“They cannot hear us,” he replied.
“No, but they can see us.”
“Let us sit down,” said Calyste gently, as he took her hand.
“Is it true that your banner once floated from that twisted pillar?” asked Charlotte, looking at the house as if it were her own. “It would look well there!—How happy one might be here! You will make some alterations in the arrangement of your house, will you not, Calyste?”
“I shall have no time for it, my dear Charlotte,” said the young man, taking her hands and kissing them. “I will tell you my secret. I love a woman whom you have seen, and who loves me—love her too well to make any other woman happy; and I know that from our infancy you and I have always been intended to marry.”
“But she is married, Calyste,” said Charlotte.
“I will wait,” said the boy.
“And so will I,” said Charlotte, her eyes full of tears. “You cannot love that woman for long; she has gone off with a singer, they say. …”
“Marry someone else, my dear Charlotte,” said Calyste. “With such a fortune as your aunt has to leave you, which is enormous in Brittany, you can find a better match than I. You will find a man with a title.—I have not brought you out here to tell you what you already know, but to entreat you in the name of our long friendship to take the matter upon yourself and to refuse me. Say that you can have nothing to say to a man whose heart is not free, and my passion will at least have been so far serviceable that I shall have done you no wrong. You cannot think how life weighs upon me! I cannot endure any struggle, I am as weak as a body deserted by its soul, by the very element of life. But for the grief that my death would be to my mother and my aunt, I should have thrown myself into the sea ere now, and I have never gone to the rocks of le Croisic since the day when the temptation began to be irresistible.—Say nothing of this.—Charlotte, farewell!”
He took the girl’s head in his hands, kissed her hair, went out of the path under the gable, and made his escape to Camille’s, where he remained till midnight.
On returning at about one in the morning, he found his mother busy with her tapestry, waiting for him. He crept in softly, took her hand, and asked:
“Is Charlotte gone?”
“She is going tomorrow with her aunt; they are both in despair.—Come to Ireland, my Calyste,” she added.
“How many times have I dreamed of flying thither!” said he.
“Really!” exclaimed the Baroness.
“With Béatrix,” he added.
Some days after Charlotte’s departure, Calyste was walking with the Chevalier du Halga on the Mall, and he sat down in the sun on a bench whence his eye could command the whole landscape, from the weathercocks of les Touches to the shoals marked out by the foaming breakers which dance above the reefs at high tide. Calyste was thin and pale, his strength was diminishing, he was beginning to have little periodical shivering fits, symptomatic of fever. His eyes, with dark marks round them, had the hard glitter which a fixed idea will give to lonely persons, or which the ardor of the struggle imparts to the bold leaders of the civilization of our age. The Chevalier was the only person with whom he sometimes exchanged his ideas; he had discerned in this old man an apostle of his religion, and found in him the traces of a never-dying love.
“Have you loved many women in your life?” he asked, the second time that he and the old navy man sailed in company, as the Captain called it, up and down the Mall.
“Only one,” said the Captain.
“Was she free?”
“No,” said the Chevalier. “Ah, I suffered much! She was my best friend’s wife—my patron’s, my chief’s; but we loved each other so much!”
“She loved you, then?”
“Passionately,” replied du Halga, with unwonted vehemence.
“And you were happy?”
“Till her death. She died at the age of forty-nine, an émigrée at Saint-Petersburg; the climate killed her. She must be very cold in her coffin! I have often thought of going to bring her away and lay her in our beloved Brittany, near me! But she rests in my heart!”
The Chevalier wiped his eyes; Calyste took his hands and pressed them.
“I cling to that dog more than to my life,” said he, pointing to Thisbe. “That little creature is in every particular exactly like the dog she used to fondle with her beautiful hands, and to take on her knees. I never look at Thisbe without seeing Madame de Kergarouët’s hands.”
“Have you seen Madame de Rochefide?” asked Calyste.
“No,” replied du Halga. “It is fifty-eight years now since I looked at a woman, excepting your mother; there is something in her coloring that is like the Admiral’s wife.”
Three days later the Chevalier said to Calyste as they met on the Mall:
“My boy, all I have in the world is a hundred and eighty louis. When you know where to find Madame de Rochefide, come and ask me for them, to go to see her.”
Calyste thanked the old man, whose life he envied. But day by day he became more morose; he seemed to care for no one; he was gentle and kind only to his mother. The Baroness watched the progress of this mania with increasing anxiety; she alone, by much entreaty, could persuade Calyste to take
