“Who is there?” asked someone, and I could distinguish a pale face in the slanting rays of the moon which was just rising.
It was Edmée. On recognising her I was about to move away, but she passed her beautiful arm between the mullions, and held me back by the collar of my jacket, saying:
“Why are you crying, Bernard?”
I yielded to her gentle violence, half ashamed at having betrayed my weakness, and half enchanted at finding that Edmée was not unmoved by it.
“What are you grieved at?” she continued. “What can draw such bitter tears from you?”
“You despise me; you hate me; and you ask why I am in pain, why I am angry!”
“It is anger, then, that makes you weep?” she said, drawing back her arm.
“Yes; anger or something else,” I replied.
“But what else?” she asked.
“I can’t say; probably grief, as you suggest. The truth is my life here is unbearable; my heart is breaking. I must leave you, Edmée, and go and live in the middle of the woods. I cannot stay here any longer.”
“Why is life unbearable? Explain yourself, Bernard. Now is our opportunity for an explanation.”
“Yes, with a wall between us. I can understand that you are not afraid of me now.”
“And yet it seems to me that I am only showing an interest in you; and was I not as affectionate an hour ago when there was no wall between us?”
“I begin to see why you are fearless, Edmée; you always find some means of avoiding people, or of winning them over with pretty words. Ah, they were right when they told me that all women are false, and that I must love none of them.”
“And who told you that? Your Uncle John, I suppose, or your Uncle Walter; or was it your grandfather, Tristan?”
“You can jeer—jeer at me as much as you like. It is not my fault that I was brought up by them. There were times, however, when they spoke the truth.”
“Bernard, would you like me to tell you why they thought women false?”
“Yes, tell me.”
“Because they were brutes and tyrants to creatures weaker than themselves. Whenever one makes one’s self feared one runs the risk of being deceived. In your childhood, when John used to beat you, did you never try to escape his brutal punishment by disguising your little faults?”
“I did; that was my only resource.”
“You can understand, then, that deception is, if not the right, at least the resource of the oppressed.”
“I understand that I love you, and in that at any rate there can be no excuse for your deceiving me.”
“And who says that I have deceived you?”
“But you have; you said you loved me; you did not love me.”
“I loved you, because at a time when you were wavering between detestable principles and the impulses of a generous heart I saw that you were inclining towards justice and honesty. And I love you now, because I see that you are triumphing over these vile principles, and that your evil inspirations are followed by tears of honest regret. This I say before God, with my hand on my heart, at a time when I can see your real self. There are other times when you appear to me so below yourself that I no longer recognise you and I think I no longer love you. It rests with you, Bernard, to free me from all doubts, either about you or myself.”
“And what must I do?”
“You must amend your bad habits, open your ears to good counsel and your heart to the precepts of morality. You are a savage, Bernard; and, believe me, it is neither your awkwardness in making a bow, nor your inability to turn a compliment that shocks me. On the contrary, this roughness of manner would be a very great charm in my eyes, if only there were some great ideas and noble feelings beneath it. But your ideas and your feelings are like your manners, that is what I cannot endure. I know it is not your fault, and if I only saw you resolute to improve I should love you as much for your defects as for your qualities. Compassion brings affection in its train. But I do not love evil, I never loved it; and, if you cultivate it in yourself instead of uprooting it, I can never love you. Do you understand me?”
“No.”
“What, no!”
“No, I say. I am not aware that there is any evil in me. If you are not displeased at the lack of grace in my legs, or the lack of whiteness in my hands, or the lack of elegance in my words, I fail to see what you find to hate in me. From my childhood I have had to listen to evil precepts, but I have not accepted them. I have never considered it permissible to do a bad deed; or, at least, I have never found it pleasurable. If I have done wrong, it is because I have been forced to do it. I have always detested my uncles and their ways. I do not like to see others suffer; I do not rob a fellow-creature; I despise money, of which they made a god at Roche-Mauprat; I know how to keep sober, and, though I am fond of wine, I would drink water all my life if, like my uncles, I had to shed blood to get a good supper. Yet I fought for them; yet I drank with them. How could I do otherwise? But now, when I am my own master, what harm am I doing? Does your abbé, who is
