My sweet, tender Renee, you will have learned from the papers the
terrible calamity which has overwhelmed me. I have not been able to
write you even a word. For twenty days I never left his bedside; I
received his last breath and closed his eyes; I kept holy watch over him
with the priests and repeated the prayers for the dead. The cruel pangs
I suffered were accepted by me as a rightful punishment; and yet, when
I saw on his calm lips the smile which was his last farewell to me, how
was it possible to believe that I had caused his death!
Be it so or not, he is gone, and I am left. To you, who have known us
both so well, what more need I say? These words contain all. Oh! I would
give my share of Heaven to hear the flattering tale that my prayers have
power to bring him back to life! To see him again, to have him once more
mine, were it only for a second, would mean that I could draw breath
again without mortal agony. Will you not come soon and soothe me with
such promises? Is not your love strong enough to deceive me?
But stay! it was you who told me beforehand that he would suffer through
me. Was it so indeed? Yes, it is true, I had no right to his love. Like
a thief, I took what was not mine, and my frenzied grasp has crushed
the life out of my bliss. The madness is over now, but I feel that I am
alone. Merciful God! what torture of the damned can exceed the misery in
that word?
When they took him away from me, I lay down on the same bed and hoped to
die. There was but a door between us, and it seemed to me I had strength
to force it! But, alas! I was too young for death; and after forty days,
during which, with cruel care and all the sorry inventions of medical
science, they slowly nursed me back to life, I find myself in the
country, seated by my window, surrounded with lovely flowers, which he
made to bloom for me, gazing on the same splendid view over which
his eyes have so often wandered, and which he was so proud to have
discovered, since it gave me pleasure. Ah! dear Renee, no words can tell
how new surroundings hurt when the heart is dead. I shiver at the sight
of the moist earth in my garden, for the earth is a vast tomb, and it
is almost as though I walked on _him_! When I first went out, I trembled
with fear and could not move. It was so sad to see his flowers, and he
not there!
My father and mother are in Spain. You know what my brothers are, and
you yourself are detained in the country. But you need not be uneasy
about me; two angels of mercy flew to my side. The Duc and the Duchesse
de Soria hastened to their brother in his illness, and have been
everything that heart could wish. The last few nights before the end
found the three of us gathered, in calm and wordless grief, round the
bed where this great man was breathing his last, a man among a thousand,
rare in any age, head and shoulders above the rest of us in everything.
The patient resignation of my Felipe was angelic. The sight of his
brother and Marie gave him a moment's pleasure and easing of his pain.
"Darling," he said to me with the simple frankness which never deserted
him, "I had almost gone from life without leaving to Fernand the Barony
of Macumer; I must make a new will. My brother will forgive me; he knows
what it is to love!"
I owe my life to the care of my brother-in-law and his wife; they want
to carry me off to Spain!
Ah! Renee, to no one but you can I speak freely of my grief. A sense of
my own faults weighs me to the ground, and there is a bitter solace in
pouring them out to you, poor, unheeded Cassandra. The exactions, the
preposterous jealousy, the nagging unrest of my passion wore him to
death. My love was the more fraught with danger for him because we had
both the same exquisitely sensitive nature, we spoke the same language,
nothing was lost on him, and often the mocking shaft, so carelessly
discharged, went straight to his heart. You can have no idea of the
point to which he carried submissiveness. I had only to tell him to go
and leave me alone, and the caprice, however wounding to him, would be
obeyed without a murmur. His last breath was spent in blessing me and in
repeating that a single morning alone with me was more precious to him
than a lifetime spent with another woman, were she even the Marie of his
youth. My tears fall as I write the words.
This is the manner of my life now. I rise at midday and go to bed
at seven; I linger absurdly long over meals; I saunter about slowly,
standing motionless, an hour at a time, before a single plant; I gaze
into the leafy trees; I take a sober and serious interest in mere
nothings; I long for shade, silence, and night; in a word, I fight
through each hour as it comes, and take a gloomy pleasure in adding it
to the heap of the vanquished. My peaceful park gives me all the company
I care for; everything there is full of glorious images of my vanished
joy, invisible for others but eloquent to me.
"I cannot away with you Spaniards!" I exclaimed one morning, as my
sister-in-law flung herself on my neck. "You have some nobility that we
lack."
Ah! Renee, if I still live, it is doubtless because Heaven tempers the
sense of affliction to the strength of those who have to bear it. Only a
woman can know what it is to lose a love which sprang from the heart and
was genuine throughout, a passion which was not ephemeral, and satisfied
at once the spirit and the flesh. How rare it is to find a man so gifted
that to worship him brings no sense of degradation! If such supreme
fortune befall us once, we cannot hope for it a second time. Men of true
greatness, whose strength and worth are veiled by poetic grace, and who
charm by some high spiritual power, men made to be adored, beware of
love! Love will ruin you, and ruin the woman of your heart. This is the
burden of my cry as I pace my woodland walks.
And he has left me no child! That love so rich in smiles, which rained
perpetual flowers and joy, has left no fruit. I am a thing accursed. Can
it be that, even as the two extremes of polar ice and torrid sand
are alike intolerant of life, so the very purity and vehemence of a
single-hearted passion render it barren as hate? Is it only a marriage
of reason, such as yours, which is blessed with a family? Can Heaven be
jealous of our passions? There are wild words.
You are, I believe, the one person whose company I could endure. Come to
me, then; none but Renee should be with Louise in her sombre garb.
What a day when I first put on my widow's bonnet! When I saw myself all
arrayed in black, I fell back on a seat and wept till night came; and I
weep again as I recall that moment of anguish.
Good-bye. Writing tires me; thoughts crowd fast, but I have no heart
to put them into words. Bring your children; you can nurse baby here
without making me jealous; all that is gone, _he_ is not here, and I
shall be very glad to see my godson. Felipe used to wish for a child
like little Armand. Come, then, come and help me to bear my woe.