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

no medical power could control the disease; she had the symptoms which Monsieur de Mortsauf has no doubt described to you, for he thinks he has them himself. Madame la comtesse was not in any transient condition of ill-health, which our profession can direct and which is often the cause of a better state, nor was she in the crisis of a disorder the effects of which can be repaired; no, her disease had reached a point where science is useless; it is the incurable result of grief, just as a mortal wound is the result of a stab. Her physical condition is produced by the inertia of an organ as necessary to life as the action of the heart itself. Grief has done the work of a dagger. Don't deceive yourself; Madame de Mortsauf is dying of some hidden grief."

"Hidden!" I exclaimed. "Her children have not been ill?"

"No," he said, looking at me significantly, "and since she has been so seriously attacked Monsieur de Mortsauf has ceased to torment her. I am no longer needed; Monsieur Deslandes of Azay is all-sufficient; nothing can be done; her sufferings are dreadful. Young, beautiful, and rich, to die emaciated, shrunken with hunger--for she dies of hunger! During the last forty days the stomach, being as it were closed up, has rejected all nourishment, under whatever form we attempt to give it."

Monsieur Origet pressed my hand with a gesture of respect.

"Courage, monsieur," he said, lifting his eyes to heaven.

The words expressed his compassion for sufferings he thought shared; he little suspected the poisoned arrow which they shot into my heart. I sprang into the carriage and ordered the postilion to drive on, promising a good reward if I arrived in time.

Notwithstanding my impatience I seemed to do the distance in a few minutes, so absorbed was I in the bitter reflections that crowded upon my soul. Dying of grief, yet her children were well? then she died through me! My conscience uttered one of those arraignments which echo throughout our lives and sometimes beyond them. What weakness, what impotence in human justice, which avenges none but open deeds! Why shame and death to the murderer who kills with a blow, who comes upon you unawares in your sleep and makes it last eternally, who strikes without warning and spares you a struggle? Why a happy life, an honored life, to the murderer who drop by drop pours gall into the soul and saps the body to destroy it? How many murderers go unpunished! What indulgence for fashionable vice! What condoning of the homicides caused by moral wrongs! I know not whose avenging hand it was that suddenly, at that moment, raised the painted curtain that reveals society. I saw before me many victims known to you and me,--Madame de Beauseant, dying, and starting for Normandy only a few days earlier; the Duchesse de Langeais lost; Lady Brandon hiding herself in Touraine in the little house where Lady Dudley had stayed two weeks, and dying there, killed by a frightful catastrophe,--you know it. Our period teems with such events. Who does not remember that poor young woman who poisoned herself, overcome by jealousy, which was perhaps killing Madame de Mortsauf? Who has not shuddered at the fate of that enchanting young girl who perished after two years of marriage, like a flower torn by the wind, the victim of her chaste ignorance, the victim of a villain with whom Ronquerolles, Montriveau, and de Marsay shake hands because he is useful to their political projects? What heart has failed to throb at the recital of the last hours of the woman whom no entreaties could soften, and who would never see her husband after nobly paying his debts? Madame d'Aiglemont saw death beside her and was saved only by my brother's care. Society and science are accomplices in crimes for which there are no assizes. The world declares that no one dies of grief, or of despair; nor yet of love, of anguish hidden, of hopes cultivated yet fruitless, again and again replanted yet forever uprooted. Our new scientific nomenclature has plenty of words to explain these things; gastritis, pericarditis, all the thousand maladies of women the names of which are whispered in the ear, all serve as passports to the coffin followed by hypocritical tears that are soon wiped by the hand of a notary. Can there be at the bottom of this great evil some law which we do not know? Must the centenary pitilessly strew the earth with corpses and dry them to dust about him that he may raise himself, as the millionaire battens on a myriad of little industries? Is there some powerful and venomous life which feasts on these gentle, tender creatures? My God! do I belong to the race of tigers?

Remorse gripped my heart in its scorching fingers, and my cheeks were furrowed with tears as I entered the avenue of Clochegourde on a damp October morning, which loosened the dead leaves of the poplars planted by Henriette in the path where once she stood and waved her handkerchief as if to recall me. Was she living? Why did I feel her two white hands upon my head laid prostrate in the dust? In that moment I paid for all the pleasures that Arabella had given me, and I knew that I paid dearly. I swore not to see her again, and a hatred of England took possession of me. Though Lady Dudley was only a variety of her species, I included all Englishwomen in my judgment.

