Calyste had, in fact, but one idea; the image of Béatrix was always before him. During the evening, over the cards, his absence of mind was like his father’s slumbers. Finding him so unlike what he had been when he had believed himself in love with Camille, his mother recognized with a sort of terror the symptoms of a genuine passion, a thing altogether unknown in the old family home. Feverish irritability and constant dreaming made Calyste stupid. He would often sit for hours gazing at one figure in the tapestry. That morning she had advised him to go no more to les Touches, but to give up these two women.
“Not go to les Touches!” cried he.
“Nay, go, my dear, go; do not be angry, my darling,” replied she, kissing his eyes, which had flashed flame at her.
In this state Calyste was within an ace of losing the fruits of Camille’s skilled manoeuvres by the Breton impetuosity of his love, which he could no longer master. In spite of his promises to Félicité, he vowed that he would see and speak to Béatrix. He wanted to read her eyes, to drown his gaze in their depths, to study the little details of her dress, to breathe its fragrance, to hear the music of her voice, follow the elegant deliberateness of her movements, embrace her figure in a glance—to contemplate her, in short, as a great general studies the field on which a decisive battle is to be fought. He wanted her, as lovers want; he was the prey of such desire as closed his ears, dulled his intellect, and threw him into a morbid condition, in which he no longer saw obstacles or distance, and was not even conscious of his body.
It struck him that he might go to les Touches before the hour agreed upon, hoping to find Béatrix in the garden. He knew that she walked there while waiting for breakfast. Mademoiselle des Touches and her friend had been in the morning to see the salt-marshes, and the basin with its shore of fine sand, into which the sea oozes, looking like a lake in the midst of the sand-hills; they had come home, and were talking as they wandered about the yellow gravel paths in the garden.
“If this landscape interests you,” said Camille, “you should go to le Croisic with Calyste. There are some very fine rocks there, cascades of granite, little bays with natural basins, wonders of capricious variety, and the seashore with thousands of fragments of marble, a whole world of amusement. You will see women making wood, that is to say, plastering masses of cow-dung against the wall to dry, and then piling them to keep, like peat in Paris; then in the winter they warm themselves by that fuel.”
“And you will trust Calyste?” said the Marquise, laughing, in a tone which plainly showed that Camille, by sulking with Béatrix the night before, had obliged her to think of Calyste.
“Oh, my dear, when you know the angelic soul of a boy like him you will understand me. In him beauty is as nothing, you must know that pure heart, that guilelessness that is amazed at every step taken in the realm of love. What faith! what candor! what grace! The ancients had good reason to worship Beauty as holy.
“Some traveler, I forget who, tells us that horses in a state of freedom take the handsomest of them to be their leader. Beauty, my dear, is the genius of matter; it is the hallmark set by Nature on her most perfect creations; it is the truest symbol, as it is the greatest chance. Did anyone ever imagine a deformed angel? Do not they combine grace and strength? What has kept us standing for hours together before certain pictures in Italy, in which genius has striven for years to realize one of these caprices of nature? Come, with your hand on your conscience, was it not the ideal of beauty which we combined in our minds with moral grandeur? Well, and Calyste is one of those dreams made real; he has the courage of the lion, who remains quiet without suspecting his sovereignty. When he feels at his ease he is brilliant; I like his girlish diffidence. In his heart, my soul is refreshed after all the corruption, the ideas of science, literature, the world, politics—all the futile accessories under which we stifle happiness. I am now what I never was before—I am a child! I am sure of him, but I like to pretend jealousy; it makes him happy. Besides, it is part of my secret.”
Béatrix walked on, silent and pensive; Camille was enduring unspoken martyrdom, and flashing side glances at her that looked like flames.
“Ah, my dear, you—you are happy,” said Béatrix, leaning her hand on Camille’s arm like a woman weary of some covert resistance.
“Yes! very happy!” replied poor Félicité, with savage bitterness.
The women sank on to a bench, both exhausted. No creature of her sex was ever subjected to more elaborate seduction or more clear-sighted Machiavelism than Madame de Rochefide had been during the last week.
“But I—I who see Conti’s infidelities, who swallow them, who—”
“And why do you not give him up?” said Camille, discerning a favorable moment for striking a decisive blow.
“Can I?”
“Oh! poor child—”
They both sat stupidly gazing at a clump of
