Cecil Castlemaine's Gage, Lady Marabout's Troubles, and Other Stories Part 32

fooleries. The storm only increased, the great black rocks echoing the roll of the thunder, and the Gave las.h.i.+ng itself into fury in its narrow bed; happily I was on decently level ground, and the horse being, I suppose, tolerably used to storms like it, I pushed him on at last, by dint of blows and conjurations combined, to where, in the flashes of the lightning, I saw what looked to me like the outline of a homestead: it stood in a cleft between two shelving sides of rock, and a narrow bridle-path led up to it, through high yews and a tangled wilderness of rhododendrons, boxwood, and birch--one of those green slopes so common in the Pyrenees, that look in full sunlight doubly bright and Arcadian-like, from the contrast of the dark, bare, perpendicular rocks that shut them in. I could see but little of its beauty then in the fog that shrouded both it and me, but I saw the shape and semblance of a house, and urging the horse up the ascent, thundered on its gate-panels with my whip-handle till the rocks round echoed.

"There was no answer, and I knocked a little louder, if possible, than before. I was wet to the skin with that wretched storm, and swore not mildly at the inhospitable roof that would not admit me under it. I knocked again, inclined to pick up a piece of granite and beat the panel in; and at last a face--an old woman's weather-beaten face, but with black southern eyes that had lost little of their fire with age--looked through a grating at me and asked me what I wanted.

"'I want shelter if you can give it me,' I answered her. 'I have lost my way coming from Gavarnie, and am drenched through. I will pay you liberally if you will give me an asylum till the weather clears.'

"Her eyes blazed like coals through the little grille.

"'M'sieu, we take no money here--have you mistaken it for an inn? Come in if you want shelter, in Heaven's name! The Holy Virgin forbid we should refuse refuge to any!'

"And she crossed herself and uttered some conjurations to Mary to protect them from all wolves in sheep's clothing, and guard their dwelling from all harm, by which I suppose she thought I spoke fairly and looked harmless, but might possibly be a thief or an a.s.sa.s.sin, or both in one. She unlocked the gate, and calling to a boy to take my horse into a shed, admitted me under a covered pa.s.sageway into the house, which looked like part, and a very ruined part, too, of what had probably been, in the times of Henri-Quatre and his grandfather, a feudal chateau fenced in by natural ramparts from the rocks that surrounded it, shutting in the green slope on which it stood, with only one egress, the path through which I had ascended, into the level plain below. She marshalled me through this covered way into an interior pa.s.sage, dark and vaulted, cheerless enough, and opened a low oak door, ushering me into a chamber, bare, gloomy, yet with something of lost grandeur and past state lingering about its great hearth, its ma.s.sive walls, its stained windows, and its ragged tapestry hangings. The woman went up to one of the windows and spoke with a gentleness to which I should have never thought her voice could have been attuned with its harsh patois.

"'Mon enfant, v'la un m'sieu etranger qui vient chercher un abri pour un pet.i.t peu. Veux-tu lui parler?'

"The young girl she spoke to turned, rose, and, coming forward, bade me welcome with the grace, simplicity, and the nave freedom from embarra.s.sment of a child, looking up in my face with her soft clear eyes. She was like----No matter! you have seen that crayon-head, it is but a portrayal of a face whose expression Raphael and Sa.s.soferrato themselves would have failed to render in its earnest, innocent, elevated regard. She was very young--

Standing with reluctant feet Where the brook and river meet-- Womanhood and childhood fleet.

Good Heavens, I am quoting poetry! what will you think of me, to have gone back to the Wertherian and Tennysonian days so far as to repeat a triplet of Longfellow's? No man quotes _those_ poets after his salad days, except in a moment of weakness. Caramba! why _has_ one any weaknesses at all? we ought not to have any; we live in an atmosphere that would kill them all if they were not as obstinate and indestructible as all other weeds whose seeds will linger and peer up and spoil the ground, let one root them out ever so! I owed you an apology for that lapse into Longfellow, and I have made it. Am I to go on with this story?"

He laughed as he spoke, and his laugh was by no means heartfelt. I told him to go on, and he lighted another Manilla and obeyed me, while the Arno murmured on its way, and the dusky, sultry clouds brooded nearer the earth, and the lights were lit in the distant windows of the palace of the Marchese Acqua d'Oro, that fairest of Florentines, who rouges so indiscriminately and flirts her fan so inimitably, to one of whose b.a.l.l.s we were going that night.

He settled himself back in his chair, with his face darkened again by the shadow cast on it from the pillar of the balcony; and took his cigar out of his mouth.

