“Dear God!” she exclaimed, drying her tears and looking up to heaven, “for what am I thus punished? But we must believe—yes, Félix,” she said, laying her hand on my arm, “let us believe that we must pass through a red-hot crucible before we can mount holy and perfect to the higher spheres.—Ought I to be silent? Does God forbid my crying out to a friend’s heart? Do I love him too well?” She clasped me to her as though she feared to lose me. “Who will answer my doubts? My conscience does not reproach me. The stars above shine down on men; why should not the soul, that living star, shed its fires over and round a friend when only pure thoughts go out to him?”
I listened in silence to this terrible outcry, holding her clammy hand in my own, which was moister still; I grasped it with a force to which Henriette responded with equal pressure.
“You are there, are you?” cried the Count, coming towards us bareheaded.
Since my return he had insisted on always being the third whenever we met, either because he counted on some amusement, or because he suspected the Countess of telling me of all her sorrows and bewailing herself to me; or again, because he was jealous of a pleasure he did not share.
“How he follows me about!” said she in a tone of despair. “We will go to look at the Clos, and then we shall avoid him. Stoop low behind the hedges and we shall escape.” We screened ourselves behind a thick hedge, and reaching the vineyard at a run, found ourselves far enough from the Count under an alley of almond-trees.
“Dear Henriette,” said I, holding her arm pressed against my heart, and standing still to contemplate her in her sorrow, “you could once steer me wisely through the perilous ways of the great world. Allow me now to give you some instructions to help you to end the single-handed duel in which you must infallibly be defeated, for you and he are not fighting with equal weapons. Struggle no longer against a madman—”
“Hush!” she exclaimed, keeping back the tears that filled her eyes.
“Listen to me, my dearest. After an hour of his talk, which I endure for your sake, my mind is often bewildered and my head aches; the Count makes me doubt my very senses; the same things repeated are stamped in my brain in spite of myself. A strongly marked monomania is not infectious; when madness takes the form of affecting a man’s views and hides itself behind perpetual discussions, it may act terribly on those who live with it. Your patience is sublime, but is it not stultifying? For your own sake, for your children’s, change your system with the Count. Your exquisite submissiveness has increased his egoism; you treat him as a mother treats the child she spoils. But now, if you wish to live—and you do,” I added, looking her in the face, “exert all the influence you have over him. He loves and he fears you—you know it; make him fear you more; meet his diffused wilfulness with a narrow, set will. Increase your power, just as he has managed to increase the concessions you have granted; imprison his infirmities in a narrow moral sphere, as a maniac is imprisoned in a cell.”
“Dear boy,” said she, smiling bitterly, “none but a heartless woman could play such a part. I am a mother; I should make a feeble executioner. I can suffer—yes; but to make others suffer!—Never,” she said, “not even to attain some great or conspicuous advantage. Should I not have to falsify my feelings, disguise my voice, set my face, restrain every gesture? … Do not require such lies of me. I can stand between Monsieur de Mortsauf and his children; I can take his blows so that they may fall on no one else; that is the utmost I can do to reconcile so many antagonistic interests.”
“Let me worship
