We came down by the wooded slopes to the foaming bed of a cascade.
There we saw a small funereal monument erected to the memory of a young
and lovely woman, Madame de Broc; she fell some years ago into this
whirl-pool, whose foaming waters gave up a long while after a part of
her white dress, and thus caused her body to be found in the deep
grotto in which it had been ingulfed. Lovers often come and visit this
watery tomb; their hearts feel heavy, and they draw closer to each
other as they think how their fragile felicity may be dashed to atoms
by one false step on the slippery rock.
From this cascade, which bears the name of Madame de Broc, we walked in
silence towards the Château de Saint Innocent, from whence one commands
an extensive view of the whole lake. We got down from our mules beneath
the shade of some lofty oaks, which were interspersed here and there
with a few patches of heath. It was a lonely place at that time, but
since then a rich planter, on his return to his native land, has built
himself a country house, and planted a garden in these, his paternal
acres. Our mules were turned loose, and left to graze in the wood under
the care of the children who acted as our guides. We walked on alone
from tree to tree, from one glade to another on the narrow neck of
land, until we reached the extreme point, where we saw the shining
lake, and heard its splashing waters. This wood of Saint Innocent is a
promontory that stretches out into the lake at the wildest and most
lonely part of its shores; it ends in some rocks of gray granite, which
are sometimes washed by the foam of the wind-tossed waves, but are dry
and shining when the waters subside into repose. We sat down on two
stones close to each other. Before us, the dark pile of the Abbey of
Haute-Combe rose on the opposite shore of the lake. Our eyes were fixed
on a little white speck that seemed to shine at the foot of the gloomy
terraces of the monastery. It was the fisherman's house, where we had
been thrown together by the waves, and united forever by that chance
meeting; it was the room where we had spent that heavenly and yet
funereal night which had decided the fate of both our lives. "It was
there!" she said, stretching out her arm, and pointing to the bright
speck, which was scarcely visible in the distance and darkness of the
opposite shore. "Will there come a day and a place," she added
mournfully, "in which the memory of all we felt there during those
deathless hours will appear to you, in the remoteness of the past, but
as that little speck on the dark background of yonder shore?"
I could not reply to these words; her tone, her doubts, the prospect of
death, inconstancy, and frailty, and the possibility of forgetfulness,
had struck me to the heart, and filled me with sad forebodings. I burst
into tears. I hid my face in my hands, and turned towards the evening
breeze, that it might dry my tears in my eyes; but she had seen them.
"Raphael," she resumed with greater tenderness, "no, you will never
forget me. I know it, I feel it; but love is short, and life is slow.
You will live many years beyond me. You will drain all that is sweet,
or powerful, or bitter in the cup that Nature offers to the lips of
man. You will be a man! I know it by your sensibility, which is at once
manly and feminine. You will be a man to the full extent of all the
wretchedness and dignity of that name by which God has called one of
his strangest creatures! In one of your aspirations there is breath for
a thousand lives! You will live with all the energy and in the full
meaning of the word--life! I ..." she stopped for an instant, and
raised her eyes and arms to Heaven as if in thank fulness: "I--I have
lived!--I have lived enough," she resumed in a contented tone, "since I
have inhaled, to bear it forever within me, the spirit of the soul that
I waited for on earth, and which would vivify me even in death, from
whence you once recalled me.... I shall die young, and without regret
now, for I have drained at a single draught the life that you will not
exhaust before your dark hair has become as white as the spray that
dashes over your feet.
"This sky, this lake, these shores, these mountains, have been the
scene of my only real life here below. Swear to me to blend so
completely in your remembrance this sky, this lake, these shores, these
mountains, with my memory, that their image and mine may henceforward
be inseparable for you; that this landscape in your eyes, and I in your
heart, may make but one ... so that," she added, "when you return after
long days, to see once more this lonely spot, to wander beneath these
trees, on the margin of these waves, to listen to the breeze and
murmuring winds, you may see me once more, as living, as present, and
as loving as I am here!..."
She could say no more and burst into tears. Oh, how we wept! how long
we wept! The sound of our stifled sobs mingled with the sobbing of the
water on the sand. Our tears fell trickling in the water at our feet.
After a lapse of fifteen years, I cannot write it without tears, even
now.
O man! fear not for thy affections, and feel no dread lest time should
efface them. There is neither to-day nor yesterday in the powerful
echoes of memory; there is only always. He who no longer feels has
never felt. There are two memories,--the memory of the senses, which
wears out with the senses, and in which perishable things decay; and
the memory of the soul, for which time does not exist, and which lives
over at the same instant every moment of its past and present
existence; it is a faculty of the soul, which, like the soul, enjoys
ubiquity, universality, and immortality of spirit. Fear not, ye who
love! Time has power over hours, none over the soul.