"She looked incongruous in that bare and gloomy room, out of place with it, and out of keeping with the old woman--a French peasant-woman, weather-beaten and bronzed, such as you see any day by the score riding to market or sitting knitting at their cottage-doors. It was impossible that the girl could be either daughter or grand-daughter, or any relation at all to her. In that room she looked more as one of these myrtles might do, set down in the stifling gloomy horrors of a London street than anything else, save that in certain traces about the chamber, as I told you, there were relics of a faded grandeur which harmonized better with her. I can see her now, as she stood there with a strange foreign grace, an indescribable patrician delicacy mingled with extreme youthfulness and navete, like an old picture in costume, like one of Raphael's child-angels in face--poor little Florelle!

"'You would stay till the storm is over, monsieur? you are welcome to shelter if you will,' she said, coming forward to me timidly yet frankly. 'Cazot tells me you are a stranger, and our mountain storms are dangerous if you have no guide.'

"I did not know who Cazot was, but I presumed her to be the old woman, who seemed to be portress, mistress, domestic, cameriste, and all else in her single person, but I thanked her for her permitted shelter, and accepted her invitation to remain till the weather had cleared, as you can imagine. When you have lost your way, any asylum is grateful, however desolate and tumble-down. They made me welcome, she and the old peasant-woman, with that simple, unstrained, and unostentatious hospitality which is, after all, the true essence of good breeding, and of which your parvenu knows nothing, when he keeps you waiting, and shows you that you are come at an inapropos moment, in his fussy fear lest everything should not be _comme il faut_ to do due credit to _him_.

Old Cazot set before me some simple refreshment, a _grillade de chataignes_, some maize and milk, and a dish of trout just caught in the Gave below, while I looked at my chatelaine, marvelling how that young and delicate creature could come to be shut up with an old peasant on a remote hill-side. I did my best to draw her out and learn her history; she was shy at first of a complete stranger, as was but natural, but I spoke of Garvarnie, of the beauty of the Pyrenees, or Tourmalet, and the Lac Bleu, and, warming with enthusiasm for her birthplace, the girl forgot that I was a foreign tourist, unknown to her, and indebted to her for an hour's shelter, and before my impromptu supper was over I had drawn from her, by a few questions which she was too much of a child and had too little to conceal not to answer with a child's ingenuousness, the whole of her short history, and the explanation of her anomalous position. Her name was Florelle de l'Heris, a name once powerful enough among the n.o.bles of the Midi, and the old woman, Madame Cazot, was her father's foster-sister. Of her family, beggared in common with the best aristocracy of France, none were now left; they had dwindled and fallen away, till of the once great house of L'Heris this child remained alone its representative: her mother had died in her infancy, and her father, either too idle or too broken-hearted to care to retrieve his fortunes, lived the life of a hermit among these ruins where I now found his daughter, educating her himself till his death, which occurred when she was only twelve years old, leaving her to poverty and obscurity, and such protection and companions.h.i.+p as her old nurse Cazot could afford her. Such was the story Florelle de l'Heris told me as I sat there that evening waiting till the clouds should clear and the mists roll off enough to let me go to St. Sauveur--a story told simply and pathetically, and which Cazot, sitting knitting in a corner, added to by a hundred gesticulations, expletives, appeals to the Virgin, and prolix addenda, glad, I dare say, of any new confident, and disposed to regard me with grat.i.tude for my sincere praises of her fried trout. It was a story which seemed to me to suit the delicate beauty of the flower I had found in the wilderness, and read more like a chapter of some versified novelette, like 'Lucille,' than a _bona fide_ page out of the book of one's actual life, especially in a life like mine, of essentially material pleasures and emphatically substantial and palpable ambitions. But there _are_ odd stories in real life!--strange pathetic ones, too--stranger, often, than those that found the plot and underplot of a novel or the basis of a poem; but when such men as I come across them they startle us, they look bizarre and unlike all the other leaves of the book that glitter with worldly aphorisms, philosophical maxims, and pungent egotisms, and we would fain cut them out; they have the ring of that Arcadia whose golden gates shut on us when we outgrew boyhood, and in which, _en revanche_, we have sworn ever since to disbelieve--keeping our word sometimes, perhaps to our own hindrance--Heaven knows!

"I stayed as long as I could that evening, till the weather had cleared up so long, and the sun was s.h.i.+ning again so indisputably, that I had no longer any excuse to linger in the dark-tapestried room, with the chestnuts sputtering among the wood-ashes, and Madame Cazot's needles clicking one continual refrain, and the soft gazelle eyes of my young chatelaine glancing from my sketches to me with that mixture of shyness and fearlessness, innocence and candor, which gave so great a charm to her manner. She was a new study to me, both for my palette and my mind--a pretty fresh toy to amuse me while I should stay in the Midi. I was not going to leave without making sure of a permission to return. I wanted to have that face among my pastels, and when I had thanked her for her shelter and her welcome, I told her my name, and asked her leave to come again where I had been so kindly received.

