It was exactly two years since Daniel and Henrietta had been parted
by the foulest treachery,--two years since that fatal evening when the
stupidly ironical voice of Count Ville-Handry had suddenly made itself
heard near them under the old trees of the garden of the palace.
What had not happened since then? What unheard-of, most improbable
events; what trials, what tribulations, what sufferings! They had
endured all that the human heart can endure. There was not a day, so to
say, in these two years, that had not brought them its share of grief
and sorrow. How often both of them had despaired of the future! How many
times they had sighed for death!
And yet, after all these storms, here they were reunited once more, in
unspeakable happiness, forgetting every thing,--their enemies and the
whole world, the anxieties of the past, and the uncertainty of the
future.
They remained thus for a long time, holding each other closely, overcome
with happiness, unable, as yet, to believe in the reality for which they
had sighed so long, unable to utter a word, laughing and weeping in one
breath.
Now and then they would move apart a little, throwing back the head in
order the better to look at each other; then swiftly they would fold
each other again closely in their arms, as if they were afraid they
might be separated anew.
“How they love each other!” whispered Mrs. Bertolle in her brother’s
ear,--“the poor young people!”
And big tears rolled down her cheeks, while the old dealer, not less
touched, but showing his emotion differently, closed his hands fiercely,
and said,--
“All right, all right! They will have to pay for everything.”
Daniel, in the meantime, was recovering himself gradually; and reason
once more got the better of his feelings. He led Henrietta to an arm-
chair at the corner of the fireplace, and sitting down in front of her,
after having taken her hands in his own, he asked her to give him a
faithful account of the two terrible years that had just come to an end.
She had to tell him everything,--her humiliations in her father’s house,
the insults she had endured, the wicked slanders by which her honor had
been tainted, the incomprehensible blindness of the count, the surly
provocations of her step-mother, the horrible attentions of Sir Thorn;
in fine, the whole abominable plot which had been formed, as she found
out too late, for the purpose of driving her to seek safety in flight,
and to give herself up to Maxime de Brevan.
Trembling with rage, livid, his eyes bloodshot, Daniel suddenly let go
Henrietta’s hands, and exclaimed in a half-smothered voice,--
“Ah, Henrietta! your father deserved--Wretched old man! to abandon his
child to the mercy of such miserable wretches!”