Do you know what the greatest news was after I had greeted the children, for I will say nothing of my alarm on seeing how pale and thin the Countess was? I knew the dismay I might produce by a gesture of surprise, and expressed nothing but pleasure at seeing her.—The great news for us was, “You will have some ice.”
She had often been annoyed last year because she had no water cold enough for me; for, drinking nothing else, I liked it iced. God knows what it had cost her in importunities to have an icehouse built. You, better than anyone, know that love is satisfied with a word, a look, a tone of voice, an attention apparently most trifling; its highest privilege is to be its own evidence. Well, this word, with her look and her pleasure, revealed to me the extent of her sentiments, as I had formerly shown her mine by my conduct over the backgammon.
But there was no end to the artless proofs of her tenderness. By the seventh day after my arrival she was quite herself again; she was sparkling with health, glee, and youth; I found my beloved Lily more beautiful, more fully developed, just as I found all my heart’s treasures increased. Is it not a narrow soul only, or a vulgar heart, which finds that absence diminishes feeling, effaces the impression of the soul, and deteriorates the beauty of the person beloved? To an ardent imagination, to those beings in whom enthusiasm flows in their blood, dyeing it with a fresher purple, and in whom passion takes on the form of constancy, has not absence such an effect as the torments which fortified the faith of early Christians and made God visible to them? Are there not, in a heart full of love, certain undying hopes which give a higher value to the image we desire by showing it in glimpses tinged by the glow of dreams? Can we not feel such promptings as lend the beauty of an ideal to those adored features by informing them with thought? The past, remembered bit by bit, is magnified; the future is furnished with hopes. Between two hearts overcharged with such electric tension, the first interview is then like a beneficent storm which revives the earth and fertilizes it, while shedding on it the flashing gleams of the lightning. How much exquisite pleasure I tasted in finding that in us these thoughts, these experiences were reciprocal! With what rapture did I watch the growth of happiness in Henriette!
A woman who resuscitates under the eyes of the man she loves gives a greater proof of feeling perhaps than one who dies, killed by a suspicion, or withered on the stem for lack of nutrition. Which of the two is the more pathetic I cannot tell. Madame de Mortsauf’s revival was as natural as the effect of the month of May on the meadows, or of sunshine and shower on drooping plants. Like our Vale of Love, Henriette had gone through her winter; like it, she was born anew with the spring.
Before dinner we went down to our beloved terrace. There, as she stroked the head of her poor child, weaker now than I had ever seen him, while he walked by her side in silence as though he were sickening for some disease, she told me of the nights she had spent by his sickbed. For those three months, she said, she had lived exclusively in herself; she had dwelt, as it were, in a gloomy palace, dreading to enter the rooms where lights were blazing, where banquets were given that were forbidden to her; she had stood at the open door with one eye on her child, and the other on a vague face, with one ear listening to sorrow, and the other hearing a voice. She spoke in poems, suggested by solitude, such as no poet has ever written; and all quite simply, without knowing that there might be the slightest trace of love or taint of voluptuous thought, or of Oriental sweetness like a rose of Frangistan. When the Count joined us she went on in the same tone, as a wife proud of herself, who can look her husband boldly in the face, and kiss her son’s brow without a blush.
She had prayed much, holding her clasped hands over Jacques for whole nights, willing that he should not die.
“I went up to the gates of the sanctuary,” said she, “to ask his life of God.”
And she had seen visions; she repeated them to me; but when she presently said in her angel voice these wonderful words, “When I slept, my heart kept watch!”—“That is to say, you were almost crazy,” said the Count, interrupting her.
She was silenced, as if this was the first blow she had ever had, as if she had forgotten that for thirteen years this man had never failed to aim an arrow at her heart. Like a glorious bird, she was stayed in her flight by this clumsy bullet; she fell into a mood of dull dejection.
“Dear me, monsieur,” said she, after a pause, “will nothing I say ever find favor before the bar of your wit? Will you never have pity on my weakness nor any sympathy with my womanly fancies?”
She paused. This angel already repented of having murmured, and sounded the past and the future alike at a glance. Could she be understood, had she not provoked some virulent retort? The blue veins throbbed strongly in her temples; she shed no tears, but her green eyes lost their color; then she looked down to
