sadly.
When he held out the lump of sugar between his thumb and finger, and
shook it, Stephanie uttered the wild note again, and sprang quickly
towards him; then she stopped short, there was a conflict between
longing for the sweet morsel and instinctive fear of him; she looked at
the sugar, turned her head away, and looked again like an unfortunate
dog forbidden to touch some scrap of food, while his master slowly
recites the greater part of the alphabet until he reaches the letter
that gives permission. At length the animal appetite conquered fear;
Stephanie rushed to Philip, held out a dainty brown hand to pounce upon
the coveted morsel, touched her lover’s fingers, snatched the piece of
sugar, and vanished with it into a thicket. This painful scene was
too much for the colonel; he burst into tears, and took refuge in the
drawing-room.
“Then has love less courage than affection?” M. Fanjat asked him. “I
have hope, Monsieur le Baron. My poor niece was once in a far more
pitiable state than at present.”
“Is it possible?” cried Philip.
“She would not wear clothes,” answered the doctor.
The colonel shuddered, and his face grew pale. To the doctor’s mind this
pallor was an unhealthy symptom; he went over to him and felt his pulse.
M. de Sucy was in a high fever; by dint of persuasion, he succeeded in
putting the patient in bed, and gave him a few drops of laudanum to gain
repose and sleep.
The Baron de Sucy spent nearly a week, in a constant struggle with a
deadly anguish, and before long he had no tears left to shed. He was
often well-nigh heartbroken; he could not grow accustomed to the sight
of the Countess’ madness; but he made terms for himself, as it were, in
this cruel position, and sought alleviations in his pain. His heroism
was boundless. He found courage to overcome Stephanie’s wild shyness
by choosing sweetmeats for her, and devoted all his thoughts to this,
bringing these dainties, and following up the little victories that
he set himself to gain over Stephanie’s instincts (the last gleam
of intelligence in her), until he succeeded to some extent--she grew
_tamer_ than ever before. Every morning the colonel went into the park;
and if, after a long search for the Countess, he could not discover the
tree in which she was rocking herself gently, nor the nook where she
lay crouching at play with some bird, nor the roof where she had perched
herself, he would whistle the well-known air _Partant pour la Syrie_,
which recalled old memories of their love, and Stephanie would run
towards him lightly as a fawn. She saw the colonel so often that she was
no longer afraid of him; before very long she would sit on his knee with
her thin, lithe arms about him. And while thus they sat as lovers love
to do, Philip doled out sweetmeats one by one to the eager Countess.
When they were all finished, the fancy often took Stephanie to search
through her lover’s pockets with a monkey’s quick instinctive dexterity,
till she had assured herself that there was nothing left, and then she
gazed at Philip with vacant eyes; there was no thought, no gratitude in
their clear depths. Then she would play with him. She tried to take off
his boots to see his foot; she tore his gloves to shreds, and put on his
hat; and she would let him pass his hands through her hair, and take her
in his arms, and submit passively to his passionate kisses, and at last,
if he shed tears, she would gaze silently at him.
She quite understood the signal when he whistled _Partant pour la
Syrie_, but he could never succeed in inducing her to pronounce her
own name--_Stephanie_. Philip persevered in his heart-rending task,
sustained by a hope that never left him. If on some bright autumn
morning he saw her sitting quietly on a bench under a poplar tree, grown
brown now as the season wore, the unhappy lover would lie at her feet
and gaze into her eyes as long as she would let him gaze, hoping that
some spark of intelligence might gleam from them. At times he lent
himself to an illusion; he would imagine that he saw the hard,
changeless light in them falter, that there was a new life and softness
in them, and he would cry, “Stephanie! oh, Stephanie! you hear me, you
see me, do you not?”
But for her the sound of his voice was like any other sound, the
stirring of the wind in the trees, or the lowing of the cow on which she
scrambled; and the colonel wrung his hands in a despair that lost none
of its bitterness; nay, time and these vain efforts only added to his
anguish.
