concerns you, who, unawares, are the lady in whose hand is the crown
promised to the
victor in the tournament!"
Then I
related to her my
childhood and youth, not as I have told it to
you, judged from a distance, but in the language of a young man whose
wounds are still bleeding. My voice was like the axe of a woodsman in
the forest. At every word the dead years fell with echoing sound,
bristling with their
anguish like branches robbed of their
foliage. I
described to her in
feverish language many cruel details which I have
here spared you. I spread before her the treasure of my
radiant hopes,
the
virgin gold of my desires, the whole of a burning heart kept alive
beneath the snow of these Alps, piled higher and higher by perpetual
winter. When, bowed down by the weight of these remembered sufferings,
related as with the live coal of Isaiah, I awaited the reply of the
woman who listened with a bowed head, she illumined the darkness with
a look, she quickened the worlds terrestrial and
divine with a single
sentence.
"We have had the same
childhood!" she said, turning to me a face on
which the halo of the martyrs shone.
After a pause, in which our souls were
wedded in the one consoling
thought, "I am not alone in suffering," the
countess told me, in the
voice she kept for her little ones, how
unwelcome she was as a girl
when sons were wanted. She showed me how her troubles as a daughter
bound to her mother's side differed from those of a boy cast out upon
the world of school and college life. My
desolateneglect seemed to me
a
paradise compared to that
contact with a
millstone under which her
soul was ground until the day when her good aunt, her true mother, had
saved her from this
misery, the ever-recurring pain of which she now
related to me;
misery caused sometimes by
incessant faultfinding,
always
intolerable to high-strung natures which do not
shrink before
death itself but die beneath the sword of Damocles; sometimes by the
crushing of
generous impulses beneath an icy hand, by the cold
rebuffal of her kisses, by a stern command of silence, first imposed
and then as often blamed; by
inward tears that dared not flow but
stayed within the heart; in short, by all the
bitterness and tyranny
of
convent rule,
hidden to the eyes of the world under the appearance
of an exalted motherly
devotion. She gratified her mother's vanity
before strangers, but she
dearly paid in private for this homage.
When, believing that by
obedience and
gentleness she had softened her
mother's heart, she opened hers, the
tyrant only armed herself with
the girl's confidence. No spy was ever more traitorous and base. All
the pleasures of girlhood, even her fete days, were
dearly purchased,
for she was scolded for her
gaiety as much as for her faults. No
teaching and no training for her position had been given in love,
always with sarcastic irony. She was not angry against her mother; in
fact she blamed herself for feeling more
terror than love for her.
"Perhaps," she said, dear angel, "these severities were needful; they
had certainly prepared her for her present life." As I listened it
seemed to me that the harp of Job, from which I had drawn such savage
sounds, now touched by the Christian fingers gave forth the litanies
of the Virgin at the foot of the cross.
"We lived in the same
sphere before we met in this," I said; "you
coming from the east, I from the west."
She shook her head with a
gesture of
despair.
"To you the east, to me the west," she replied. "You will live happy,
I must die of pain. Life is what we make of it, and mine is made
forever. No power can break the heavy chain to which a woman is
fastened by this ring of gold--the
emblem of a wife's purity."
We knew we were twins of one womb; she never dreamed of a half-
confidence between brothers of the same blood. After a short sigh,
natural to pure hearts when they first open to each other, she told me
of her first married life, her deceptions and disillusions, the
rebirth of her
childhood's
misery. Like me, she had suffered under
trifles;
mighty to souls whose limpid substance quivers to the least
shock, as a lake quivers on the surface and to its
utmost depths when
a stone is flung into it. When she married she possessed some girlish
savings; a little gold, the fruit of happy hours and repressed
fancies. These, in a moment when they were needed, she gave to her
husband, not telling him they were gifts and savings of her own. He
took no
account of them, and never regarded himself her
debtor. She
did not even
obtain the glance of thanks that would have paid for all.
Ah! how she went from trial to trial! Monsieur de Mortsauf habitually
neglected to give her money for the household. When, after a struggle
with her timidity, she asked him for it, he seemed surprised and never
once spared her the mortification of petitioning for necessities. What
terror filled her mind when the real nature of the ruined man's
disease was revealed to her, and she quailed under the first outbreak
of his mad anger! What bitter reflections she had made before she
brought herself to admit that her husband was a wreck! What horrible
calamities had come of her
bearing children! What
anguish she felt at
the sight of those infants born almost dead! With what courage had she
said in her heart: "I will
breathe the
breath of life into them; I
will bear them anew day by day!" Then
conceive the
bitterness of
finding her greatest
obstacle in the heart and hand from which a wife
should draw her greatest succor! She saw the
untolddisaster that
threatened him. As each difficulty was conquered, new deserts opened
before her, until the day when she
thoroughly understood her husband's
condition, the
constitution of her children, and the
character of the
neighborhood in which she lived; a day when (like the child taken by
Napoleon from a tender home) she taught her feet to
trample through
mud and snow, she trained her nerves to bullets and all her being to
the
passiveobedience of a soldier.
These things, of which I here make a
summary, she told me in all their
dark
extent, with every piteous detail of conjugal battles lost and
fruitless struggles.
"You would have to live here many months," she said, in conclusion,
"to understand what difficulties I have met with in improving
Clochegourde; what persuasions I have had to use to make him do a
thing which was most important to his interests. You cannot imagine
the
childish glee he has shown when anything that I advised was not at
once successful. All that turned out well he claimed for himself. Yes,
I need an
infinitepatience to bear his complaints when I am half-
exhausted in the effort to amuse his weary hours, to
sweeten his life
and smooth the paths which he himself has
strewn with stones. The
reward he gives me is that awful cry: 'Let me die, life is a burden to
me!' When visitors are here and he enjoys them, he forgets his gloom
and is
courteous and
polite. You ask me why he cannot be so to his
family. I cannot explain that want of
loyalty in a man who is truly
chivalrous. He is quite
capable of riding at full speed to Paris to
buy me a set of ornaments, as he did the other day before the ball.
Miserly in his household, he would be
lavish upon me if I wished it. I
would it were reversed; I need nothing for myself, but the wants of
the household are many. In my strong desire to make him happy, and not
reflecting that I might be a mother, I began my married life by
letting him treat me as a
victim, I, who at that time by using a few
caresses could have led him like a child--but I was
unable to play a
part I should have thought
disgraceful. Now, however, the
welfare of
my family requires me to be as calm and stern as the figure of Justice
--and yet, I too have a heart that overflows with tenderness."
"But why," I said, "do you not use this great influence to master him
and
govern him?"
"If it
concerned myself only I should not attempt either to overcome
the dogged silence with which for days together he meets my arguments,
nor to answer his irrational remarks, his
childish reasons. I have no
courage against
weakness, any more than I have against
childhood; they
may strike me as they will, I cannot
resist. Perhaps I might meet
strength with strength, but I am
powerless against those I pity. If I
were required to coerce Madeleine in some matter that would save her
life, I should die with her. Pity relaxes all my fibres and unstrings
my nerves. So it is that the
violent shocks of the last ten years have
broken me down; my feelings, so often battered, are numb at times;
nothing can
revive them; even the courage with which I once faced my
troubles begins to fail me. Yes, sometimes I am
beaten. For want of
rest--I mean repose--and sea-baths by which to recover my nervous
strength, I shall
perish. Monsieur de Mortsauf will have killed me,
and he will die of my death."
"Why not leave Clochegourde for a few months? Surely you could take
your children and go to the seashore."