She turned pale, and raising her eyes to heaven:
“God’s will be done,” she replied.
“Do you know what the King said to your father when speaking of you: ‘That old wretch of a Mortsauf still lives on?’ ”
“What is a jest on the King’s lips is a crime here,” she said.
In spite of our precautions, the Count had tracked us; bathed in sweat, he came up with us under a walnut-tree, where the Countess had paused to speak these brave words. As soon as I saw him, I began to discuss the vintage. Had he any unjust suspicions? I know not, but he stood looking at us without saying a word, or heeding the damp chill that falls from a walnut-tree.
After a few minutes, during which he spoke in broken sentences of no significance, with pauses of very great significance, the Count said he had a sick headache; he complained of it mildly, not claiming our pity nor describing his indisposition in exaggerated terms. We paid no heed to him. When we went in he felt still worse, talked of going to bed, and did so without ceremony, with a simplicity that was very unusual. We took advantage of the armistice granted us by his fit of hypochondria, and went down to our beloved terrace, taking Madeleine with us.
“Let us go out on the river,” said the Countess after a few turns; “we will go to see the fish caught by the gamekeeper for today’s supply.”
We went out of the little gate, found the punt, got into it, and slowly pushed up stream. Like three children, delighted with trifles, we looked at the flowers on the banks, at the blue and green dragonflies, and the Countess wondered that she could enjoy such tranquil pleasures in the midst of so much acute grief. But does not the calm influence of Nature moving on, indifferent to our struggles, exert a consoling charm? The swirl of passion, with its suppressed longings, harmonizes with that of the river; the flowers, unforced by the hand of man, express his most secret dreams; the delicious seesaw of a boat vaguely repeats the thoughts that float in the brain.
We felt the lulling influence of this twofold poetry. Our words, strung to the diapason of Nature, were full of mysterious grace, and our eyes shone with brighter beams, as they caught the light so lavishly shed by the sun on the scorching shore. The river was like a road on which we flew. In short, disengaged from the mechanical movement exerted in walking, the mind took possession of creation. And was not the excited glee of the little girl in her freedom—so pretty in her movements, so puzzling in her remarks—the living expression of two souls set free, and indulging in the ideal creation of the being dreamed of by Plato, and known to all whose youth has been filled with happy love?
To give you an idea of that hour, not in its indescribable details, but as a whole, I may say that we loved each other in every creature, in every object that we saw about us, we felt outside us the happiness each longed for; it sank so deeply into our hearts, that the Countess drew off her gloves and let her beautiful hands play in the water, as if to cool some secret fires. Her eyes spoke; but her lips, parted like a rose to the air, would have closed on a desire. You know, the harmony of deep notes in perfect concord with a high treble; it always reminds me of the harmony of our two souls that day, never more to be repeated.
“Where do your men fish,” said I, “if you can only fish from your own banks?”
“Near the bridge at Ruan,” said she. “The river is ours now from the bridge at Ruan down to Clochegourde. Monsieur de Mortsauf has just bought forty acres of meadow with the savings of the last two years and the arrears of his pension. Does that surprise you?”
“I?—I only wish the whole valley were yours!” I exclaimed, and she answered with a smile.
We were presently above Pont de Ruan, at a spot where the Indre widens, and where the men were fishing.
“Well, Martineau?” said she.
“Oh, Madame la Comtesse, luck is against us. We have been out three hours, working up from the mill, and we have caught nothing.”
We landed to help draw the net once more, standing, all three of us, in the shade of a poplar, with silvery bark, of a kind common on the Danube and the Loire, which in springtime sheds a silky white fluff, the wrapper of its catkins. The Countess had resumed her serene dignity; she repented of having confessed her pangs to me, and of crying out like Job instead of weeping like a Magdalen—a Magdalen bereft of lovers, of feasts and dissipations, but not without perfume and beauty.
The net was drawn at her feet, full of fish—tench, barbel, pike, perch, and an enormous carp leaped upon the grass.
“They were sent on purpose!” said the keeper.
The laborers stared open-eyed with admiration of the woman standing like a fairy who had touched the net with her wand.
At this moment a groom appeared, riding at a gallop across the fields, and filling her with qualms of horror. Jacques was not with us; and a mother’s first instinct, as Virgil has so poetically expressed it, is to clasp her children to her bosom on the slightest alarm.
“Jacques!” she cried. “Where is Jacques? What has happened to my boy?”
She did not love me; if she had loved me, for my sufferings too, she would not have uttered this cry as of a lioness in despair.
“Madame la Comtesse, Monsieur le Comte is much worse.”
She drew a breath of relief, and ran off with me, followed by Madeleine.
“Come
