Has any woman forgiveness for such crimes of treason? Short of being an angel come down from heaven rather than a purified spirit about to attain to it, a loving woman would see her lover suffer any agony sooner than see him made happy by another. The more she loves, the more she will be hurt.
Thus regarded from both sides, my position, when I had once left Clochegourde to go to La Grenadière, was as fatal to my first true love as it was profitable to my chance passion. The Marchioness had foreseen it all with deep calculation. She confessed later that if Madame de Mortsauf had not met her on the heath she had intended to commit me by hanging about Clochegourde.
The instant I saw the Countess, whom I found pale and stricken, like a person who has endured intolerable insomnia, I exercised—not the tact—but the instinct which enables a still young and generous heart to appreciate the full bearing of actions that are criminal in the jurisprudence of noble souls though indifferent in the eyes of the vulgar. Suddenly, as a child that has gone down a steep while playing and plucking flowers, sees, in terror, that he cannot go up it again, discerns no human ground but at an immeasurable distance, feels himself alone in the dark, and hears savage howls, I perceived that a whole world lay between us. A loud cry went up in our souls, an echo, as it were, of the funereal Consummatum est which is pronounced in church on Good Friday, at the hour when the Saviour died—a dreadful scene which freezes those young souls in which religion is their first love. Every illusion Henriette had known had died under one blow; her heart had gone through its passion. She whom pleasure had never involved in its deadening coils—could she suspect the joys of happy lovers, that she refused to look at me? for she would not shed on my gaze the light which for six years had irradiated my life. She knew, then, that the source of the beams that shone from our eyes lay in our souls, for which they were as a pathway, leading from one to the other, so that they might visit, become one, separate, and play—like two confiding girls who have no secrets from each other. I was bitterly conscious of the sin of bringing under this roof, where caresses were unknown, a face on which the wings of enjoyment had shed their sparkling dust.
If, the day before, I had left Lady Dudley to go home alone; if I had come back to Clochegourde, where Henriette perhaps expected me; perhaps—well, perhaps Madame de Mortsauf would not have behaved so strictly as my sister. She gave all her civilities the solemnity of exaggerated emphasis; she played her part to excess so as not to forget it. During breakfast she paid me a thousand little attentions, humiliating attentions; she made much of me like a sick man to be pitied.
“You were out betimes,” said the Count; “you must have a fine appetite, you whose digestion is not ruined.”
This speech, which failed to bring the smile of a wily sister to the Countess’ lips, put the crowning touch to the impossibility of my position. I could not be at Clochegourde by day and at Saint-Cyr by night. Arabella had counted on my sense of delicacy and Madame de Mortsauf’s magnanimity.
All through that long day I felt the difficulty of becoming the friend of a woman one has long desired. This transition, simple enough when years have led up to it, in youth is a distemper. I was ashamed, I cursed all pleasure, I wished that Madame de Mortsauf would demand my blood! I could not tear her rival to pieces before her eyes; she avoided mentioning her, and to speak ill of Arabella was a baseness which would have incurred the contempt of Henriette, herself noble and lofty to the inmost core. After five years of exquisite intimacy we did not know what to talk about; our words did not express our thoughts; we hid gnawing pangs, we to whom suffering had hitherto been a faithful interpreter. Henriette affected a cheerful air on my behalf and her own; but she was sad. Though she called herself my sister on every opportunity, and though she was a woman, she could find no subject to keep up the conversation, and we sat for the most part in awkward silence. She added to my mental torment by affecting to think herself Lady Arabella’s only victim.
“I am suffering more than you are,” said I, at a moment when the sister spoke in a tone of very feminine irony.
“How can that be?” said she, in the haughty voice a woman can put on when her feelings are underestimated.
“I have done all the wrong.”
Then there was a moment when the Countess assumed a cold indifference that was too much for me. I determined to go.
That evening, on the terrace, I took leave of all the family together. They followed me to the lawn where my horse waited, pawing the ground. They stood out of the way. When I had taken the bridle, the Countess came up to me.
“Come, we will walk down the avenue alone,” said she.
I gave her my arm, and we went out through the courtyards, walking slowly as if lingering over the sensation of moving together; we thus reached a clump of trees that screened a corner of the outer enclosure.
“Goodbye, my friend,” said she, stopping and throwing her arms round my neck with her head on my heart. “Goodbye, we shall see each other no more. God
