I listened to the Count in terror. On seeing the Countess, the glitter of her hard eyes and the straw-colored complexion of her brow had struck me. I now dragged the Count back to the house as I pretended to listen to his complaining, interspersed with medical dissertations, but I was thinking only of Henriette, and was bent on studying her.
I found the Countess in the drawing-room; she was listening to a lesson in mathematics that the Abbé de Dominis was giving to Jacques, while she showed Madeleine a stitch in tapestry. Formerly she would have found means, on the day of my arrival, to put off such occupations, and devote herself to me; but my love was so deep and true that I buried in the depths of my heart the sorrow I felt at the contrast between the past and present; for I could see that terrible yellow tinge on her heavenly face, like the reflection of a divine light which Italian painters have given to the faces of their female saints. I felt in my soul the cold blast of death. When the blaze of her eyes fell on me, bereft now of the liquid moisture in which her looks had floated, I shuddered; and I then observed certain changes due to grief which I had not noticed out of doors. The fine lines which, when I had last seen her, were but faintly traced on her forehead, were now deep furrows; her temples, bluely veined, were dry and hollow; her eyes were sunk under reddened brows and had dark circles round them; she had the look of fruit on which bruises are beginning to show, and which has turned prematurely yellow from the ravages of a worm within.
And was it not I, whose sole ambition it had been to pour happiness in a full tide into her soul, who had shed bitterness into the spring whence her life derived strength and her courage refreshment?
I sat down by her, and said in a voice tearful with repentance:
“Is your health satisfactory?”
“Yes,” she replied, looking straight into my eyes. “Here is my health,” and she pointed to Madeleine and Jacques.
Madeleine, who had come out victorious from her struggle with nature, at fifteen was a woman; she had grown, the tint of a China rose bloomed in her dark cheeks; she had lost the light heedlessness of a child that looks everything in the face, and had begun to cast down her eyes. Her movements, like her mother’s, were rare and sober; her figure slight, and the charms of her bust already filling out. A woman’s vanity had smoothed her fine black hair, parted into bands on her Spanish-looking brow. She had a look of the pretty medieval busts, so refined in outline, so slender in mould, that the eye that lingers on them fears lest it should break them; but health, the fruit that had ripened after so much care, had given her cheek the velvety texture of the peach, and a silky down on her neck which caught the light—as it did in her mother.
She would live! God had written it, sweet bud of the loveliest of human blossoms, on the long lashes of your eyelids, on the slope of your shoulders, which promised to be as beautiful as your mother’s had been!
This nut-brown maiden, with the growth of a poplar, was a contrast indeed to Jacques, a fragile youth of seventeen, whose head looked too large, for his brow had expanded so rapidly as to give rise to alarms, whose fevered, weary eyes were in keeping with a deep sonorous voice. The throat gave out too great a volume of sound, just as the eye betrayed too much thought. Here Henriette’s intellect, soul, and heart were consuming with eager fires a too frail body; for Jacques had the milk-white complexion touched with the burning flush that is seen in young English girls marked by the scourge to be felled within a limited time—delusive health!
Following a gesture by which Henriette, after pointing to Madeleine, made me look at Jacques, tracing geometrical figures and algebraical sums on a blackboard before the Abbé, I was startled at this glimpse of death hidden under roses, and respected the unhappy mother’s mistake.
“When I see them so well, joy silences all my griefs, as, indeed, they are silent and vanish when I see those two ill.—My friend,” said she, her eyes beaming with motherly pleasure, “if other affections desert us, those that find their reward here—duties fulfilled and crowned with success—make up for defeat endured elsewhere. Jacques, like you, will be a highly cultivated man, full of virtuous learning; like you, he will be an honor to his country—which he may help to govern perhaps, guided by you, who will hold so high a place—but I will try to make him faithful to his first affections. Madeleine, dear creature, has already an exquisite heart. She is as pure as the snow on the highest Alpine summit; she will have the devotedness and the sweet intelligence of a woman; she is proud, she will be worthy of the Lenoncourts!
“The mother, once so distraught, is now very happy—happy in an infinite and unmixed happiness; yes, my life is full, my life is rich. As you see, God has given me joys that unfold from permitted affection, has infused bitterness into those to which I was being tempted by a dangerous attachment.”
“Well done!” cried the Abbé gleefully. “Monsieur le Vicomte knows as much as I do—”
Jacques, as he finished the demonstration, coughed a little.
“That is enough for today, my dear Abbé,” said the Countess in some agitation. “Above all, no chemistry lesson! Go out riding, Jacques,” she added, kissing her son with the justifiable rapture of a mother’s caress, her eyes fixed on me as if to insult my remembrances. “Go, dear, and be prudent.”
“But you have not answered my