I received a fresh shock as I neared Clochegourde. Jacques, Madeleine, and the Abbe Dominis were kneeling at the foot of a wooden cross placed on a piece of ground that was taken into the enclosure when the iron gate was put up, which the count and countess had never been willing to remove. I sprang from the carriage and went towards them, my heart aching at the sight of these children and that grave old man imploring the mercy of God. The old huntsman was there too, with bared head, standing a little apart.

I stooped to kiss Jacques and Madeleine, who gave me a cold look and continued praying. The abbe rose from his knees; I took him by the arm to support myself, saying, "Is she still alive?" He bowed his head sadly and gently. "Tell me, I implore you for Christ's sake, why are you praying at the foot of this cross? Why are you here, and not with her? Why are the children kneeling here this chilly morning? Tell me all, that I may do no harm through ignorance."

"For the last few days Madame le comtesse has been unwilling to see her children except at stated times.--Monsieur," he continued after a pause, "perhaps you had better wait a few hours before seeing Madame de Mortsauf; she is greatly changed. It is necessary to prepare her for this interview, or it might cause an increase in her sufferings--death would be a blessed release from them."

I wrung the hand of the good man, whose look and voice soothed the pangs of others without sharpening them.

"We are praying God to help her," he continued; "for she, so saintly, so resigned, so fit to die, has shown during the last few weeks a horror of death; for the first time in her life she looks at others who are full of health with gloomy, envious eyes. This aberration comes less, I think, from the fear of death than from some inward intoxication,--from the flowers of her youth which ferment as they wither. Yes, an evil angel is striving against heaven for that glorious soul. She is passing through her struggle on the Mount of Olives; her tears bathe the white roses of her crown as they fall, one by one, from the head of this wedded Jephtha. Wait; do not see her yet. You would bring to her the atmosphere of the court; she would see in your face the reflection of the things of life, and you would add to the bitterness of her regret. Have pity on a weakness which God Himself forgave to His Son when He took our nature upon Him. What merit would there be in conquering if we had no adversary? Permit her confessor or me, two old men whose worn-out lives cause her no pain, to prepare her for this unlooked-for meeting, for emotions which the Abbe Birotteau has required her to renounce. But, in the things of this world there is an invisible thread of divine purpose which religion alone can see; and since you have come perhaps you are led by some celestial star of the moral world which leads to the tomb as to the manger--"

He then told me, with that tempered eloquence which falls like dew upon the heart, that for the last six months the countess had suffered daily more and more, in spite of Monsieur Origet's care. The doctor had come to Clochegourde every evening for two months, striving to rescue her from death; for her one cry had been, "Oh, save me!" "To heal the body the heart must first be healed," the doctor had exclaimed one day.

"As the illness increased, the words of this poor woman, once so gentle, have grown bitter," said the Abbe. "She calls on earth to keep her, instead of asking God to take her; then she repents these murmurs against the divine decree. Such alternations of feeling rend her heart and make the struggle between body and soul most horrible. Often the body triumphs. 'You have cost me dear,' she said one day to Jacques and Madeleine; but in a moment, recalled to God by the look on my face, she turned to Madeleine with these angelic words, 'The happiness of others is the joy of those who cannot themselves be happy,'--and the tone with which she said them brought tears to my eyes. She falls, it is true, but each time that her feet stumble she rises higher towards heaven."

Struck by the tone of the successive intimations chance had sent me, and which in this great concert of misfortunes were like a prelude of mournful modulations to a funereal theme, the mighty cry of expiring love, I cried out: "Surely you believe that this pure lily cut from earth will flower in heaven?"

"You left her still a flower," he answered, "but you will find her consumed, purified by the forces of suffering, pure as a diamond buried in the ashes. Yes, that shining soul, angelic star, will issue glorious from the clouds and pass into the kingdom of the Light."

As I pressed the hand of the good evangelist, my heart overflowing with gratitude, the count put his head, now entirely white, out of the door and immediately sprang towards me with signs of surprise.

"She was right! He is here! 'Felix, Felix, Felix has come!' she kept crying. My dear friend," he continued, beside himself with terror, "death is here. Why did it not take a poor madman like me with one foot in the grave?"

I walked towards the house summoning my courage, but on the threshold of the long antechamber which crossed the house and led to the lawn, the Abbe Birotteau stopped me.

"Madame la comtesse begs you will not enter at present," he said to me.

Giving a glance within the house I saw the servants coming and going, all busy, all dumb with grief, surprised perhaps by the orders Manette gave them.

"What has happened?" cried the count, alarmed by the commotion, as much from fear of the coming event as from the natural uneasiness of his character.

"Only a sick woman's fancy," said the abbe.