“coquettish,” if the word were not too heavy. By justifying herself and
love, she was stimulating every sentiment in the man before her; nay,
more, the higher she set the goal, the more conspicuous it grew. At
last, when her eyes had lost the too eloquent expression given to them
by painful memories, she let them fall on Gaston.
“You acknowledge, do you not, that I am bound to lead a solitary,
self-contained life?” she said quietly.
So sublime was she in her reasoning and her madness, that M. de Nueil
felt a wild longing to throw himself at her feet; but he was afraid of
making himself ridiculous, so he held his enthusiasm and his thoughts in
check. He was afraid, too, that he might totally fail to express them,
and in no less terror of some awful rejection on her part, or of her
mockery, an apprehension which strikes like ice to the most fervid soul.
The revulsion which led him to crush down every feeling as it sprang
up in his heart cost him the intense pain that diffident and ambitious
natures experience in the frequent crises when they are compelled
to stifle their longings. And yet, in spite of himself, he broke the
silence to say in a faltering voice:
“Madame, permit me to give way to one of the strongest emotions of my
life, and own to all that you have made me feel. You set the heart in
me swelling high! I feel within me a longing to make you forget your
mortifications, to devote my life to this, to give you love for all who
ever have given you wounds or hate. But this is a very sudden outpouring
of the heart, nothing can justify it to-day, and I ought not----”
“Enough, monsieur,” said Mme. de Beauseant; “we have both of us gone too
far. By giving you the sad reasons for a refusal which I am compelled to
give, I meant to soften it and not to elicit homage. Coquetry only suits
a happy woman. Believe me, we must remain strangers to each other. At a
later day you will know that ties which must inevitably be broken ought
not to be formed at all.”
She sighed lightly, and her brows contracted, but almost immediately
grew clear again.
“How painful it is for a woman to be powerless to follow the man she
loves through all the phases of his life! And if that man loves her
truly, his heart must surely vibrate with pain to the deep trouble in
hers. Are they not twice unhappy?”
There was a short pause. Then she rose smiling.
“You little suspected, when you came to Courcelles, that you were to
hear a sermon, did you?”
Gaston felt even further than at first from this extraordinary woman.
Was the charm of that delightful hour due after all to the coquetry of
the mistress of the house? She had been anxious to display her wit. He
bowed stiffly to the Vicomtesse, and went away in desperation.
On the way home he tried to detect the real character of a creature
supple and hard as a steel spring; but he had seen her pass through so
many phases, that he could not make up his mind about her. The tones
of her voice, too, were ringing in his ears; her gestures, the little
movements of her head, and the varying expression of her eyes grew
more gracious in memory, more fascinating as he thought of them.
The Vicomtesse’s beauty shone out again for him in the darkness; his
reviving impressions called up yet others, and he was enthralled anew by
womanly charm and wit, which at first he had not perceived. He fell to
wandering musings, in which the most lucid thoughts grow refractory and
flatly contradict each other, and the soul passes through a brief
frenzy fit. Youth only can understand all that lies in the dithyrambic
outpourings of youth when, after a stormy siege, of the most frantic
folly and coolest common-sense, the heart finally yields to the assault
of the latest comer, be it hope, or despair, as some mysterious power
determines.
At three-and-twenty, diffidence nearly always rules a man’s conduct; he
is perplexed with a young girl’s shyness, a girl’s trouble; he is afraid
lest he should express his love ill, sees nothing but difficulties, and
takes alarm at them; he would be bolder if he loved less, for he has no
confidence in himself, and with a growing sense of the cost of happiness
comes a conviction that the woman he loves cannot easily be won;
perhaps, too, he is giving himself up too entirely to his own pleasure,
and fears that he can give none; and when, for his misfortune, his idol
inspires him with awe, he worships in secret and afar, and unless his
love is guessed, it dies away. Then it often happens that one of these
dead early loves lingers on, bright with illusions in many a young
heart. What man is there but keeps within him these virgin memories that
grow fairer every time they rise before him, memories that hold up to
him the ideal of perfect bliss? Such recollections are like children who
die in the flower of childhood, before their parents have known anything
of them but their smiles.