One evening, under the quiet sky, in the midst of the silence and peace
of the forest hermitage, M. Fanjat saw from a distance that the Baron
was busy loading a pistol, and knew that the lover had given up all
hope. The blood surged to the old doctor’s heart; and if he overcame the
dizzy sensation that seized on him, it was because he would rather
see his niece live with a disordered brain than lose her for ever. He
hurried to the place.
“What are you doing?” he cried.
“That is for me,” the colonel answered, pointing to a loaded pistol on
the bench, “and this is for her!” he added, as he rammed down the wad
into the pistol that he held in his hands.
The Countess lay stretched out on the ground, playing with the balls.
“Then you do not know that last night, as she slept, she murmured
‘Philip?’” said the doctor quietly, dissembling his alarm.
“She called my name?” cried the Baron, letting his weapon fall.
Stephanie picked it up, but he snatched it out of her hands, caught the
other pistol from the bench, and fled.
“Poor little one!” exclaimed the doctor, rejoicing that his stratagem
had succeeded so well. He held her tightly to his heart as he went
on. “He would have killed you, selfish that he is! He wants you to die
because he is unhappy. He cannot learn to love you for your own sake,
little one! We forgive him, do we not? He is senseless; you are only
mad. Never mind; God alone shall take you to Himself. We look upon
you as unhappy because you no longer share our miseries, fools that we
are!... Why, she is happy,” he said, taking her on his knee; “nothing
troubles her; she lives like the birds, like the deer--”
Stephanie sprang upon a young blackbird that was hopping about, caught
it with a little shriek of glee, twisted its neck, looked at the dead
bird, and dropped it at the foot of a tree without giving it another
thought.
The next morning at daybreak the colonel went out into the garden to
look for Stephanie; hope was very strong in him. He did not see her,
and whistled; and when she came, he took her arm, and for the first time
they walked together along an alley beneath the trees, while the fresh
morning wind shook down the dead leaves about them. The colonel sat
down, and Stephanie, of her own accord, lit upon his knee. Philip
trembled with gladness.
“Love!” he cried, covering her hands with passionate kisses, “I am
Philip...”
She looked curiously at him.
“Come close,” he added, as he held her tightly. “Do you feel the beating
of my heart? It has beat for you, for you only. I love you always.
Philip is not dead. He is here. You are sitting on his knee. You are my
Stephanie, I am your Philip.”
“Farewell!” she said, “farewell!”
The colonel shivered. He thought that some vibration of his highly
wrought feeling had surely reached his beloved; that the heart-rending
cry, drawn from him by hope, the utmost effort of a love that must last
for ever, of passion in its ecstasy, striving to reach the soul of the
woman he loved, must awaken her.
“Oh, Stephanie! we shall be happy yet!”
A cry of satisfaction broke from her, a dim light of intelligence
gleamed in her eyes.
“She knows me!... Stephanie!...”
The colonel felt his heart swell, and tears gathered under his eyelids.
But all at once the Countess held up a bit of sugar for him to see; she
had discovered it by searching diligently for it while he spoke. What he
had mistaken for a human thought was a degree of reason required for a
monkey’s mischievous trick!
Philip fainted. M. Fanjat found the Countess sitting on his prostrate
body. She was nibbling her bit of sugar, giving expression to her
enjoyment by little grimaces and gestures that would have been thought
clever in a woman in full possession of her senses if she tried to mimic
her paroquet or her cat.
“Oh, my friend!” cried Philip, when he came to himself. “This is
like death every moment of the day! I love her too much! I could bear
anything if only through her madness she had kept some little trace of
womanhood. But, day after day, to see her like a wild animal, not even a
sense of modesty left, to see her--”
“So you must have a theatrical madness, must you!” said the doctor
sharply, “and your prejudices are stronger than your lover’s devotion?
What, monsieur! I resign to you the sad pleasure of giving my niece her
food, and the enjoyment of her playtime; I have kept for myself nothing
but the most burdensome cares. I watch over her while you are asleep,
I--Go, monsieur, and give up the task. Leave this dreary hermitage; I
can live with my little darling; I understand her disease; I study her
movements; I know her secrets. Some day you shall thank me.”
