Being informed by his brother of all these arrangements, the Marquis
submitted with gratitude. He was extremely weak, and recovering
apparently from a dangerous crisis, which had not wholly exhausted him,
but had broken him down morally almost as much as a long illness would
have done. He could struggle against his love no longer; and having
ceased to feel the dangerous storms of passion, thanks to this
prostration, he gave himself up to the pleasure of being tenderly cared
for. The Duke would not permit him to question the future. "You cannot
come to any decision in your present state," Gaëtan would say to his
brother. "You have n't the free use of your will: without health there
can be no moral clear-sightedness. Let us cure you, and then you will
see plainly that, with your health, you have also regained the strength
necessary to resist your love, or to deal with the scruples it causes.
In the mean time I don't see what you can have on your conscience, for
Mlle de Saint-Geneix suspects nothing, and after all is only doing what
a sister would do in her place."
This compromise quieted all the invalid's uneasiness. He arose and went
to see his mother a few moments, making her believe that a slight
indisposition was responsible for the change in his countenance. He
asked to be excused from returning till the next day, and so for
twenty-four hours, that is, until after the departure of Madame
d'Arglade, he could give himself up to almost absolute repose.
Throughout the day there subsisted between the Duke and Caroline an air
of mutual intelligence and an exchange of glances which had for their
subject only the Marquis and his health, but which completely deluded
Léonie. She went away perfectly sure of her facts, but without saying
anything to the Marchioness which could lead that old lady to suppose
her possessed of any penetration whatever.
At the close of the week M. de Villemer was much better. Every symptom
of aneurism had passed away, and under rational treatment he even
regained a certain glow of health, as well as a mental serenity, to
which he had long been a stranger. No one for ten years had taken care
of him with the assiduity, the devotedness, the evenness of temper, the
unheard-of charm, with which Mlle de Saint-Geneix contrived to surround
him: we might even say he had never met with attentions at once so
sensible and so tender, for his mother, aside from her lack of active
physical strength, had shown herself excitable and over-anxious in the
care she had lavished on him when his life had before been threatened.
She had, indeed, at this time some suspicion of a relapse, when she saw
her son more frequently with her, and consequently less devoted to his
work; but when this idea occurred the crisis had already passed: the
good understanding between the Duke and Caroline as to the need of
tranquillity, the absolute ignorance of the servants, few in numbers and
therefore very busy, and the serenity of the Marquis himself, all tended
to reassure her; and at the close of a fortnight she even observed that
her son was regaining an air of youth and health at which she could but
rejoice.
The condition of the Marquis had been carefully concealed from Madame
d'Arglade. The Duke would in no wise give up the great marriage
projected for his brother. He thought Léonie was a foolish chatterbox,
and did not care to have it understood in society that his brother's
health, at any moment, might give serious cause for alarm. The Duke had
thoroughly warned Caroline on this point. He was playing with her, in
the interests of his brother as he understood them, the double game of
preparing her as far as possible, and little by little, for the exercise
of an unlimited devotion; and to this end, he thought best to remind
her, now and then, that the future well-being of the family rested
entirely on the famous marriage. Caroline, then, had no chance to forget
this; and relying on the integrity of the two brothers, on her own ideas
of duty and the unselfishness of her heart, she walked resolutely toward
an abyss which might have engulfed her. And thus the Duke, naturally
kind, and animated by the best intentions toward his brother, was coolly
working out the misery of a poor girl whose personal merit made her
worthy of the highest places of happiness and consideration.
Fortunately for Mlle de Saint-Geneix, although the conscience of the
Marquis was somewhat stupefied, it was not wholly asleep. Besides, his
passion was made up of enthusiasm and sincere affection. He insisted
that the Duke should be with them almost always, and in his abrupt
sincerity he came near releasing Caroline from her attendance
altogether, promising not to begin work again without her permission.
