The Lily of the Valley, Honoré de Balzac [the little red hen read aloud TXT] 📗

promise of a development as superb as her mother's! This brown young girl, erect as a poplar, contrasted with Jacques, a fragile youth of seventeen, whose head had grown immensely, causing anxiety by the rapid expansion of the forehead, while his feverish, weary eyes were in keeping with a voice that was deep and sonorous. The voice gave forth too strong a volume of tone, the eye too many thoughts. It was Henriette's intellect and soul and heart that were here devouring with swift flames a body without stamina; for Jacques had the milk-white skin and high color which characterize young English women doomed sooner or later to the consumptive curse,--an appearance of health that deceives the eye. Following a sign by which Henriette, after showing me Madeleine, made me look at Jacques drawing geometrical figures and algebraic calculations on a board before the Abbe Dominis, I shivered at the sight of death hidden beneath the roses, and was thankful for the self-deception of his mother.

"When I see my children thus, happiness stills my griefs--just as those griefs are dumb, and even disappear, when I see them failing. My friend," she said, her eyes shining with maternal pleasure, "if other affections fail us, the feelings rewarded here, the duties done and crowned with success, are compensation enough for defeat elsewhere. Jacques will be, like you, a man of the highest education, possessed of the worthiest knowledge; he will be, like you, an honor to his country, which he may assist in governing, helped by you, whose standing will be so high; but I will strive to make him faithful to his first affections. Madeleine, dear creature, has a noble heart; she is pure as the snows on the highest Alps; she will have a woman's devotion and a woman's graceful intellect. She is proud; she is worthy of being a Lenoncourt. My motherhood, once so tried, so tortured, is happy now, happy with an infinite happiness, unmixed with pain. Yes, my life is full, my life is rich. You see, God makes my joy to blossom in the heart of these sanctified affections, and turns to bitterness those that might have led me astray--"

"Good!" cried the abbe, joyfully. "Monsieur le vicomte begins to know as much as I--"

Just then Jacques coughed.

"Enough for to-day, my dear abbe," said the countess, "above all, no chemistry. Go for a ride on horseback, Jacques," she added, letting her son kiss her with the tender and yet dignified pleasure of a mother. "Go, dear, but take care of yourself."

"But," I said, as her eyes followed Jacques with a lingering look, "you have not answered me. Do you feel ill?"

"Oh, sometimes, in my stomach. If I were in Paris I should have the honors of gastritis, the fashionable disease."

"My mother suffers very much and very often," said Madeleine.

"Ah!" she said, "does my health interest you?"

Madeleine, astonished at the irony of these words, looked from one to the other; my eyes counted the roses on the cushion of the gray and green sofa which was in the salon.

"This situation is intolerable," I whispered in her ear.

"Did I create it?" she asked. "Dear child," she said aloud, with one of those cruel levities by which women point their vengeance, "don't you read history? France and England are enemies, and ever have been. Madeleine knows that; she knows that a broad sea, and a cold and stormy one, separates them."

The vases on the mantelshelf had given place to candelabra, no doubt to deprive me of the pleasure of filling them with flowers; I found them later in my own room. When my servant arrived I went out to give him some orders; he had brought me certain things I wished to place in my room.

"Felix," said the countess, "do not make a mistake. My aunt's old room is now Madeleine's. Yours is over the count's."

Though guilty, I had a heart; those words were dagger thrusts coldly given at its tenderest spot, for which she seemed to aim. Moral sufferings are not fixed quantities; they depend on the sensitiveness of souls. The countess had trod each round of the ladder of pain; but, for that very reason, the kindest of women was now as cruel as she was once beneficent. I looked at Henriette, but she averted her head. I went to my new room, which was pretty, white and green. Once there I burst into tears. Henriette heard me as she entered with a bunch of flowers in her hand.

"Henriette," I said, "will you never forgive a wrong that is indeed excusable?"

"Do not call me Henriette," she said. "She no longer exists, poor soul; but you may feel sure of Madame de Mortsauf, a devoted friend, who will listen to you and who will love you. Felix, we will talk of these things later. If you have still any tenderness for me let me grow accustomed to seeing you. Whenever words will not rend my heart, if the day should ever come when I recover courage, I will speak to you, but not till then. Look at the valley," she said, pointing to the Indre, "it hurts me, I love it still."

"Ah, perish England and all her women! I will send my resignation to the king; I will live and die here, pardoned."

"No, love her; love that woman! Henriette is not. This is no play, and you should know it."

She left the room, betraying by the tone of her last words the extent of her wounds. I ran after her and held her back, saying, "Do you no longer love me?"

