This evening Cecile had written a great deal into her diary; and she
now paced up and down in her room, with locked hands hanging before
her and her head slightly bowed and a fixed look in her eyes. There
was anxiety about her mouth. Before her was the vision, as she had
conceived it. He loved her with his soul alone, not as a woman who
is pretty and good, but with a higher love than that, with the finest
nervous fibres of his being--his real being--with the supreme emotion
of the very essence of his soul. Thus she felt that he loved her and
in no other way, with contemplation, with adoration. Thus she felt it
actually, through a sympathetic power of divination by which each of
them was able to guess what actually passed within the other. And this
was his happiness--his first, as he said--thus to love her and in no
other way. Oh, she well understood him! She understood his illusion,
which he saw in her; and she now knew that, if she really wished to
love him for his sake and not for her own, she must needs appear to
be nothing else to him, she must preserve his illusion of a woman
not of flesh, one who desired none of the earthly things that other
women did, one who should be soul alone, a sister soul to his. But,
while she saw before her this vision of her love, calm and radiant,
she saw also the struggle which awaited her, the struggle with herself,
with her own distress: distress because he thought of her so highly
and named her Madonna, the while she longed only to be lowly and his
slave. She would have to seem the woman he saw in her, for the sake of
his happiness, and the part would be a heavy one for her to support,
for she loved him, ah, with such simplicity, with all her woman's
heart, wishing to give herself to him entirely, as only once in her
life a woman gives herself, whatever the sacrifice might cost her,
the sacrifice made in ignorance of herself and perhaps afterwards
to be made in bitterness and sorrow! The outward appearance of her
conduct and her inward consciousness of herself: the conflict of
these would fall heavily upon her, but she thought upon the struggle
with a smile, with joy beaming through her heart, for this bitterness
would be endured for him, deliberately for him and for him alone. Oh,
the luxury to suffer for one whom she loved as she loved him; to
be tortured with inner longing, that he might not come to her with
the embrace of his arms and the kiss of his mouth; and to feel that
the torture was for the sake of his happiness, his! To feel that she
loved him enough to go to him with open arms and beg for the alms of
his caresses; but also to feel that she loved him more than that and
more highly and that--not from pride or bashfulness, which are really
egoism, but solely from sacrifice of herself to his happiness--she
never would, never could, be a suppliant before him!
To suffer, to suffer for him! To wear a sword through her soul for
him! To be a martyr for her god, for whom there was no happiness
on earth save through her martyrdom! And she had passed her life,
had spent long, long years, without feeling until this day that such
luxury could exist, not as a fantasy in rhymes, but as a reality in her
heart. She had been a young girl and had read the poets and what they
rhyme of love; and she had thought she understood it all, with a subtle
comprehension and yet without ever having had the least acquaintance
with emotion itself. She had been a young woman, had been married,
had borne children. Her married life flashed through her mind in a
lightning-flicker of memory; and she stopped still before the portrait
of her dead husband, standing there on its easel, draped in sombre
plush. The mask it wore was of ambition: an austere, refined face,
with features sharp, as if engraved in fine steel; coldly-intelligent
eyes with a fixed portrait look; thin, clean-shaven lips, closed firmly
like a lock. Her husband! And she still lived in the same house where
she had lived with him, where she had had to receive her many guests
when he was Foreign Minister. Her receptions and dinners flickered up
in her mind, so many scenes of worldliness; and she clearly recalled
her husband's eye taking in everything with a quick glance of approval
or disapproval: the arrangement of her rooms, her dress, the ordering
of her parties. Her marriage had not been unhappy; her husband was a
little cold and unexpansive, wrapped wholly in his ambition; but he
was attached to her after his fashion and even tenderly; she too had
been fond of him; she thought at the time that she was marrying him
for love: her dependent womanliness loved the male, the master. Of a
delicate constitution, probably undermined by excessive brain-work,
he had died after a short illness. Cecile remembered her sorrow, her
loneliness with the two children, as to whom he had already feared
that she would spoil them. And her loneliness had been sweet to her,
among the clouds of her dreaming....
This portrait--a handsome life-size photograph; a carbon impression
dark with a Rembrandt shadow--why had she never had it copied in
oils, as she had at first intended? The intention had faded away
within her; for months she had not given it a thought; now suddenly
it recurred to her.... And she felt no self-reproach or remorse. She
would not have the painting made now. The portrait was well enough
as it was. She thought of the dead man without sorrow. She had never
had cause to complain of him; he had never had anything with which to
reproach her. And now she was free; she became conscious of the fact
with a great exultation. Free, to feel what she would! Her freedom
arched above her as a blue firmament in which new love ascended
with a dove's immaculate flight. Freedom, air, light! She turned
from the portrait with a smile of rapture; she thrust her arms above
her head as if she would measure her freedom, the width of the air,
as if she would go to meet the light. Love, she was in love! There
was nothing but love; nothing but the harmony of their souls, the
harmony of her handmaiden's soul with the soul of her god, an exile
upon earth. Oh, what a mercy that this harmony could exist between
him so exalted and her so lowly! But he must not see her lowliness;
she must remain the Madonna, remain the Madonna for his sake, in the
martyrdom due to his reverence, in the dizziness of the high place,
the heavenly throne to which he raised her, beside himself. She felt
this dizziness shuddering about her like rings of light. And she flung
herself on her sofa and locked her fingers; her eyelids quivered;
then she remained staring before her, towards some very distant point.