities have an ascertained force, it is capable of saturation; often I felt a void even in Paris, near Lady Dudley. Infinitude is the region of the heart, love had no limits at Clochegourde. I loved Lady Dudley pa.s.sionately; and certainly, though the animal in her was magnificent, she was also superior in mind; her sparkling and satirical conversation had a wide range. But I adored Henriette. At night I wept with happiness, in the morning with remorse.

Some women have the art to hide their jealousy under a tone of angelic kindness; they are, like Lady Dudley, over thirty years of age. Such women know how to feel and how to calculate; they press out the juices of to-day and think of the future also; they can stifle a moan, often a natural one, with the will of a huntsman who pays no heed to a wound in the ardor of the chase. Without ever speaking of Madame de Mortsauf, Arabella endeavored to kill her in my soul, where she ever found her, her own pa.s.sion increasing with the consciousness of that invincible love. Intending to triumph by comparisons which would turn to her advantage, she was never suspicious, or complaining, or inquisitive, as are most young women; but, like a lioness who has seized her prey and carries it to her lair to devour, she watched that nothing should disturb her feast, and guarded me like a rebellious captive. I wrote to Henriette under her very eyes, but she never read a line of my letters; she never sought in any way to know to whom they were addressed. I had my liberty; she seemed to say to herself, "If I lose him it shall be my own fault," and she proudly relied on a love that would have given me her life had I asked for it,--in fact she often told me that if I left her she would kill herself. I have heard her praise the custom of Indian widows who burn themselves upon their husband's grave. "In India that is a distinction reserved for the higher cla.s.ses," she said, "and is very little understood by Europeans, who are incapable of understanding the grandeur of the privilege; you must admit, however, that on the dead level of our modern customs aristocracy can rise to greatness only through unparalleled devotions. How can I prove to the middle cla.s.ses that the blood in my veins is not the same as theirs, unless I show them that I can die as they cannot? Women of no birth can have diamonds and satins and horses--even coats-of-arms, which ought to be sacred to us, for any one can buy a name. But to love, with our heads up, in defiance of law; to die for the idol we have chosen, with the sheets of our bed for a shroud; to lay earth and heaven at his feet, robbing the Almighty of his right to make a G.o.d, and never to betray that man, never, never, even for virtue's sake,--for, to refuse him anything in the name of duty is to devote ourselves to something that is not _he_, and let that something be a man or an idea, it is betrayal all the same,--these are heights to which common women cannot attain; they know but two matter-of-fact ways; the great high-road of virtue, or the muddy path of the courtesan."

Pride, you see, was her instrument; she flattered all vanities by deifying them. She put me so high that she might live at my feet; in fact, the seductions of her spirit were literally expressed by an att.i.tude of subserviency and her complete submission. In what words shall I describe those first six months when I was lost in enervating enjoyments, in the meshes of a love fertile in pleasures and knowing how to vary them with a cleverness learned by long experience, yet hiding that knowledge beneath the transports of pa.s.sion. These pleasures, the sudden revelation of the poetry of the senses, const.i.tute the powerful tie which binds young men to women older than they. It is the chain of the galley-slave; it leaves an ineffaceable brand upon the soul, filling it with disgust for pure and innocent love decked with flowers only, which serves no alcohol in curiously chased cups inlaid with jewels and sparkling with unquenchable fires.

Recalling my early dreams of pleasures I knew nothing of, expressed at Clochegourde in my "selams," the voice of my flowers, pleasures which the union of souls renders all the more ardent, I found many sophistries by which I excused to myself the delight with which I drained that jewelled cup. Often, when, lost in infinite la.s.situde, my soul disengaged itself from the body and floated far from earth, I thought that these pleasures might be the means of abolishing matter and of rendering to the spirit its power to soar. Sometimes Lady Dudley, like other women, profited by the exaltation in which I was to bind me by promises; under the lash of a desire she wrung blasphemies from my lips against the angel at Clochegourde. Once a traitor I became a scoundrel.