The moment came even when he did give her this promise to induce her to
cease her watch in the library; he had found her there more than once, a
guardian, gently and gayly "savage," over the books and portfolios,
placed, she said, under interdict till further orders; but the Duke
counteracted the effect of this "imprudence" on his brother's part, by
telling Caroline, in a very low voice, that she must not trust a
promise, given in good faith to be sure, but which Urbain would not have
it in his power to keep. "You don't know how absent-minded he is," said
the Duke; "when an idea takes hold of him it masters him, and makes him
forget all his promises. I have found him myself, more than twenty
times, searching over these bookshelves while my back was turned, and
when I called out, 'Here, here, you marauder!' he seemed startled out of
a revery and looked at me with an air of great surprise."
So Caroline did not relax her watchfulness. The library was much farther
from her room than from that of the Marquis; but yet so near the centre
of the house that the constant presence of the young lady reader in this
room devoted to study was not likely to strike the servants as anything
remarkable. They saw her there often, sometimes alone, sometimes with
the Duke or the Marquis, more frequently with both, although the Duke
had a thousand pretexts for leaving her alone with his brother; but even
then the doors always open, the book often in Caroline's hands, the
evident interest with which she was reading, and lastly, more than all
this, the real truth of the situation,--truth, which has more power than
the best-planned deception,--removed every pretext and even every desire
for malicious comment.
In this state of things Caroline was really happy, and often recurred to
it in after years as the most delightful phase of her life. She had
suffered from Urbain's coldness, but now she found him showing an
unhoped-for kindness and a disposition to trust her again. As soon as
all fears for his health were dispelled, a bond was established between
them, which, for Caroline, had not a single doubt or apprehension. The
Marquis enjoyed her reading exceedingly, and before long he even
consented to let her help him with his work. She conducted
investigations for him and took notes, which she classified in the very
spirit he desired,--a spirit she seemed to divine wonderfully. In short,
she rendered his studies so pleasant, and relieved him so cleverly from
the dry and disagreeable portions, that he could once more betake
himself to writing without pain or fatigue.
The Marquis certainly needed a secretary far more than his mother did;
but he had never been able to endure this interposition between himself
and the objects of his researches. He saw very soon, however, that
Caroline never led him off into ideas foreign to his own, but kept him
from straying away himself into useless speculations and reveries. She
had a remarkable clearness of judgment, joined with a faculty rarely
possessed by women, namely, that of order in the sequence of thought.
She could remain absorbed in any pursuit a long while, without fatigue
or faltering. The Marquis made a discovery,--one that was destined to
direct his future. He found himself in presence of a superior mind, not
creative, indeed, but analytic in the highest degree,--just the
organization he needed to give balance and scope to his own intellect.
Let us say, once for all, that M. de Villemer was a man of very sound
understanding; but he had not found as yet, and was still awaiting, the
crisis of its development. Hence the slow and painful progress of his
work. He thought and wrote rapidly; but his conscientiousness, as a
philosopher and moralist, was always putting fresh obstacles in the way
of his enthusiasm as an historian. He was the victim of his own
scruples, like certain devotees, sincere but morbid, who always imagine
they have failed to tell their confessor the whole truth. He wanted to
confess to the human race the truth about social science; and did not
sufficiently admit that this science of truths and facts is, largely, a
relative one, determined by the age in which one lives. He could not
decide on his course. He strove to discover the meaning of facts long
buried among the arcana of the past, and after he had, with great labor,
caught a few traces of these, he was surprised to find them often
contradictory, and in alarm would doubt his own discernment or his own
impartiality, would suspend judgment, laying aside his work, and for
weeks and months would be the prey of terrible uncertainties and
misgivings.
