“I am not feeling well,” she said at last, taking alarm at the pause fraught with such great moment for them both, when the language of the eyes completely filled the blank left by the helplessness of speech.
“Madame,” said Charles, and his voice was tender but unsteady with strong feeling, “soul and body are both dependent on each other. If you were happy, you would be young and fresh. Why do you refuse to ask of love all that love has taken from you? You think that your life is over when it is only just beginning. Trust yourself to a friend’s care. It is so sweet to be loved.”
“I am old already,” she said; “there is no reason why I should not continue to suffer as in the past. And ‘one must love,’ do you say? Well, I must not, and I cannot. Your friendship has put some sweetness into my life, but beside you I care for no one, no one could efface my memories. A friend I accept; I should fly from a lover. Besides, would it be a very generous thing to do, to exchange a withered heart for a young heart; to smile upon illusions which now I cannot share, to cause happiness in which I should either have no belief, or tremble to lose? I should perhaps respond to his devotion with egoism, should weigh and deliberate while he felt; my memory would resent the poignancy of his happiness. No, if you love once, that love is never replaced, you see. Indeed, who would have my heart at this price?”
There was a tinge of heartless coquetry in the words, the last effort of discretion.
“If he loses courage, well and good, I shall live alone and faithful.” The thought came from the very depths of the woman, for her it was the too slender willow twig caught in vain by a swimmer swept out by the current.
Vandenesse’s involuntary shudder at her dictum plead more eloquently for him than all his past assiduity. Nothing moves a woman so much as the discovery of a gracious delicacy in us, such a refinement of sentiment as her own, for a woman the grace and delicacy are sure tokens of truth. Charles’ start revealed the sincerity of his love. Mme. d’Aiglemont learned the strength of his affection from the intensity of his pain.
“Perhaps you are right,” he said coldly. “New love, new vexation of spirit.”
Then he changed the subject, and spoke of indifferent matters; but he was visibly moved, and he concentrated his gaze on Mme. d’Aiglemont as if he were seeing her for the last time.
“Adieu, madame,” he said, with emotion in his voice.
“Au revoir,” said she, with that subtle coquetry, the secret of a very few among women.
He made no answer and went.
When Charles was no longer there, when his empty chair spoke for him, regrets flocked in upon her, and she found fault with herself. Passion makes an immense advance as soon as a woman persuades herself that she has failed somewhat in generosity or hurt a noble nature. In love there is never any need to be on our guard against the worst in us; that is a safeguard; a woman only surrenders at the summons of a virtue. “The floor of hell is paved with good intentions,”—it is no preacher’s paradox.
Vandenesse stopped away for several days. Every evening at the accustomed hour the Marquise sat expectant in remorseful impatience. She could not write—that would be a declaration, and, moreover, her instinct told her that he would come back. On the sixth day he was announced, and never had she heard the name with such delight. Her joy frightened her.
“You have punished me well,” she said, addressing him.
Vandenesse gazed at her in astonishment.
“Punished?” he echoed. “And for what?” He understood her quite well, but he meant to be avenged for all that he had suffered as soon as she suspected it.
“Why have you not come to see me?” she demanded with a smile.
“Then you have seen no visitors?” asked he, parrying the question.
“Yes. M. de Ronquerolles and M. de Marsay and young d’Escrignon came and stayed for nearly two hours, the first two yesterday, the last this morning. And besides, I have had a call, I believe, from Mme. Firmiani and from your sister, Mme. de Listomère.”
Here was a new infliction, torture which none can comprehend unless they know love as a fierce and all-invading tyrant whose mildest symptom is a monstrous jealousy, a perpetual desire to snatch away the beloved from every other influence.
“What!” thought he to himself, “she has seen visitors, she has been with happy creatures, and talking to them, while I was unhappy and all alone.”
He buried his annoyance forthwith, and consigned love to the depths of his heart, like a coffin to the sea. His thoughts were of the kind that never find expression in words; they pass through the mind swiftly as a deadly acid, that poisons as it evaporates and vanishes. His brow, however, was overclouded; and Mme. d’Aiglemont, guided by her woman’s instinct, shared his sadness without understanding it. She had hurt him, unwittingly, as Vandenesse knew. He talked over his position with her, as if his jealousy were one of those hypothetical cases which lovers love to discuss. Then the Marquise understood it all. She was so deeply moved, that she could not keep back the tears—and so these lovers entered the heaven of love.
Heaven and Hell are two great imaginative conceptions formulating our ideas of Joy and Sorrow—those two poles about which human existence revolves. Is not heaven a figure of speech covering now and for evermore an infinite of human feeling impossible to express save in its accidents—since that
