The words revealed her purity of mind. The Count’s death a misfortune!
She hurried on to Clochegourde, went in by a break in the wall, and crossed the vineyard. I returned as slowly as she could wish. Henriette’s words had enlightened me, but as the lightning-flash which destroys the garnered harvest. During that hour on the river I had fancied that she cared most for me; I now felt bitterly that her words were perfectly sincere. The lover who is not all in all is nothing. So I was alone in my love with the longing of a passion that knows all its wants, that feeds on anticipation, on hoped-for kindness, and is satisfied with the joys of imagination, because it confounds with them those it looks for in the future. If Henriette loved me, she still knew nothing of the joys or the storms of love. She lived on the feeling itself, as a saint is the spouse of God.
I was the object with which her thoughts were bound up, the sensations she misunderstood, as a swarm of bees clings to some blossoming bough; but I was not the element of life to her, only an adventitious fact. A king unthroned, I walked on, wondering who should restore me to my kingdom. In my crazy jealousy I blamed myself for never having greatly dared, for not having tightened the bonds of an affection—which now seemed to me refined out of all reality—by the chains of self-evident right conferred by possession.
The Count’s indisposition, caused probably by a chill under the walnut-tree, in a few hours had become serious. I went off to Tours to fetch a physician of note, Monsieur Origet, whom I could not bring back till the evening; but he spent the night and the next day at Clochegourde. Though he had sent the groom to fetch a large number of leeches, he thought immediate bleeding necessary, and had no lancet with him. I rushed off to Azay, in dreadful weather; I roused Monsieur Deslandes the surgeon, and made him come off with the rapidity of a bird. Ten minutes later the Count would have succumbed; bleeding saved him.
In spite of this first triumph, the doctor pronounced him in a dangerously high fever, one of those attacks which come on people who have ailed nothing for twenty years. The Countess was overwhelmed; she believed herself to be the cause of this disastrous illness. Unable to thank me for what I did, she was content to give me an occasional smile, with an expression that was equivalent to the kiss she had pressed on my hand; I wished I could read in it the remorse of an illicit passion; but it was an act of contrition, painful to see in so pure a soul, and the expression of admiring affection for him whom she considered noble, while she accused herself alone of an imaginary crime. She loved indeed as Laura de Noves loved Petrarch, and not as Francesca da Rimini loved Paolo—a crushing discovery for a man who had dreamed of the union of these two types of love. The Countess was reclining, her frame exhausted, her arms lying limp, in a dirty armchair in that room that reminded me of a wild boar’s den.
Next evening, before leaving, the doctor told the Countess, who had watched all night, that she must send for a nurse; the illness would be long.
“A nurse!” cried she. “No, no. We will nurse him,” she added, looking at me. “We owe it to ourselves to save him.”
At these words, the doctor glanced at us with an observing eye full of astonishment. The expression of her words was enough to lead him to suspect some crime that had failed in the execution. He promised to come twice a week, suggested the treatment to be pursued by Monsieur Deslandes, and described the alarming symptoms which might necessitate his being fetched from Tours.
To secure the Countess at least one night’s rest out of two, I proposed that she should allow me to sit up with the Count in turns with her; and thus, not without difficulty, I persuaded her to go to bed the third night. When all was still in the house, during a minute when the Count was dozing, I heard a sigh of anguish from Henriette’s room. My anxiety was so keen that I went to see her; she was on her knees before her prie-Dieu in tears and accusing herself:—“Ah, God! if this is the price of a murmur,” she cried, “I will never complain again.”
“You have left him!” she exclaimed as she saw me.
“I heard you wailing and moaning, and I was alarmed about you.”
“About me? Oh, I am quite well,” she said.
She wanted to be sure that Monsieur de Mortsauf was really asleep. We went down together, and by the light of a lamp we looked at him. He was weakened by loss of blood rather than sleeping; his restless hands were trying to pull the counterpane up.
“They say that is a trick of the dying,” said she. “Oh, if he were to die of this illness brought on by us, I would never marry again; I swear it!” she went on, solemnly holding out her hand over the Count’s head.
“I have done all I can to save him,” said I.
“You! Oh, you are most good!” said she, “It is I—I am the guilty one.”
She bent down over the puckered brow, wiped away the moisture with her hair, and gave it a sacred kiss. But I noted, not without secret satisfaction, that she bestowed this caress as an expiation.
“Blanche—some drink,” said the Count in a feeble voice.
“You see, he only recognizes me,” she said as she brought him a glass. And by