"You have done me more harm than all my other troubles put together. To-day I suffer less, therefore I love you less. Be kind; do not increase my pain; if you suffer, remember that--I--live."

She withdrew her hand, which I held, cold, motionless, but moist, in mine, and darted like an arrow through the corridor in which this scene of actual tragedy took place.

At dinner, the count subjected me to a torture I had little expected. "So the Marchioness of Dudley is not in Paris?" he said.

I blushed excessively, but answered, "No."

"She is not in Tours," continued the count.

"She is not divorced, and she can go back to England. Her husband would be very glad if she would return to him," I said, eagerly.

"Has she children?" asked Madame de Mortsauf, in a changed voice.

"Two sons," I replied.

"Where are they?"

"In England, with their father."

"Come, Felix," interposed the count; "be frank; is she as handsome as they say?"

"How can you ask him such a question?" cried the countess. "Is not the woman you love always the handsomest of women?"

"Yes, always," I said, firmly, with a glance which she could not sustain.

"You are a happy fellow," said the count; "yes, a very happy one. Ha! in my young days, I should have gone mad over such a conquest--"

"Hush!" said Madame de Mortsauf, reminding the count of Madeleine by a look.

"I am not a child," he said.

When we left the table I followed the countess to the terrace. When we were alone she exclaimed, "How is it possible that some women can sacrifice their children to a man? Wealth, position, the world, I can conceive of; eternity? yes, possibly; but children! deprive one's self of one's children!"

"Yes, and such women would give even more if they had it; they sacrifice everything."

The world was suddenly reversed before her, her ideas became confused. The grandeur of that thought struck her; a suspicion entered her mind that sacrifice, immolation justified happiness; the echo of her own inward cry for love came back to her; she stood dumb in presence of her wasted life. Yes, for a moment horrible doubts possessed her; then she rose, grand and saintly, her head erect.

"Love her well, Felix," she said, with tears in her eyes; "she shall be my happy sister. I will forgive her the harm she has done me if she gives you what you could not have here. You are right; I have never told you that I loved you, and I never have loved you as the world loves. But if she is a mother how can she love you so?"

"Dear saint," I answered, "I must be less moved than I am now, before I can explain to you how it is that you soar victoriously above her. She is a woman of earth, the daughter of decaying races; you are the child of heaven, an angel worthy of worship; you have my heart, she my flesh only. She knows this and it fills her with despair; she would change parts with you even though the cruellest martyrdom were the price of the change. But all is irremediable. To you the soul, to you the thoughts, the love that is pure, to you youth and old age; to her the desires and joys of passing passion; to you remembrance forever, to her oblivion--"

"Tell me, tell me that again, oh, my friend!" she turned to a bench and sat down, bursting into tears. "If that be so, Felix, virtue, purity of life, a mother's love, are not mistakes. Oh, pour that balm upon my wounds! Repeat the words which bear me back to heaven, where once I longed to rise with you. Bless me by a look, by a sacred word,--I forgive you for the sufferings you have caused me the last two months."

"Henriette, there are mysteries in the life of men of which you know nothing. I met you at an age when the feelings of the heart stifle the desires implanted in our nature; but many scenes, the memory of which will kindle my soul to the hour of death, must have told you that this age was drawing to a close, and it was your constant triumph still to prolong its mute delights. A love without possession is maintained by the exasperation of desire; but there comes a moment when all is suffering within us--for in this we have no resemblance to you. We possess a power we cannot abdicate, or we cease to be men. Deprived of the nourishment it needs, the heart feeds upon itself, feeling an exhaustion which is not death, but which precedes it. Nature cannot long be silenced; some trifling accident awakens it to a violence that seems like madness. No, I have not loved, but I have thirsted in the desert."

"The desert!" she said bitterly, pointing to the valley. "Ah!" she exclaimed, "how he reasons! what subtle distinctions! Faithful hearts are not so learned."

"Henriette," I said, "do not quarrel with me for a chance expression. No, my soul has not vacillated, but I have not been master of my senses. That woman is not ignorant that you are the only one I ever loved. She plays a secondary part in my life; she knows it and is resigned. I have the right to leave her as men leave courtesans."

"And then?"

"She tells me that she will kill herself," I answered, thinking that this resolve would startle Henriette. But when she heard it a disdainful smile, more expressive than the thoughts it conveyed, flickered on her lips. "My dear conscience," I continued, "if you would take into account my resistance and the seductions that led to my fall you would understand the fatal--"

"Yes, fatal!" she cried. "I believed in you too much. I believed you capable of the virtue a priest practises. All is over," she continued, after