So M. de Nueil came home from Courcelles, the victim of a mood fraught
with desperate resolutions. Even now he felt that Mme. de Beauseant
was one of the conditions of his existence, and that death would be
preferable to life without her. He was still young enough to feel
the tyrannous fascination which fully-developed womanhood exerts over
immature and impassioned natures; and, consequently, he was to spend one
of those stormy nights when a young man’s thoughts travel from happiness
to suicide and back again--nights in which youth rushes through a
lifetime of bliss and falls asleep from sheer exhaustion. Fateful
nights are they, and the worst misfortune that can happen is to awake a
philosopher afterwards. M. de Nueil was far too deeply in love to
sleep; he rose and betook to inditing letters, but none of them were
satisfactory, and he burned them all.
The next day he went to Courcelles to make the circuit of her garden
walls, but he waited till nightfall; he was afraid that she might
see him. The instinct that led him to act in this way arose out of so
obscure a mood of the soul, that none but a young man, or a man in like
case, can fully understand its mute ecstasies and its vagaries, matter
to set those people who are lucky enough to see life only in its
matter-of-fact aspect shrugging their shoulders. After painful
hesitation, Gaston wrote to Mme. de Beauseant. Here is the letter, which
may serve as a sample of the epistolary style peculiar to lovers, a
performance which, like the drawings prepared with great secrecy by
children for the birthdays of father or mother, is found insufferable by
every mortal except the recipients:--
“MADAME,--Your power over my heart, my soul, myself, is so great
that my fate depends wholly upon you to-day. Do not throw this
letter into the fire; be so kind as to read it through. Perhaps
you may pardon the opening sentence when you see that it is no
commonplace, selfish declaration, but that it expresses a simple
fact. Perhaps you may feel moved, because I ask for so little, by
the submission of one who feels himself so much beneath you, by
the influence that your decision will exercise upon my life. At my
age, madame, I only know how to love, I am utterly ignorant of
ways of attracting and winning a woman’s love, but in my own heart
I know raptures of adoration of her. I am irresistibly drawn to
you by the great happiness that I feel through you; my thoughts
turn to you with the selfish instinct which bids us draw nearer to
the fire of life when we find it. I do not imagine that I am
worthy of you; it seems impossible that I, young, ignorant, and
shy, could bring you one-thousandth part of the happiness that I
drink in at the sound of your voice and the sight of you. For me
you are the only woman in the world. I cannot imagine life without
you, so I have made up my mind to leave France, and to risk my
life till I lose it in some desperate enterprise, in the Indies,
in Africa, I care not where. How can I quell a love that knows no
limits save by opposing to it something as infinite? Yet, if you
will allow me to hope, not to be yours, but to win your
friendship, I will stay. Let me come, not so very often, if you
require it, to spend a few such hours with you as those stolen
hours of yesterday. The keen delight of that brief happiness to be
cut short at the least over-ardent word from me, will suffice to
enable me to endure the boiling torrent in my veins. Have I
presumed too much upon your generosity by this entreaty to suffer
an intercourse in which all the gain is mine alone? You could find
ways of showing the world, to which you sacrifice so much, that I
am nothing to you; you are so clever and so proud! What have you
to fear? If I could only lay bare my heart to you at this moment,
to convince you that it is with no lurking afterthought that I
make this humble request! Should I have told you that my love was
boundless, while I prayed you to grant me friendship, if I had any
hope of your sharing this feeling in the depths of my soul? No,
while I am with you, I will be whatever you will, if only I may be
with you. If you refuse (as you have the power to refuse), I will
not utter one murmur, I will go. And if, at a later day, any other
woman should enter into my life, you will have proof that you were
right; but if I am faithful till death, you may feel some regret
perhaps. The hope of causing you a regret will soothe my agony,
and that thought shall be the sole revenge of a slighted
heart....”
