Of Long Felicity, Brief Word
“How many years, dear heart, since we made that winter journey, thou and
I, from Jemseg to Quebec, through the illimitable snows?”
“Ten!” answers Yvonne; and the great eyes which she lifts from her
writing and flashes gayly upon me grow tender with sweet remembrance.
During those ten years the destinies of thrones have shifted strangely
in the kaleidoscope of fate. Empires have changed hands. New France has
been erased from the New World. Louisbourg has been levelled to a sheep
pasture. Quebec has proved no more impregnable. The flag of England
flies over Canada. My uncle, the Sieur de Briart, sleeps in a glorious
grave, having fallen with Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham. My cousin
Marc and I, having fought and bled for France in all the last battles,
and lain for months in an English hospital, have accepted the new
masters of our country and been confirmed in our little estates beside
the Ottawa.
Redeeming my promise to Grûl, I have aided him in his vengeance on the
Black Abbé—a strange, dark tale which I may one day set down, if ever
time makes it less painful to my memory.
Much, then, have I endured in these ten years. But the remembrance of it
appears to me but as a tinted glass, through which I am enabled to
contemplate the full sun of my happiness.
Yvonne in these ten years has changed but to grow more beautiful.
Bodily, there was, I think, no room for that change; but growth is the
law of such a spirit as hers, and so into her perfect eyes, wells of
light as of old, has come a deeper and more immeasurable wisdom. As to
this perennial potency of her beauty, I know that I am not deluded by my
passion; for I perceive the homage it compels from all who come within
its beneficent influence. Even her mother, a laughingly malicious
critic, tells me that my eyes see true in this—(for Giles de Lamourie,
having sold his ample acres in Nova Scotia, and forgiven ancient
grudges, has come here to live with Yvonne). Father Fafard, when he
visits us from his Bonaventure parish, says the same; but _his_ eyes are
blind with loving prejudice. When we go into Montreal for the months of
December and January, exchanging for a little the quiet of our country
home for the glitter of rout and function, no other court so choice, so
loyal, and so revering as that which Yvonne gathers about her. The wise,
drawn by her wit, are held fast by her beauty; while the gay, drawn by
her beauty, rise to a worship of her wit and worth.
Yvonne’s small hands are white and alive and restless as on that day in
the Grand Pré orchard when, prying into the heart of the apple-blossom,
they pried into and set fast hold upon the strings of my heart also. But
this life of mine, given into the keeping of their sweet restlessness,
has found the secret of rest.
One thing more of her, and I have done with this narrative; for they who
live blest have little need or power to depict their happiness. It seems
to me, in looking back and forward, that my wife delights particularly
in setting at naught the cheap wisdom of the maxim-mongers. How
continually are men heard to declare, with the tongue of Sir Oracle: “We
don’t woo what is well won”!
But Yvonne, well won these ten years back, I woo again continually, and
our daily life together is never without the spur of fresh interest and
further possibilities.
“The familiar is held cheap,” say the disappointed; and “Use dulls the
edge of passion,” say they whose passion has never known the edge which
finely tempered spirits take on.
But familiarity, the crucial intimacy of day by day companionship, only
reveals to me in Yvonne the richer reasons for my reverence; while
passion grows but the more poignant as it realizes the exhaustless
depths of the nature which responds to it.
The mean poverty of these maxims I had half suspected even before I knew
Yvonne. But one, more universally accepted, to the effect that
“Anticipation beggars reality,” had ever caused me a certain fear, lest
it might prove true. The husband of my dear love has fathomed its
falsehood, and anticipation, in my case, was little moderate in its
demands. If there be any germ of truth under that long-triumphant lie,
then the reason we two have not discovered it must be sought in another
life than this. This life cannot be the full reality. Even so, my
confident faith is that the lying adage will but seem to lie the more
shamelessly under a fuller revelation. Many times have I told Yvonne
that to me one life seemed not enough for love of her.
As I conclude, I look across the room to where the beautiful, dark,
proud head bends over her desk; for she has outstripped me in my own art
of letters, and only my old achievements with the sword enable me to
maintain that dominance which the husband, even of Yvonne, ought to
have.
She will not approve these last few pages. She will demand their
erasure, declaring them extravagant and an offence against the reticence
of true art.
But not one line will I expunge, for they are true.
THE END.
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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. Silently corrected typographical errors.
2. Retained anachronistic and non-standard spellings as printed.
3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
End of Project Gutenberg's A Sister to Evangeline, by Charles G. D. Roberts