“I love you too truly, in spite of the aversion you show for me, to lay a proposal before the Count, which he would hail with eager satisfaction. Be free. But by and by, consider that you will never know anybody in the world so well as you know me, that no man can bear in his heart feelings more devoted—”
So far Madeleine had listened with downcast eyes, but she stopped me with a gesture.
“Monsieur,” said she in a voice tremulous with agitation, “I, too, know all your mind. But I can never change in feeling towards you, and I would rather drown myself in the Indre than unite myself with you. Of myself I will not speak, but if my mother’s name can still influence you, in her name I beg you never to come to Clochegourde so long as I am here. The mere sight of you occasions me such distress as I cannot describe, and I shall never get over it.”
She bowed to me with much dignity, and went up to the house, never looking back; as rigid as her mother had been once, and only once, and quite pitiless. The girl’s clear sight had, though only of late, seen to the bottom of her mother’s heart, and her hatred of the man who seemed to her so fatal was increased perhaps by some regret at her own innocent complicity.
Here was an impassable gulf. Madeleine hated me without choosing to ascertain whether I was the cause or the victim of her griefs; and she would, I dare say, have hated both her mother and me if we had been happy. So this fair castle of promised happiness was in ruins.
I alone was ever to know the whole life of this noble unknown woman, I alone was in the secret of her feelings. I alone had studied her soul in its complete grandeur. Neither her mother, nor her father, nor her husband, nor her children had understood her.
It is a strange thing! I can turn over that pile of ashes, and take pleasure in spreading them before you; we may all find among them something of what has been dearest to us. How many families have their Henriette! How many noble creatures depart from earth without having met with an intelligent friend to tell their story, and to sound their hearts, and measure their depth and height! This is human life in its stern reality; and often mothers know no more of their children than the children know of them. And it is the same with married couples, lovers, brothers and sisters. Could I foresee that the day would come when, over my father’s grave I should go to law with Charles de Vandenesse, the brother to whose advancement I had so largely contributed? Good Heavens! How much may be learned from the simplest tale!
When Madeleine had disappeared into the house I came away heartbroken, took leave of my hospitable friends, and set out for Paris along the right bank of the Indre—the road by which I had come down the valley for the first time. I was sad enough as I rode through the village of Pont de Ruan. And yet I was now rich; political life smiled upon me; I was no longer the weary wayfarer of 1814. Then my heart had been full of desires, now my eyes were full of tears; then I had to fill up my life, now I felt it a desert. I was still quite young—nine-and-twenty—and my heart was crushed. A few years had been enough to rob the landscape of its pristine glory, and to disgust me with life. You may conceive then of my emotion when, on looking back, I discerned Madeleine on the terrace.
Wholly possessed by absorbing sorrow, I never thought of the end of my journey. Lady Dudley was far from my mind, when I found that I had unconsciously entered her courtyard. The blunder once made, I could but act it out.
My habits in the house were quite marital; I went upstairs, gloomy in anticipation of a vexatious rupture. If you have ever understood the character of Lady Dudley you can imagine how disconcerted I felt when her butler showed me, as I was, in traveling dress, into a drawing-room where she sat splendidly dressed with a party of five visitors. Lord Dudley, one of the most noteworthy of English statesmen, was standing in front of the fire—elderly, starch, arrogant, cold, with the satirical expression he must wear in the House; he smiled on hearing my name. With their mother were Arabella’s two boys, astonishingly like de Marsay, one of the nobleman’s natural sons, who was sitting on the sofa by the Marchioness.
Arabella, as soon as she saw me, assumed a lofty air, and stared at my traveling cap as if she were on the point of inquiring what had brought me to see her. She looked at me from head to foot, as she might have done at some country squire just introduced to her. As to our intimacy, our eternal passion, her vows that she must die if I ever ceased to love her—all the phantasmagoria of Armida—it had vanished like a dream. I had never held her hand, I was a stranger, she did not know me!
I was startled, in spite of the diplomatic coolness I was beginning to acquire; and any man in my place would have been no less so. De Marsay smiled as he looked at his boots, examining them with obvious significancy.
I made up my mind at once. From any other woman I would have submissively accepted my discomfiture;