Only those who have passed through all the exceeding tribulations of
youth, who have seized on all the chimeras with two white pinions, the
nightmare fancies at the disposal of a fervid imagination, can realize
the horrors that seized upon Gaston de Nueil when he had reason to
suppose that his ultimatum was in Mme. de Beauseant’s hands. He saw the
Vicomtesse, wholly untouched, laughing at his letter and his love, as
those can laugh who have ceased to believe in love. He could have wished
to have his letter back again. It was an absurd letter. There were a
thousand and one things, now that he came to think of it, that he might
have said, things infinitely better and more moving than those stilted
phrases of his, those accursed, sophisticated, pretentious, fine-spun
phrases, though, luckily, the punctuation had been pretty bad and the
lines shockingly crooked. He tried not to think, not to feel; but he
felt and thought, and was wretched. If he had been thirty years old, he
might have got drunk, but the innocence of three-and-twenty knew
nothing of the resources of opium nor of the expedients of advanced
civilization. Nor had he at hand one of those good friends of the
Parisian pattern who understand so well how to say _Poete, non dolet!_
by producing a bottle of champagne, or alleviate the agony of suspense
by carrying you off somewhere to make a night of it. Capital fellows
are they, always in low water when you are in funds, always off to some
watering-place when you go to look them up, always with some bad bargain
in horse-flesh to sell you; it is true, that when you want to borrow of
them, they have always just lost their last louis at play; but in all
other respects they are the best fellows on earth, always ready to
embark with you on one of the steep down-grades where you lose your
time, your soul, and your life!
At length M. de Nueil received a missive through the instrumentality of
Jacques, a letter that bore the arms of Burgundy on the scented seal, a
letter written on vellum notepaper.
He rushed away at once to lock himself in, and read and re-read _her_
letter:--
“You are punishing me very severely, monsieur, both for the
friendliness of my effort to spare you a rebuff, and for the
attraction which intellect always has for me. I put confidence in
the generosity of youth, and you have disappointed me. And yet, if
I did not speak unreservedly (which would have been perfectly
ridiculous), at any rate I spoke frankly of my position, so that
you might imagine that I was not to be touched by a young soul. My
distress is the keener for my interest in you. I am naturally
tender-hearted and kindly, but circumstances force me to act
unkindly. Another woman would have flung your letter, unread, into
the fire; I read it, and I am answering it. My answer will make it
clear to you that while I am not untouched by the expression of
this feeling which I have inspired, albeit unconsciously, I am
still far from sharing it, and the step which I am about to take
will show you still more plainly that I mean what I say. I wish
besides, to use, for your welfare, that authority, as it were,
which you give me over your life; and I desire to exercise it this
once to draw aside the veil from your eyes.
“I am nearly thirty years old, monsieur; you are barely
two-and-twenty. You yourself cannot know what your thoughts will
be at my age. The vows that you make so lightly to-day may seem a
very heavy burden to you then. I am quite willing to believe that
at this moment you would give me your whole life without a regret,
you would even be ready to die for a little brief happiness; but
at the age of thirty experience will take from you the very power
of making daily sacrifices for my sake, and I myself should feel
deeply humiliated if I accepted them. A day would come when
everything, even Nature, would bid you leave me, and I have
already told you that death is preferable to desertion. Misfortune
has taught me to calculate; as you see, I am arguing perfectly
dispassionately. You force me to tell you that I have no love for
you; I ought not to love, I cannot, and I will not. It is too late
to yield, as women yield, to a blind unreasoning impulse of the
heart, too late to be the mistress whom you seek. My consolations
spring from God, not from earth. Ah, and besides, with the
melancholy insight of disappointed love, I read hearts too clearly
to accept your proffered friendship. It is only instinct. I
forgive the boyish ruse, for which you are not responsible as yet.
