“I will go and hasten breakfast,” said Camille, “this walk has given me an appetite.”
“Our conversation has taken away mine,” said Béatrix.
Béatrix, a white figure in a morning dress, stood out against the green masses of foliage. Calyste, who had stolen into the garden through the drawing-room, turned down a path, walking slowly to meet the Marquise by chance, as it were; and Béatrix could not help starting a little when she saw him.
“How did I displease you yesterday, madame?” asked Calyste, after a few commonplace remarks had been exchanged.
“Why, you neither please me nor displease me,” said she gently.
Her tone, her manner, her delightful grace encouraged Calyste.
“I am indifferent to you?” said he, in a voice husky with the tears that rose to his eyes.
“Must we not be indifferent to each other?” replied Béatrix. “Each of us has a sincere attachment—”
“Oh!” said Calyste eagerly, “I did love Camille; but I do not love her now.”
“Then what do you do every day, all the morning long?” asked she, with a perfidious smile. “I cannot suppose that, in spite of her passion for tobacco, Camille prefers her cigar to you; or that, in spite of your admiration for authoresses, you spend four hours in reading novels by women.”
“Then you know?” said the innocent boy, his face flushed with the joy of gazing at his idol.
“Calyste!” cried Camille violently, as she appeared on the scene, seizing him by the arm and pulling him some steps; “Calyste, is this what you promised me?”
The Marquise heard this reproof, while Mademoiselle des Touches went off scolding, and leading away Calyste; she stood mystified by Calyste’s avowal, and unable to understand it. Madame de Rochefide was not so clear-sighted as Claude Vignon. The truth of the terrible and sublime comedy performed by Camille is one of those parts of magnanimous infamy which a woman can conceive of only in the last extremity. It means a breaking heart, the end of her feelings as a woman, and the beginning of a sacrifice, which drags her down to hell or leads her to heaven.
During breakfast, to which Calyste was invited, Béatrix, whose feelings were lofty and proud, had already undergone a revulsion, stifling the germs of love that were sprouting in her heart. She was not hard or cold to Calyste, but her mild indifference wrung his heart. Félicité proposed that they should go on the next day but one to make an excursion through the strange tract of country lying between les Touches, le Croisic, and le Bourg de Batz. She begged Calyste to spend the morrow in finding a boat and some men, in case they should wish to go out by sea. She undertook to supply provisions, horses, and everything necessary to spare them any fatigue in this party of pleasure.
Béatrix cut her short by saying that she would not take the risk of running about the country. Calyste’s face, which had expressed lively delight, was suddenly clouded.
“Why, what are you afraid of, my dear?” said Camille.
“My position is too delicate to allow of my compromising, not my reputation, but my happiness,” she said with meaning, and she looked at the lad. “You know how jealous Conti is; if he knew—”
“And who is to tell him?”
“Will he not come back to fetch me?”
At these words Calyste turned pale. Notwithstanding Félicité’s arguments, and those of the young Breton, Madame de Rochefide was inexorable, and showed what Camille called her obstinacy. Calyste, in spite of the hopes Félicité gave him, left les Touches in one of those fits of lovers’ distress of which the violence often rises to the pitch of madness.
On his return home, Calyste did not quit his room till dinnertime, and went back again soon after. At ten o’clock his mother became uneasy, and went up to him; she found him writing in the midst of a quantity of torn papers and rough copy. He was writing to Béatrix, for he distrusted Camille; the Marquise’s manner during their interview in the garden had encouraged him strangely.
Never did a first love-letter spring in a burning fount from the soul, as might be supposed. In all youths as yet uncorrupted, such a letter is produced with a flow too hotly effervescent not to be the elixir of several letters begun, rejected, and rewritten.
Here is that sent by Calyste, which he read to his poor, astonished mother. To her, the old house was on fire; her son’s love blazed up in it like the flare of a conflagration.
Calyste to Béatrix.
“Madame—I loved you when as yet you were but a dream to me; imagine the fervor assumed by my love when I saw you. The dream was surpassed by the reality. My regret is that I have nothing to tell you that you do not know, when I say how beautiful you are; still, perhaps your beauty never gave rise to so many feelings in anyone as in me. You are beautiful in so many ways; I have studied you so thoroughly by thinking of you day and night, that I have penetrated the mystery of your personality, the secrets of your heart, and your misprized refinements. Have you ever been loved as you deserve?
“Let me tell you, then, that there is nothing in you which has not its interpretation in my heart: your pride answers to mine, the dignity of your looks, the grace of your mien, the elegance of your movements—everything in you is in harmony with the thoughts and wishes hidden in your secret soul; and it is because I can read them that I think myself worthy of you. If I had not become, within these few days, your second self, should I dare speak to you of myself? To read myself would be egotistic; it is you I speak of here, not Calyste.
“To write to you, Béatrix, I have set my twenty years aside; I have stolen a march on myself and aged my mind—or, perhaps, you have aged it by a week