Caroline, without knowing his book, which was still only half written,
and which he concealed with a morbid timidity, soon divined the cause of
his mental uneasiness from his conversation, and especially his remarks
while she was reading aloud. She volunteered a few off-hand reflections
of extreme simplicity, but so plainly just and right as to be
unanswerable. She was not perplexed by a little blot on a grand life or
a tiny glimmer of reason in an age of delirium. She thought the past
must be viewed just as we look at paintings, from the distance required
by the eye of each in order to take in the whole; and that, as the great
masters have done in composing their pictures, we must learn to
sacrifice the petty details, which sometimes really destroy the harmony
of nature, and even her logic. She called attention to the fact that we
notice on a landscape, at every step, strange effects of light and
shade, and the multitude will say, "How could a painter render that?"
and the painter would reply, "By not rendering it at all."
She admitted that the historian is fettered more than the artist to
accuracy in matters of fact, but she denied that there could be progress
on any different principles in either case. The past and even the
present of individual or collective life, according to her, take color
and meaning only from their general tenor and results.
She ventured on these suggestions, cautiously putting them in the form
of questions; without being positive, and as if willing to suppress them
in case they were not approved; but M. de Villemer was struck with them,
because he felt she had given expression to a certainty, an inward
faith, and that if she consented to keep silence, she would still remain
none the less convinced. He struggled a little, nevertheless, laying
before her a number of facts which had delayed and troubled him. She
passed judgment on them in one word, with the strong, good sense of a
fresh mind and a pure heart, and he soon exclaimed with a glance at the
Duke, "She finds the truth because she has it within her, and that is
the first condition of clear insight. Never will the troubled
conscience, never will the perverted mind, comprehend history."
"Perhaps," said she, "that is why history should not be too much made up
from memoirs, for these are nearly always the work of prejudice or
passions of the moment. It is the fashion now to dig these out with
great care, bringing forward many trifling facts not generally known,
and which do not deserve to be known."
"Yes, you are right," replied the Marquis; "if the historian, instead of
standing firm in his belief and worship of lofty things, lets himself be
misled and distracted by trivial ones, truth loses all that reality
usurps."
If we relate these bits of conversation, perhaps a little out of the
usual color of a romance, it is because they are necessary to explain
the seriousness and apparent calmness of the relations that were growing
up between the scholar and the humble lady-reader in the castle of
Séval, in spite of the pains the Duke was taking to leave them as much
as possible to the tender influences of youth and love. The Marquis felt
that he belonged to Caroline, not only through his enthusiasm, his
dreams, his need of throwing a kind of ideal about grace and beauty, but
through his reason, his judgment, and through his present certainty that
he had met that ideal. Henceforth Caroline was safe; she commanded
respect by the weight of her character, and the Marquis stood in no
further fear of losing control of his own impulses.
The Duke was at first astonished by this unlooked-for result of their
intimacy. His brother was cured, he was happy, he seemed to have
conquered love by the very power of love itself; but the Duke was
intelligent and he understood. He was even seized himself with a serious
deference for Caroline. He took an interest in her reading, and soon,
instead of falling asleep under the first few pages, he wanted to read
in his turn and give them his impressions. He had no convictions, but,
in the artist spirit, allowed himself to be moved and borne along by
those of others. He had read but little on serious subjects, in the
course of his life, but he had admirably retained all kinds of dates and
proper names. So that he had in his fine memory, as one might say, a
sort of network with large meshes to which the loose lines of his
brother's studies could be tied. That is, he was a stranger to nothing
except the logical and profound meanings of historical events. He did
not lack prejudices; but excellence of style had a power over him which
put them to silence, and before an eloquent page, whether of Bossuet or
Rousseau, he felt the same enthusiasm.
Thus he also found himself pleasantly initiated into the pursuits of the
Marquis and the society of Mlle de Saint-Geneix. What was really very
good in him is that, from the day he first became aware of his brother's
affection for Caroline, she ceased to be a woman in his eyes. He had
nevertheless felt some emotion for several days in her presence, and the
truth had come upon him unexpectedly in an hour of feverish spite. From
day to day he abjured every evil thought, and, touched by seeing that
the Marquis, after a terrible attack of jealousy, had restored to him
his entire confidence, he knew, for the first time in his life, what it
was to feel a true and worthy friendship for a pretty woman.