“Yes, still,” replied the Duke.
“But the Comtesse de Mortsauf is an angel whom I should very much like to see here,” the King went on. “However, I can do nothing; but perhaps my secretary,” and he turned to me, “may be more fortunate. You have six months’ leave. I shall engage as your colleague the young man of whom we were speaking yesterday. Enjoy yourself at Clochegourde, Master Cato!” and he smiled as he was wheeled out of the room in his chair.
I flew like a swallow to Touraine. For the first time I was about to show myself to the woman I loved, not only as rather less of a simpleton, but in the paraphernalia of a young man of fashion whose manners had been formed in the politest circles, whose education had been finished by the most charming women, who had at last won the reward of his sufferings, and who had made good use of the experience of the fairest angel to whom Heaven ever entrusted the care of a child.
When I had stayed at Clochegourde at the time of my mission in la Vendée, I had been in shooting dress; I wore a jacket with tarnished white metal buttons, finely striped trousers, leather gaiters, and shoes. My long tramp and the thickets had served me so ill that the Count was obliged to lend me some linen. This time, two years’ residence in Paris, the duty of attending the King, the habits of wealth, my now complete development, and a youthful countenance which beamed with indescribable light, derived from the serenity of a soul magnetically united to the pure soul at Clochegourde that went forth to me—all had transfigured me; I was sure of myself without being conceited; I was deeply satisfied at finding myself, young as I was, at the top of the tree; I had the proud consciousness of being the secret mainstay of the most adorable woman on earth, and her unconfessed hope.
I felt perhaps some stirrings of vanity when the postilion’s whip cracked in the newly-made avenue from the Chinon road to Clochegourde, and a gate I had never seen opened in an enclosing wall that had been recently built. I had not written to announce my arrival to the Countess, wishing to take her by surprise; but this was a twofold blunder: in the first place, she suffered the shock of a pleasure long wished for, but regarded as impossible, and she also proved to me that elaborate surprises are always in bad taste.
When Henriette beheld a young man where she had remembered a boy, her eyes fell with a tragical droop; she allowed me to take her hand and kiss it without showing any of the heartfelt pleasure which I had been wont to perceive in her sensitive thrill; and when she raised her face to look at me again, I saw that she was pale.
“So you do not forget old friends!” said Monsieur de Mortsauf, who had neither altered nor grown older.
The two children sprang into my arms; I saw in the doorway the grave face of the Abbé de Dominis, Jacques’ tutor.
“No,” said I to the Count, “and henceforth I shall have six months of every year to devote always to you.—Why, what is the matter?” I said to the Countess, putting my arm round her waist to support her, in the presence of all her family.
“Oh! leave me!” she exclaimed with a start; “it is nothing.”
I read her soul, and answered her secret thought, saying, “Do you no longer acknowledge me for your faithful slave?”
She took my arm, turned away from the Count, the children, the Abbé, and all the servants who had hurried out, and led me round the lawn, still within sight of them all. When we had gone so far that she thought she could not be heard:
“Félix, my friend,” she said, “forgive the alarms of a woman who has but one clue by which to guide herself in an underground labyrinth, and fears to find it broken. Tell me once more that I am more than ever your Henriette, that you will not desert me, that nothing can dislodge me, that you will always be my faithful friend. I have had a sudden vision of the future—and you were not there as usual, with a radiant face and eyes fixed on mine; you had your back to me.”
“Henriette, dear idol, whom I worship more than I do God, Lily, flower of my life, how can you, who are my conscience, fail to know that I am so entirely part of your heart, that my soul is here when my body is in Paris? Need I tell you that I have traveled hither in seventeen hours; that every turn of the wheel bore with it a world of thought and longing, which broke out like a tempest the moment I saw you—”
“Tell me, tell me! I am sure of myself. I can listen to you without sinning. God does not desire my death; He sends you to me as He gives the breath of life to His creatures, as He sheds rain from the clouds on a barren land. Speak, tell me, do you love me with a holy love?”
“With a holy love.”
“And forever?”
“Forever.”
“As a Virgin Mary, to be left shrouded in her draperies under her spotless crown?”
“As a visible Virgin.”
“As a sister?”
“As a sister too dearly loved.”
“As a mother?”
“As a mother I secretly long for.”
“Chivalrously, without hope?”
“Chivalrously, but hoping.”
“In short, as if you were still but twenty, and had your shabby blue evening coat?”
“Oh, far better! I love you like that, but I also love you as—” She looked at me in keen alarm. “As you loved your aunt.”
“Ah! I am happy; you have relieved my fears,” said she, returning to the others, who stood puzzled by our private colloquy.
“Be still a child here!—for you are but a
