The Lily of the Valley Part 4

On this first day the count said to his wife when he reached home, "Monsieur Felix is a charming young man."

That evening I wrote to my mother and asked her to send my clothes and linen, saying that I should remain at Frapesle. Ignorant of the great revolution which was just taking place, and not perceiving the influence it was to have upon my fate, I expected to return to Paris to resume my legal studies. The Law School did not open till the first week in November; meantime I had two months and a half before me.

The first part of my stay, while I studied to understand the count, was a period of painful impressions to me. I found him a man of extreme irascibility without adequate cause; hasty in action in hazardous cases to a degree that alarmed me. Sometimes he showed glimpses of the brave gentleman of Conde's army, parabolic flashes of will such as may, in times of emergency, tear through politics like bomb-sh.e.l.ls, and may also, by virtue of honesty and courage, make a man condemned to live buried on his property an Elbee, a Bonchamp, or a Charette. In presence of certain ideas his nostril contracted, his forehead cleared, and his eyes shot lightnings, which were soon quenched. Sometimes I feared he might detect the language of my eyes and kill me. I was young then and merely tender. Will, that force that alters men so strangely, had scarcely dawned within me. My pa.s.sionate desires shook me with an emotion that was like the throes of fear. Death I feared not, but I would not die until I knew the happiness of mutual love--But how tell of what I felt! I was a prey to perplexity; I hoped for some fortunate chance; I watched; I made the children love me; I tried to identify myself with the family.

Little by little the count restrained himself less in my presence. I came to know his sudden outbreaks of temper, his deep and ceaseless melancholy, his flashes of brutality, his bitter, cutting complaints, his cold hatreds, his impulses of latent madness, his childish moans, his cries of a man's despair, his unexpected fury. The moral nature differs from the physical nature inasmuch as nothing is absolute in it.

The force of effects is in direct proportion to the characters or the ideas which are grouped around some fact. My position at Clochegourde, my future life, depended on this one eccentric will.

I cannot describe to you the distress that filled my soul (as quick in those days to expand as to contract), whenever I entered Clochegourde, and asked myself, "How will he receive me?" With what anxiety of heart I saw the clouds collecting on that stormy brow. I lived in a perpetual "qui-vive." I fell under the dominion of that man; and the sufferings I endured taught me to understand those of Madame de Mortsauf. We began by exchanging looks of comprehension; tried by the same fire, how many discoveries I made during those first forty days!--of actual bitterness, of tacit joys, of hopes alternately submerged and buoyant. One evening I found her pensively watching a sunset which reddened the summits with so ravishing a glow that it was impossible not to listen to that voice of the eternal Song of Songs by which Nature herself bids all her creatures love. Did the lost illusions of her girlhood return to her? Did the woman suffer from an inward comparison? I fancied I perceived a desolation in her att.i.tude that was favorable to my first appeal, and I said, "Some days are hard to bear."

"You read my soul," she answered; "but how have you done so?"

"We touch at many points," I replied. "Surely we belong to the small number of human beings born to the highest joys and the deepest sorrows; whose feeling qualities vibrate in unison and echo each other inwardly; whose sensitive natures are in harmony with the principle of things.

Put such beings among surroundings where all is discord and they suffer horribly, just as their happiness mounts to exaltation when they meet ideas, or feelings, or other beings who are congenial to them. But there is still a third condition, where sorrows are known only to souls affected by the same distress; in this alone is the highest fraternal comprehension. It may happen that such souls find no outlet either for good or evil. Then the organ within us endowed with expression and motion is exercised in a void, expends its pa.s.sion without an object, utters sounds without melody, and cries that are lost in solitude,--terrible defeat of a soul which revolts against the inutility of nothingness. These are struggles in which our strength oozes away without restraint, as blood from an inward wound. The sensibilities flow to waste and the result is a horrible weakening of the soul; an indescribable melancholy for which the confessional itself has no ears.

Have I not expressed our mutual sufferings?"

She shuddered, and then without removing her eyes from the setting sun, she said, "How is it that, young as you are, you know these things? Were you once a woman?"

"Ah!" I replied, "my childhood was like a long illness--"

"I hear Madeleine coughing," she cried, leaving me abruptly.

