“But all this is past remedy. Yours are my soul, my thoughts, my purest love, yours are my youth and my old age; hers are the desires and raptures of transient passion. You will fill my memory in all its extent; she will be utterly forgotten.”
“Tell me, tell me—oh, tell me this, my dear!” She sat down on a bench and melted into tears. “Then virtue, Félix, a saintly life, motherly love, are not a mere blunder. Oh, pour that balm on my sorrows! Repeat those words which restore me to the bliss for which I hoped to strive in equal flight with you! Bless me with a sacred word, a look, and I can forgive you the misery I have endured these two months past.”
“Henriette, there are mysteries in a man’s life of which you know nothing. When I met you, I was at an age when sentiment can smother the cravings of our nature; still, several scenes, of which the memory will warm me in the hour of death, must have shown you that I had almost outlived that stage, and it was your unfailing triumph that you could prolong its mute delights. Love without possession is upheld by the very exasperation of hope; but a moment comes when every feeling is pure suffering to us who are in any respect like you. A power is ours which we cannot abdicate, or we are not men. The heart, bereft of the nourishment it needs, feeds on itself and sinks into exhaustion, which is not death, but which leads to it. Nature cannot be persistently cheated; at the least accident it asserts itself with a vehemence akin to madness.
“No, I did not love, I thirsted in the desert!”
“In the desert!” she bitterly echoed, pointing to the valley. “And how he argues,” she went on; “what subtle distinctions. Believers have not so much wit!”
“Henriette,” said I, “do not let us quarrel for the sake of a few overbold expressions. My soul has never wavered, but I was no longer master of my senses. That woman knows that you are the only one I love. She plays a secondary part in my life; she knows it, and is resigned. I have a right to desert her as we desert a courtesan.”
“What then?”
“She says she shall kill herself,” said I, thinking that this resolution would startle Henriette.
But as she heard me, she gave one of those scornful smiles that are even more expressive than the ideas they represent. “My dearest Conscience,” I went on, “if you gave me credit for my resistance, and for the temptations that led to my ruin, you would understand this fated—”
“Yes, fated!” she exclaimed, “I believed in you too completely. I fancied you would never lack the virtue a priest can practise, and—Monsieur de Mortsauf!” she added, with satirical emphasis.
“It is all over,” she went on, after a pause. “I owe much to you, my friend; you have extinguished the light of earthly life in me. The hardest part of the road is past; I am growing old, I am often ailing, almost invalided. I could never be the glittering fairy, showering favors on you. Be faithful to Lady Arabella.—And Madeleine, whom I was bringing up so well for you, whose will she be? Poor Madeleine, poor Madeleine!” she repeated, like a sorrowful burden. “If you could have heard her say, ‘Mother, you are not nice to Félix.’ Sweet creature!”
She looked at me in the mild rays of the setting sun that slanted through the foliage; and, filled with some mysterious pity for the ruins of us both, she looked back on our chastened past, giving herself up to reminiscences that were mutual. We took up the thread of our memories, our eyes went from the valley to the vineyard, from the windows of Clochegourde to Frapesle, filling our daydream with the perfumes of our nosegays, the romance of our hopes. It was her last piece of self-indulgence, enjoyed with the guilelessness of a Christian soul. The scene, to us so full of meaning, had plunged us both into melancholy. She believed my words, and felt herself in the heaven where I had placed her.
“My friend,” said she, “I submit to God, for His hand is in all this.”
It was not till later that I understood all the deep meaning of this speech.
We slowly went back by the terraces. She took my arm and leaned on me, resigned, bleeding, but having bound up her wounds.
“This is human life,” said she. “What had Monsieur de Mortsauf done to deserve his fate? All this proves the existence of another world. Woe to those who complain of walking in the narrow way.”
She went on to estimate the value of life, to contemplate it so profoundly in its various aspects, that her calm balance showed me what disgust had come over her of everything here below. As we reached the top steps she took her hand from my arm, and said these last words:
“Since God has given us the faculty and love of happiness, must He not take care of those innocent souls that have known nothing but affliction on earth? Either this is so, or there is no God, and our life is but a cruel jest.”
With these words she hastily went indoors, and I found her presently lying on the sofa, stricken as though she had heard the Voice which confounded Saint-Paul.
“What is the matter?” said I.
“I no longer know what virtue means,” said she. “I have