In the name of this passing fancy of yours, for the sake of your
career and my own peace of mind, I bid you stay in your own
country; you must not spoil a fair and honorable life for an
illusion which, by its very nature, cannot last. At a later day,
when you have accomplished your real destiny, in the fully
developed manhood that awaits you, you will appreciate this answer
of mine, though to-day it may be that you blame its hardness. You
will turn with pleasure to an old woman whose friendship will
certainly be sweet and precious to you then; a friendship untried
by the extremes of passion and the disenchanting processes of
life; a friendship which noble thoughts and thoughts of religion
will keep pure and sacred. Farewell; do my bidding with the
thought that your success will bring a gleam of pleasure into my
solitude, and only think of me as we think of absent friends.”
Gaston de Nueil read the letter, and wrote the following lines:--
“MADAME,--If I could cease to love you, to take the chances of
becoming an ordinary man which you hold out to me, you must admit
that I should thoroughly deserve my fate. No, I shall not do as
you bid me; the oath of fidelity which I swear to you shall only
be absolved by death. Ah! take my life, unless indeed you do not
fear to carry a remorse all through your own----”
When the man returned from his errand, M. de Nueil asked him with whom
he left the note?
“I gave it to Mme. la Vicomtesse herself, sir; she was in her carriage
and just about to start.”
“For the town?”
“I don’t think so, sir. Mme. la Vicomtesse had post-horses.”
“Ah! then she is going away,” said the Baron.
“Yes, sir,” the man answered.
Gaston de Nueil at once prepared to follow Mme. de Beauseant. She led
the way as far as Geneva, without a suspicion that he followed. And
he? Amid the many thoughts that assailed him during that journey, one
all-absorbing problem filled his mind--“Why did she go away?” Theories
grew thickly on such ground for supposition, and naturally he inclined
to the one that flattered his hopes--“If the Vicomtesse cares for me,
a clever woman would, of course, choose Switzerland, where nobody knows
either of us, in preference to France, where she would find censorious
critics.”
An impassioned lover of a certain stamp would not feel attracted to a
woman clever enough to choose her own ground; such women are too clever.
However, there is nothing to prove that there was any truth in Gaston’s
supposition.
The Vicomtesse took a small house by the side of the lake. As soon as
she was installed in it, Gaston came one summer evening in the twilight.
Jacques, that flunkey in grain, showed no sign of surprise, and
announced _M. le Baron de Nueil_ like a discreet domestic well
acquainted with good society. At the sound of the name, at the sight
of its owner, Mme. de Beauseant let her book fall from her hands; her
surprise gave him time to come close to her, and to say in tones that
sounded like music in her ears:
“What a joy it was to me to take the horses that brought you on this
journey!”
To have the inmost desires of the heart so fulfilled! Where is the woman
who could resist such happiness as this? An Italian woman, one of those
divine creatures who, psychologically, are as far removed from the
Parisian as if they lived at the Antipodes, a being who would be
regarded as profoundly immoral on this side of the Alps, an Italian (to
resume) made the following comment on some French novels which she had
been reading. “I cannot see,” she remarked, “why these poor lovers take
such a time over coming to an arrangement which ought to be the affair
of a single morning.” Why should not the novelist take a hint from this
worthy lady, and refrain from exhausting the theme and the reader?
Some few passages of coquetry it would certainly be pleasant to give in
outline; the story of Mme. de Beauseant’s demurs and sweet delayings,
that, like the vestal virgins of antiquity, she might fall gracefully,
and by lingering over the innocent raptures of first love draw from it
its utmost strength and sweetness. M. de Nueil was at an age when a
man is the dupe of these caprices, of the fence which women delight to
prolong; either to dictate their own terms, or to enjoy the sense of
their power yet longer, knowing instinctively as they do that it must
soon grow less. But, after all, these little boudoir protocols, less
numerous than those of the Congress of London, are too small to be worth
mention in the history of this passion.