The countess showed no displeasure at my constant visits, and for two reasons. In the first place she was pure as a child, and her thoughts wandered into no forbidden regions; in the next I amused the count and made a sop for that lion without claws or mane. I found an excuse for my visits which seemed plausible to every one. Monsieur de Mortsauf proposed to teach me backgammon, and I accepted; as I did so the countess was betrayed into a look of compa.s.sion, which seemed to say, "You are flinging yourself into the jaws of the lion." If I did not understand this at the time, three days had not pa.s.sed before I knew what I had undertaken. My patience, which nothing exhausts, the fruit of my miserable childhood, ripened under this last trial. The count was delighted when he could jeer at me for not putting in practice the principles or the rules he had explained; if I reflected before I played he complained of my slowness; if I played fast he was angry because I hurried him; if I forgot to mark my points he declared, making his profit out of the mistake, that I was always too rapid. It was like the tyranny of a schoolmaster, the despotism of the rod, of which I can really give you no idea unless I compare myself to Epictetus under the yoke of a malicious child. When we played for money his winnings gave him the meanest and most abject delight.

A word from his wife was enough to console me, and it frequently recalled him to a sense of politeness and good-breeding. But before long I fell into the furnace of an unexpected misery. My money was disappearing under these losses. Though the count was always present during my visits until I left the house, which was sometimes very late, I cherished the hope of finding some moment when I might say a word that would reach my idol's heart; but to obtain that moment, for which I watched and waited with a hunter's painful patience, I was forced to continue these weary games, during which my feelings were lacerated and my money lost. Still, there were moments when we were silent, she and I, looking at the sunlight on the meadows, the clouds in a gray sky, the misty hills, or the quivering of the moon on the sandbanks of the river; saying only, "Night is beautiful!"

"Night is woman, madame."

"What tranquillity!"

"Yes, no one can be absolutely wretched here."

Then she would return to her embroidery frame. I came at last to hear the inward beatings of an affection which sought its object. But the fact remained--without money, farewell to these evenings. I wrote to my mother to send me some. She scolded me and sent only enough to last a week. Where could I get more? My life depended on it. Thus it happened that in the dawn of my first great happiness I found the same sufferings that a.s.sailed me elsewhere; but in Paris, at college, at school I evaded them by abstinence; there my privations were negative, at Frapesle they were active; so active that I was possessed by the impulse to theft, by visions of crime, furious desperations which rend the soul and must be subdued under pain of losing our self-respect. The memory of what I suffered through my mother's parsimony taught me that indulgence for young men which one who has stood upon the brink of the abyss and measured its depths, without falling into them, must inevitably feel.

Though my own rect.i.tude was strengthened by those moments when life opened and let me see the rocks and quicksands beneath the surface, I have never known that terrible thing called human justice draw its blade through the throat of a criminal without saying to myself: "Penal laws are made by men who have never known misery."

At this crisis I happened to find a treatise on backgammon in Monsieur de Chessel's library, and I studied it. My host was kind enough to give me a few lessons; less harshly taught by the count I made good progress and applied the rules and calculations I knew by heart. Within a few days I was able to beat Monsieur de Mortsauf; but no sooner had I done so and won his money for the first time than his temper became intolerable; his eyes glittered like those of tigers, his face shrivelled, his brows knit as I never saw brows knit before or since.

His complainings were those of a fretful child. Sometimes he flung down the dice, quivered with rage, bit the dice-box, and said insulting things to me. Such violence, however, came to an end. When I had acquired enough mastery of the game I played it to suit me; I so managed that we were nearly equal up to the last moment; I allowed him to win the first half and made matters even during the last half. The end of the world would have surprised him less than the rapid superiority of his pupil; but he never admitted it. The unvarying result of our games was a topic of discourse on which he fastened.

"My poor head," he would say, "is fatigued; you manage to win the last of the game because by that time I lose my skill."

The countess, who knew backgammon, understood my manoeuvres from the first, and gave me those mute thanks which swell the heart of a young man; she granted me the same look she gave to her children. From that ever-blessed evening she always looked at me when she spoke. I cannot explain to you the condition I was in when I left her. My soul had annihilated my body; it weighed nothing; I did not walk, I flew. That look I carried within me; it bathed me with light just as her last words, "Adieu, monsieur," still sounded in my soul with the harmonies of "O filii, o filioe" in the paschal choir. I was born into a new life, I was something to her! I slept on purple and fine linen. Flames darted before my closed eyelids, chasing each other in the darkness like threads of fire in the ashes of burned paper. In my dreams her voice became, though I cannot describe it, palpable, an atmosphere of light and fragrance wrapping me, a melody enfolding my spirit. On the morrow her greeting expressed the fulness of feelings that remained unuttered, and from that moment I was initiated into the secrets of her voice.