The colonel left the Minorite convent, that he was destined to see only
once again. The doctor was alarmed by the effect that his words made
upon his guest; his niece’s lover became as dear to him as his niece. If
either of them deserved to be pitied, that one was certainly Philip; did
he not bear alone the burden of an appalling sorrow?
The doctor made inquiries, and learned that the hapless colonel had
retired to a country house of his near Saint-Germain. A dream had
suggested to him a plan for restoring the Countess to reason, and the
doctor did not know that he was spending the rest of the autumn in
carrying out a vast scheme. A small stream ran through his park, and in
winter time flooded a low-lying land, something like the plain on the
eastern side of the Beresina. The village of Satout, on the slope of
a ridge above it, bounded the horizon of a picture of desolation,
something as Studzianka lay on the heights that shut in the swamp of the
Beresina. The colonel set laborers to work to make a channel to resemble
the greedy river that had swallowed up the treasures of France and
Napoleon’s army. By the help of his memories, Philip reconstructed on
his own lands the bank where General Eble had built his bridges. He
drove in piles, and then set fire to them, so as to reproduce the
charred and blackened balks of timber that on either side of the river
told the stragglers that their retreat to France had been cut off. He
had materials collected like the fragments out of which his comrades in
misfortune had made the raft; his park was laid waste to complete
the illusion on which his last hopes were founded. He ordered ragged
uniforms and clothing for several hundred peasants. Huts and bivouacs
and batteries were raised and burned down. In short, he omitted
no device that could reproduce that most hideous of all scenes. He
succeeded. When, in the earliest days of December, snow covered the
earth with a thick white mantle, it seemed to him that he saw the
Beresina itself. The mimic Russia was so startlingly real, that several
of his old comrades recognized the scene of their past sufferings. M.
de Sucy kept the secret of the drama to be enacted with this tragical
background, but it was looked upon as a mad freak in several circles of
society in Paris.
In the early days of the month of January 1820, the colonel drove over
to the Forest of l’Isle-Adam in a carriage like the one in which M.
and Mme. de Vandieres had driven from Moscow to Studzianka. The horses
closely resembled that other pair that he had risked his life to
bring from the Russian lines. He himself wore the grotesque and soiled
clothes, accoutrements, and cap that he had worn on the 29th of November
1812. He had even allowed his hair and beard to grow, and neglected his
appearance, that no detail might be lacking to recall the scene in all
its horror.
“I guessed what you meant to do,” cried M. Fanjat, when he saw the
colonel dismount. “If you mean your plan to succeed, do not let her
see you in that carriage. This evening I will give my niece a little
laudanum, and while she sleeps, we will dress her in such clothes as
she wore at Studzianka, and put her in your traveling-carriage. I will
follow you in a berline.”
Soon after two o’clock in the morning, the young Countess was lifted
into the carriage, laid on the cushions, and wrapped in a coarse
blanket. A few peasants held torches while this strange elopement was
arranged.
A sudden cry rang through the silence of night, and Philip and the
doctor, turning, saw Genevieve. She had come out half-dressed from the
low room where she slept.
“Farewell, farewell; it is all over, farewell!” she called, crying
bitterly.
“Why, Genevieve, what is it?” asked M. Fanjat.
Genevieve shook her head despairingly, raised her arm to heaven, looked
at the carriage, uttered a long snarling sound, and with evident signs
of profound terror, slunk in again.
“‘Tis a good omen,” cried the colonel. “The girl is sorry to lose her
companion. Very likely she sees that Stephanie is about to recover her
reason.”
“God grant it may be so!” answered M. Fanjat, who seemed to be affected
by this incident. Since insanity had interested him, he had known
several cases in which a spirit of prophecy and the gift of second
sight had been accorded to a disordered brain--two faculties which many
travelers tell us are also found among savage tribes.
So it happened that, as the colonel had foreseen and arranged, Stephanie
traveled across the mimic Beresina about nine o’clock in the morning,
and was awakened by an explosion of rockets about a hundred paces from
the scene of action. It was a signal. Hundreds of peasants raised a
terrible clamor, like the despairing shouts that startled the Russians
when twenty thousand stragglers learned that by their own fault they
were delivered over to death or to slavery.
