The Lily of the Valley

trifles, his complaints of ailments of which no sign was visible, his innate discontent, which blighted her life, and the incessant craving to rule, which would have made him devour fresh victims every year. When we walked out in the evening, he chose the way we went; but wherever it might be he was always bored by it; when he got home he blamed others for his fatigue⁠—it was his wife who had done it, by taking him against his will the way she wanted to go; he forgot that he had led us, and complained of being ruled by her in every trifle, of never being allowed to decide or think for himself, of being a mere cipher in the house. If his hard words fell on silent patience, he got angry, feeling the limit to his power; he would inquire sharply whether religion did not require wives to submit to their husbands, and whether it was decent to make a father contemptible before his children. He always ended by touching some sensitive chord in his wife; and when he had struck it, he seemed to find particular pleasure in this domineering pettiness.

Sometimes he affected gloomy taciturnity and morbid dejection, which frightened his wife, and led her to lavish on him the most touching care. Like spoilt children, who exert their power without a thought of their mother’s alarms, he allowed himself to be petted like Jacques or Madeleine, of whom he was very jealous. At last, indeed, I discovered that in the smallest, as in the most important matters, the Count behaved to his servants, his children, and his wife as he had to me over the backgammon.

On the day when I first understood, root and branch, those miseries which, like forest creepers, stifled and crushed the movement and the very breathing of this family, which cast a tangle of fine but infinitely numerous threads about the working of the household, hindering every advance of fortune by hampering the most necessary steps, I was seized with admiring awe, which subjugated my love and crushed it down into my heart. What was I, good God! The tears I had swallowed filled me with a sort of rapturous intoxication; it was a joy to me to identify myself with this wife’s endurance. Till then I had submitted to the Count’s tyranny as a smuggler pays his fines; thenceforth I voluntarily received the despot’s blows to be as close as possible to Henriette. The Countess understood, and allowed me to take my place at her side, rewarding me by granting me to share her penance, as of old the repentant apostate, eager to fly heavenwards with his brethren, won permission to die on the arena.

“But for you this life would be too much for me,” said she one night when the Count had been more annoying, more acrid, and more whimsical than usual, as flies are in great heat.

He had gone to bed. Henriette and I sat during part of the evening under the acacias basking in the beams of sunset, the children playing near us. Our words, mere infrequent exclamations, expressed the sympathetic feelings in which we had taken refuge from our common sufferings. When words failed us, silence served us faithfully; our souls entered into each other, so to speak, without hindrance, but without the invitation of a kiss; each enjoying the charm of pensive torpor, they floated together on the ripples of the same dream, dipped together in the river, and came forth like two nymphs as closely one as even jealousy could wish, but free from every earthly tie. We plunged into a bottomless abyss, and came back to the surface, our hands empty, but asking each other by a look, “Out of so many days, shall we ever have one single day for our own?”

When rapture culls for us these blossoms without root, why is it that the flesh rebels? In spite of the enervating poetry of the evening, which tinged the brickwork of the parapet with sober and soothing tones of orange; in spite of the religious atmosphere, which softened the shouts of the children, leaving us at peace, longing ran in sparks of fire through my veins like the signal for a blaze of rockets. At the end of three months I was beginning to be dissatisfied with the lot appointed to me; and I was softly fondling Henriette’s hand, trying thus to expend a little of the fever that was scorching me.

Henriette was at once Madame de Mortsauf again; a few tears rose to my eyes, she saw them, and gave me a melting look, laying her hand on my lips.

“Understand,” said she, “that this costs me tears too. The friendship that asks so great a favor is dangerous.”

I broke out in a passion of reproach, I spoke of all I suffered, and of the small alleviation I craved to help me to endure it. I dared tell her that at my age, though the senses were spiritualized, the spirit had a sex; that I could die⁠—but not without having spoken.

She reduced me to silence with a flashing look of pride, in which I seemed to read the Cacique’s reply, “Am I then on a bed of roses?” Perhaps, too, I was mistaken. Ever since the day when, at the gate of Frapesle, I had wrongly ascribed to her the idea which would build our happiness on a tomb, I had been ashamed to stain her soul by uttering a wish tainted with mere criminal passion.

Then she spoke, and in honeyed words told me that she could never be wholly mine, that I ought to know that. I understood, as she spoke the words, that if I submitted, I should have dug a gulf between us. I bent my head. She went on, saying that she had an inmost conviction that she might love a brother without offence to God or man; that there is some comfort in thus taking such an affection