That day was to be one of the most decisive of my life. After dinner we walked on the heights across a barren plain where no herbage grew; the ground was stony, arid, and without vegetable soil of any kind; nevertheless a few scrub oaks and th.o.r.n.y bushes straggled there, and in place of gra.s.s, a carpet of crimped mosses, illuminated by the setting sun and so dry that our feet slipped upon it. I held Madeleine by the hand to keep her up. Madame de Mortsauf was leading Jacques. The count, who was in front, suddenly turned round and striking the earth with his cane said to me in a dreadful tone: "Such is my life!--but before I knew you," he added with a look of penitence at his wife. The reparation was tardy, for the countess had turned pale; what woman would not have staggered as she did under the blow?

"But what delightful scenes are wafted here, and what a view of the sunset!" I cried. "For my part I should like to own this barren moor; I fancy there may be treasures if we dig for them. But its greatest wealth is that of being near you. Who would not pay a great cost for such a view?--all harmony to the eye, with that winding river where the soul may bathe among the ash-trees and the alders. See the difference of taste! To you this spot of earth is a barren waste; to me, it is paradise."

She thanked me with a look.

"Bucolics!" exclaimed the count, with a bitter look. "This is no life for a man who bears your name." Then he suddenly changed his tone--"The bells!" he cried, "don't you hear the bells of Azay? I hear them ringing."

Madame de Mortsauf gave me a frightened look. Madeleine clung to my hand.

"Suppose we play a game of backgammon?" I said. "Let us go back; the rattle of the dice will drown the sound of the bells."

We returned to Clochegourde, conversing by fits and starts. Once in the salon an indefinable uncertainty and dread took possession of us. The count flung himself into an armchair, absorbed in reverie, which his wife, who knew the symptoms of his malady and could foresee an outbreak, was careful not to interrupt. I also kept silence. As she gave me no hint to leave, perhaps she thought backgammon might divert the count's mind and quiet those fatal nervous susceptibilities, the excitements of which were killing him. Nothing was ever harder than to make him play that game, which, however, he had a great desire to play. Like a pretty woman, he always required to be coaxed, entreated, forced, so that he might not seem the obliged person. If by chance, being interested in the conversation, I forgot to propose it, he grew sulky, bitter, insulting, and spoiled the talk by contradicting everything. If, warned by his ill-humor, I suggested a game, he would dally and demur. "In the first place, it is too late," he would say; "besides, I don't care for it."

Then followed a series of affectations like those of women, which often leave you in ignorance of their real wishes.

On this occasion I pretended a wild gaiety to induce him to play. He complained of giddiness which hindered him from calculating; his brain, he said, was squeezed into a vice; he heard noises, he was choking; and thereupon he sighed heavily. At last, however, he consented to the game. Madame de Mortsauf left us to put the children to bed and lead the household in family prayers. All went well during her absence; I allowed Monsieur de Mortsauf to win, and his delight seemed to put him beside himself. This sudden change from a gloom that led him to make the darkest predictions to the wild joy of a drunken man, expressed in a crazy laugh and without any adequate motive, distressed and alarmed me.

I had never seen him in quite so marked a paroxysm. Our intimacy had borne fruits in the fact that he no longer restrained himself before me.

Day by day he had endeavored to bring me under his tyranny, and obtain fresh food, as it were, for his evil temper; for it really seems as though moral diseases were creatures with appet.i.tes and instincts, seeking to enlarge the boundaries of their empire as a landowner seeks to increase his domain.

Presently the countess came down, and sat close to the backgammon table, apparently for better light on her embroidery, though the anxiety which led her to place her frame was ill-concealed. A piece of fatal ill-luck which I could not prevent changed the count's face; from gaiety it fell to gloom, from purple it became yellow, and his eyes rolled.

Then followed worse ill-luck, which I could neither avert nor repair.

Monsieur de Mortsauf made a fatal throw which decided the game.

Instantly he sprang up, flung the table at me and the lamp on the floor, struck the chimney-piece with his fist and jumped, for I cannot say he walked, about the room. The torrent of insults, imprecations, and incoherent words which rushed from his lips would have made an observer think of the old tales of satanic possession in the Middle Ages. Imagine my position!