I continued to write to Madame de Mortsauf, in the tone of the lad she had first known in his strange blue coat; but, I admit it, her gift of second-sight terrified me when I thought what ruin the indiscretion of a word might bring to the dear castle of my hopes. Often, in the midst of my pleasure a sudden horror seized me; I heard the name of Henriette uttered by a voice above me, like that in the Scriptures, demanding: "Cain, where is thy brother Abel?"

At last my letters remained unanswered. I was seized with horrible anxiety and wished to leave for Clochegourde. Arabella did not oppose it, but she talked of accompanying me to Touraine. Her woman's wit told her that the journey might be a means of finally detaching me from her rival; while I, blind with fear and guilelessly unsuspicious, did not see the trap she set for me. Lady Dudley herself proposed the humblest concessions. She would stay near Tours, at a little country-place, alone, disguised; she would refrain from going out in the day-time, and only meet me in the evening when people were not likely to be about.

I left Tours on horseback. I had my reasons for this; my evening excursions to meet her would require a horse, and mine was an Arab which Lady Hester Stanhope had sent to the marchioness, and which she had lately exchanged with me for that famous picture of Rembrandt which I obtained in so singular a way, and which now hangs in her drawing-room in London. I took the road I had traversed on foot six years earlier and stopped beneath my walnut-tree. From there I saw Madame de Mortsauf in a white dress standing at the edge of the terrace. Instantly I rode towards her with the speed of lightning, in a straight line and across country. She heard the stride of the swallow of the desert and when I pulled him up suddenly at the terrace, she said to me: "Oh, you here!"

Those three words blasted me. She knew my treachery. Who had told her?

her mother, whose hateful letter she afterwards showed me. The feeble, indifferent voice, once so full of life, the dull pallor of its tones revealed a settled grief, exhaling the breath of flowers cut and left to wither. The tempest of infidelity, like those freshets of the Loire which bury the meadows for all time in sand, had torn its way through her soul, leaving a desert where once the verdure clothed the fields.

I led my horse through the little gate; he lay down on the gra.s.s at my command and the countess, who came forward slowly, exclaimed, "What a fine animal!" She stood with folded arms lest I should try to take her hand; I guessed her meaning.

"I will let Monsieur de Mortsauf know you are here," she said, leaving me.

I stood still, confounded, letting her go, watching her, always n.o.ble, slow, and proud,--whiter than I had ever seen her; on her brow the yellow imprint of bitterest melancholy, her head bent like a lily heavy with rain.

"Henriette!" I cried in the agony of a man about to die.

She did not turn or pause; she disdained to say that she withdrew from me that name, but she did not answer to it and continued on. I may feel paltry and small in this dreadful vale of life where myriads of human beings now dust make the surface of the globe, small indeed among that crowd, hurrying beneath the luminous s.p.a.ces which light them; but what sense of humiliation could equal that with which I watched her calm white figure inflexibly mounting with even steps the terraces of her chateau of Clochegourde, the pride and the torture of that Christian Dido? I cursed Arabella in a single imprecation which might have killed her had she heard it, she who had left all for me as some leave all for G.o.d. I remained lost in a world of thought, conscious of utter misery on all sides. Presently I saw the whole family coming down; Jacques, running with the eagerness of his age. Madeleine, a gazelle with mournful eyes, walked with her mother. Monsieur de Mortsauf came to me with open arms, pressed me to him and kissed me on both cheeks crying out, "Felix, I know now that I owed you my life."

Madame de Mortsauf stood with her back towards me during this little scene, under pretext of showing the horse to Madeleine.

"Ha, the devil! that's what women are," cried the count; "admiring your horse!"

Madeleine turned, came up to me, and I kissed her hand, looking at the countess, who colored.

"Madeleine seems much better," I said.

"Poor little girl!" said the countess, kissing her on her forehead.

"Yes, for the time being they are all well," answered the count. "Except me, Felix; I am as battered as an old tower about to fall."

"The general is still depressed," I remarked to Madame de Mortsauf.

"We all have our blue devils--is not that the English term?" she replied.

The whole party walked on towards the vineyard with the feeling that some serious event had happened. She had no wish to be alone with me.

Still, I was her guest.