For three years Mme. de Beauseant and M. de Nueil lived in the villa on
the lake of Geneva. They lived quite alone, received no visitors, caused
no talk, rose late, went out together upon the lake, knew, in short,
the happiness of which we all of us dream. It was a simple little house,
with green shutters, and broad balconies shaded with awnings, a house
contrived of set purpose for lovers, with its white couches, soundless
carpets, and fresh hangings, everything within it reflecting their
joy. Every window looked out on some new view of the lake; in the far
distance lay the mountains, fantastic visions of changing color and
evanescent cloud; above them spread the sunny sky, before them stretched
the broad sheet of water, never the same in its fitful changes. All
their surroundings seemed to dream for them, all things smiled upon
them.
Then weighty matters recalled M. de Nueil to France. His father and
brother died, and he was obliged to leave Geneva. The lovers bought the
house; and if they could have had their way, they would have removed the
hills piecemeal, drawn off the lake with a siphon, and taken everything
away with them.
Mme. de Beauseant followed M. de Nueil. She realized her property, and
bought a considerable estate near Manerville, adjoining Gaston’s
lands, and here they lived together; Gaston very graciously giving
up Manerville to his mother for the present in consideration of the
bachelor freedom in which she left him.
Mme. de Beauseant’s estate was close to a little town in one of the
most picturesque spots in the valley of the Auge. Here the lovers raised
barriers between themselves and social intercourse, barriers which no
creature could overleap, and here the happy days of Switzerland were
lived over again. For nine whole years they knew happiness which it
serves no purpose to describe; happiness which may be divined from the
outcome of the story by those whose souls can comprehend poetry and
prayer in their infinite manifestations.
All this time Mme. de Beauseant’s husband, the present Marquis (his
father and elder brother having died), enjoyed the soundest health.
There is no better aid to life than a certain knowledge that our demise
would confer a benefit on some fellow-creature. M. de Beauseant was
one of those ironical and wayward beings who, like holders of
life-annuities, wake with an additional sense of relish every morning to
a consciousness of good health. For the rest, he was a man of the world,
somewhat methodical and ceremonious, and a calculator of consequences,
who could make a declaration of love as quietly as a lackey announces
that “Madame is served.”
This brief biographical notice of his lordship the Marquis de Beauseant
is given to explain the reasons why it was impossible for the Marquise
to marry M. de Nueil.
So, after a nine years’ lease of happiness, the sweetest agreement to
which a woman ever put her hand, M. de Nueil and Mme. de Beauseant
were still in a position quite as natural and quite as false as at the
beginning of their adventure. And yet they had reached a fatal crisis,
which may be stated as clearly as any problem in mathematics.
Mme. la Comtesse de Nueil, Gaston’s mother, a strait-laced and virtuous
person, who had made the late Baron happy in strictly legal fashion
would never consent to meet Mme. de Beauseant. Mme. de Beauseant quite
understood that the worthy dowager must of necessity be her enemy, and
that she would try to draw Gaston from his unhallowed and immoral way of
life. The Marquise de Beauseant would willingly have sold her property
and gone back to Geneva, but she could not bring herself to do it; it
would mean that she distrusted M. de Nueil. Moreover, he had taken
a great fancy to this very Valleroy estate, where he was making
plantations and improvements. She would not deprive him of a piece of
pleasurable routine-work, such as women always wish for their husbands,
and even for their lovers.
A Mlle. de la Rodiere, twenty-two years of age, an heiress with
a rent-roll of forty thousand livres, had come to live in the
neighborhood. Gaston always met her at Manerville whenever he was
obliged to go thither. These various personages being to each other as
the terms of a proportion sum, the following letter will throw light on
the appalling problem which Mme. de Beauseant had been trying for the
past month to solve:--