"Go into the garden," said the countess, pressing my hand.

I left the room before the count could notice my disappearance. On the terrace, where I slowly walked about, I heard his shouts and then his moans from the bedroom which adjoined the dining-room. Also I heard at intervals through that tempest of sound the voice of an angel, which rose like the song of a nightingale as the rain ceases. I walked about under the acacias in the loveliest night of the month of August, waiting for the countess to join me. I knew she would come; her gesture promised it. For several days an explanation seemed to float between us; a word would suffice to send it gushing from the spring, overfull, in our souls. What timidity had thus far delayed a perfect understanding between us? Perhaps she loved, as I did, these quiverings of the spirit which resembled emotions of fear and numbed the sensibilities while we held our life unuttered within us, hesitating to unveil its secrets with the modesty of the young girl before the husband she loves. An hour pa.s.sed. I was sitting on the brick bal.u.s.trade when the sound of her footsteps blending with the undulating ripple of her flowing gown stirred the calm air of the night. These are sensations to which the heart suffices not.

"Monsieur de Mortsauf is sleeping," she said. "When he is thus I give him an infusion of poppies, a cup of water in which a few poppies have been steeped; the attacks are so infrequent that this simple remedy never loses its effect--Monsieur," she continued, changing her tone and using the most persuasive inflexion of her voice, "this most unfortunate accident has revealed to you a secret which has. .h.i.therto been sedulously kept; promise me to bury the recollection of that scene. Do this for my sake, I beg of you. I don't ask you to swear it; give me your word of honor and I shall be content."

"Need I give it to you?" I said. "Do we not understand each other?"

"You must not judge unfavorably of Monsieur de Mortsauf; you see the effects of his many sufferings under the emigration," she went on.

"To-morrow he will entirely forget all that he has said and done; you will find him kind and excellent as ever."

"Do not seek to excuse him, madame," I replied. "I will do all you wish.

I would fling myself into the Indre at this moment if I could restore Monsieur de Mortsauf's health and ensure you a happy life. The only thing I cannot change is my opinion. I can give you my life, but not my convictions; I can pay no heed to what he says, but can I hinder him from saying it? No, in my opinion Monsieur de Mortsauf is--"

"I understand you," she said, hastily interrupting me; "you are right.

The count is as nervous as a fashionable woman," she added, as if to conceal the idea of madness by softening the word. "But he is only so at intervals, once a year, when the weather is very hot. Ah, what evils have resulted from the emigration! How many fine lives ruined! He would have been, I am sure of it, a great soldier, an honor to his country--"

"I know," I said, interrupting in my turn to let her see that it was useless to attempt to deceive me.

She stopped, laid one hand lightly on my brow, and looked at me. "Who has sent you here," she said, "into this home? Has G.o.d sent me help, a true friendship to support me?" She paused, then added, as she laid her hand firmly upon mine, "For you are good and generous--" She raised her eyes to heaven, as if to invoke some invisible testimony to confirm her thought, and then let them rest upon me. Electrified by the look, which cast a soul into my soul, I was guilty, judging by social laws, of a want of tact, though in certain natures such indelicacy really means a brave desire to meet danger, to avert a blow, to arrest an evil before it happens; oftener still, an abrupt call upon a heart, a blow given to learn if it resounds in unison with ours. Many thoughts rose like gleams within my mind and bade me wash out the stain that blotted my conscience at this moment when I was seeking a complete understanding.

"Before we say more," I said in a voice shaken by the throbbings of my heart, which could be heard in the deep silence that surrounded us, "suffer me to purify one memory of the past."

"Hush!" she said quickly, touching my lips with a finger which she instantly removed. She looked at me haughtily, with the glance of a woman who knows herself too exalted for insult to reach her. "Be silent; I know of what you are about to speak,--the first, the last, the only outrage ever offered to me. Never speak to me of that ball. If as a Christian I have forgiven you, as a woman I still suffer from your act."

"You are more pitiless than G.o.d himself," I said, forcing back the tears that came into my eyes.

"I ought to be so, I am more feeble," she replied.

"But," I continued with the persistence of a child, "listen to me now if only for the first, the last, the only time in your life."

"Speak, then," she said; "speak, or you will think I dare not hear you."