When the Countess heard the report and the cries that followed, she
sprang out of the carriage, and rushed in frenzied anguish over the
snow-covered plain; she saw the burned bivouacs and the fatal raft about
to be launched on a frozen Beresina. She saw Major Philip brandishing
his sabre among the crowd. The cry that broke from Mme. de Vandieres
made the blood run cold in the veins of all who heard it. She stood face
to face with the colonel, who watched her with a beating heart. At first
she stared blankly at the strange scene about her, then she reflected.
For an instant, brief as a lightning flash, there was the same quick
gaze and total lack of comprehension that we see in the bright eyes of a
bird; then she passed her hand across her forehead with the intelligent
expression of a thinking being; she looked round on the memories that
had taken substantial form, into the past life that had been transported
into her present; she turned her face to Philip--and saw him! An awed
silence fell upon the crowd. The colonel breathed hard, but dared
not speak; tears filled the doctor’s eyes. A faint color overspread
Stephanie’s beautiful face, deepening slowly, till at last she glowed
like a girl radiant with youth. Still the bright flush grew. Life and
joy, kindled within her at the blaze of intelligence, swept through her
like leaping flames. A convulsive tremor ran from her feet to her heart.
But all these tokens, which flashed on the sight in a moment, gathered
and gained consistence, as it were, when Stephanie’s eyes gleamed with
heavenly radiance, the light of a soul within. She lived, she thought!
She shuddered--was it with fear? God Himself unloosed a second time
the tongue that had been bound by death, and set His fire anew in the
extinguished soul. The electric torrent of the human will vivified the
body whence it had so long been absent.
“Stephanie!” the colonel cried.
“Oh! it is Philip!” said the poor Countess.
She fled to the trembling arms held out towards her, and the embrace
of the two lovers frightened those who beheld it. Stephanie burst into
tears.
Suddenly the tears ceased to flow; she lay in his arms a dead weight, as
if stricken by a thunderbolt, and said faintly:
“Farewell, Philip!... I love you.... farewell!”
“She is dead!” cried the colonel, unclasping his arms.
The old doctor received the lifeless body of his niece in his arms as a
young man might have done; he carried her to a stack of wood and set
her down. He looked at her face, and laid a feeble hand, tremulous with
agitation, upon her heart--it beat no longer.
“Can it really be so?” he said, looking from the colonel, who stood
there motionless, to Stephanie’s face. Death had invested it with
a radiant beauty, a transient aureole, the pledge, it may be, of a
glorious life to come.
“Yes, she is dead.”
“Oh, but that smile!” cried Philip; “only see that smile. Is it
possible?”
“She has grown cold already,” answered M. Fanjat.
M. de Sucy made a few strides to tear himself from the sight; then he
stopped, and whistled the air that the mad Stephanie had understood;
and when he saw that she did not rise and hasten to him, he walked away,
staggering like a drunken man, still whistling, but he did not turn
again.
In society General de Sucy is looked upon as very agreeable, and
above all things, as very lively and amusing. Not very long ago a lady
complimented him upon his good humor and equable temper.
“Ah! madame,” he answered, “I pay very dearly for my merriment in the
evening if I am alone.”
“Then, you are never alone, I suppose.”
“No,” he answered, smiling.
If a keen observer of human nature could have seen the look that Sucy’s
face wore at that moment, he would, without doubt, have shuddered.
“Why do you not marry?” the lady asked (she had several daughters of her
own at a boarding-school). “You are wealthy; you belong to an old and
noble house; you are clever; you have a future before you; everything
smiles upon you.”
“Yes,” he answered; “one smile is killing me--”
On the morrow the lady heard with amazement that M. de Sucy had shot
himself through the head that night.
The fashionable world discussed the extraordinary news in divers
ways, and each had a theory to account for it; play, love, ambition,
irregularities in private life, according to the taste of the speaker,
explained the last act of the tragedy begun in 1812. Two men alone, a
magistrate and an old doctor, knew that Monsieur le Comte de Sucy was
one of those souls unhappy in the strength God gives to them to enable
them to triumph daily in a ghastly struggle with a mysterious horror. If
for a minute God withdraws His sustaining hand, they succumb.
PARIS, March 1830.