“Still, I could not yield to my daughter without a struggle; I told myself that I was but twenty-eight when I first met you, and that you were nearly twenty-two. I abridged distances, I allowed myself to indulge false hopes. Oh, my dear Félix, I make this confession to spare you some remorse; partly, perhaps, to show you that I was not insensible, that our sufferings in love were cruelly equalized, and that Arabella was in nothing my superior. I too was one of those daughters of the fallen race whom men love so well.
“There was a time when the conflict was so fearful that I wept all the night, and night after night; my hair fell out—you have that hair! You remember Monsieur de Mortsaufs illness. Your magnanimity at that time, far from raising me, made me fall lower. Alas! there was a time when I longed to throw myself into your arms as the reward of so much heroism; but that madness was brief. I laid it at the footstool of God during that Mass which you refused to attend. Then Jacques’ illness and Madeleine’s ill health seemed to me as threats from God, who was trying thus to recall the erring sheep. And your love for that Englishwoman, natural as it was, revealed to me secrets of which I knew nothing; I loved you more than I knew I did. I lost sight of Madeleine.
“The constant agitations of this storm-tossed life, the efforts I made to subdue myself with no help but that of religion, have laid the seeds of the disease I am dying of. That dreadful blow brought on attacks of which I would say nothing. I saw in death the only possible conclusion to this unrevealed tragedy.
“I lived a whole life of passion, jealousy, fury, during the two months between the news given me by my mother of your connection with Lady Dudley and your arrival here. I wanted to go to Paris, I thirsted for murder, I longed for the death of that woman, I was insensible to the affection of my children. Prayer, which until then had been a balm to me, had no further effect on my spirit. It was jealousy that made the breach through which death entered in. Still, I maintained a placid front; yes, that time of conflict was a secret between God and me.
“When I was quite sure that I was as much loved by you as you were by me, and that it was nature only and not your heart that had made you faithless, I longed to live—but it was too late. God had taken me under His protection, in pity, no doubt, for a being true to herself, true to Him, whose sufferings had so constantly brought her to the gates of the sanctuary. My best-beloved, God has judged me, Monsieur de Mortsauf will no doubt forgive me, but you—will you be merciful? Will you listen to the voice which at this moment reaches you from my tomb? Will you make good the disasters for which we both are responsible—you, perhaps, less than I? You know what I would ask of you. Be to Monsieur de Mortsauf what a Sister of Charity is to a sick man: listen to him, love him—no one will love him. Stand between him and his children as I have always done.
“The task will not be a long one. Jacques will soon leave home to live in Paris with his grandfather, and you have promised to guide him among the rocks of the world. As to Madeleine, she will marry; would that she might some day accept you! She is all myself, and she is also strong in the will that I lack, in the energy needed in the companion of a man whose career must carry him through the storms of political life; she is clever and clear-sighted. If your destinies were united she would be happier than her mother has been. By acquiring a right to carry on my work at Clochegourde you would wipe out such errors as have been insufficiently atoned for, though forgiven in Heaven and on earth, for he is generous and will forgive.
“I am still egotistical, you see; but is not that a proof of overweening love? I want you to love me in those that belong to me. Never having been yours by right, I bequeath to you my cares and duties. If you will not marry Madeleine, at least you will secure the repose of my soul by making Monsieur de Mortsauf as happy as it is possible for him to be.
“Farewell, dear son of my heart; this is a perfectly rational leave-taking, still full of life; the adieux of a soul on which you have bestowed joys so great that you should feel no remorse over the catastrophe they have led to. And I say this as I remember that you love me; for I am going to the home of rest, a victim to duty, and—which makes me shudder—I cannot go without a regret! God knows better than I can whether I have obeyed His holy laws in the spirit. I have often stumbled, no doubt, but I never fell, and the most pressing cause of my errors lay in the temptations that surrounded me. The Lord will see me, quaking quite as much as though I had yielded.
“Once more farewell—such a