"'Come again, monsieur? Certainly, if you care to come. But you will find it a long way from Luz, I fear,' she said, navely, looking up at me with her large clear fawn-like eyes--eyes so cloudless and untroubled _then_--as she let me take her hand, and bade me adieu et bonsoir.

"I rea.s.sured her on that score, you can fancy, and left her standing in the deep-embrasured window, a great stag-hound at her feet, and the setting sun, all the brighter for its past eclipse, bathing her in light. I can always see her in memory as I saw her then, poor child!----Faugh! How hot the night is! Can't we get more air anyhow?

"'If you come again up here, m'sieu, you will be the first visitor the Nid de l'Aigle has seen for four years,' said old Cazot, as she showed me out through the dusky-vaulted pa.s.sage. She was a cheerful, garrulous old woman, strong in her devotion to the De l'Heris of the bygone past; stronger even yet in her love for their single orphan representative of the beggared present. 'Visitors! Is it likely we should have any, m'sieu? Those that would suit me would be bad company for Ma'amselle Florelle, and those that should seek her never do. I recollect the time, m'sieu, when the highest in all the departments were glad to come to the bidding of a De l'Heris; but generations have gone since then, and lands and gold gone too, and, if you cannot feast them, what care people for you? That is true in the Pyrenees, m'sieu, as well as in the rest of the world. I have not lived eighty years without finding out that. If my child yonder were the heiress of the De l'Heris, there would be plenty to court and seek her; but she lives in these poor broken-down ruins with me, an old peasant woman, to care for her as best I can, and not a soul takes heed of her save the holy women at the convent, where, maybe, she will seek refuge at last!'

"She let me out at the gate where I had thundered for admittance two hours before, and, giving her my thanks for her hospitality--money she would not take--I wished her good day, and rode down the bridle-path to St. Sauveur, and onwards to Luz, thinking at intervals of that fair young life that had just sprung up, and was already destined to wither away its bloom in a convent. Any destiny would be better to proffer to her than that. She interested me already by her childlike loveliness and her strange solitude of position, and I thought she would while away some of the long summer hours during my stay in the Midi when I was tired of chamois and palette, and my lazy dolce under the beech-wood shades. At any rate, she was newer and more charming than the belles of Eaux Bonnes.

"The next morning I remembered her permission and my promise, and I rode out through the town again, up the mountain-road, to the Nid de l'Aigle; glad of anything that gave me an amus.e.m.e.nt and a pursuit. I never wholly appreciate the far niente, I think; perhaps I have lived too entirely in the world--and a world ultra-cold and courtly, too--to retain much patience for the meditative life, the life of trees and woods, sermons in stones, and monologues in mountains. I am a restless, ambitious man; I must have a _pursuit_, be it of a great aim or a small, or I grow weary, and my time hangs heavily on hand. Already having found Florelle de l'Heris among these hills reconciled me more to my _pro tempo_ banishment from society, excitement, and pleasure, and I thanked my good fortune for having lighted upon her. She was very lovely, and I always care more for the physical than the intellectual charms of any woman. I do not share some men's visionary requirements on their mental score; I ask but material beauty, and am content with it.

"I rode up to the Nid de l'Aigle: by a clearer light it stood on a spot of great picturesqueness, and before the fury of the revolutionary peasantry had destroyed what was the then habitable and stately chateau, must have been a place of considerable extent and beauty, and in the feudal times, fenced in by the natural ramparts of its shelving rocks, no doubt all but impregnable. There were but a few ruins now that held together and had a roof over them--the part where Madame Cazot and the last of the De l'Heris lived; it was perfectly solitary; there was nothing to be heard round it but the foaming of the river, the music of the sheep-bells from the flocks that fed in the clefts and on the slopes of gra.s.s-land, and the shout of some shepherd-boy from the path below; but it was as beautiful a spot as any in the Pyrenees, with its overhanging beech-woods, its wilderness of wild-flowers, its rocks covered with that soft gray moss whose tint defies one to repeat it in oil or water colors, and its larches and beeches drooping over into the waters of the Gave. In such a home, with no companions save her father, old Cazot, and her great stag-hound, and, occasionally, the quiet recluses of St. Marie Purificatrice, with everything to feed her native poetry and susceptibility, and nothing to teach her anything of the actual and ordinary world, it were inevitable that the character of Florelle should take its coloring from the scenes around her, and that she should grow up singularly childlike, imaginative, and innocent of all that in any other life she would unavoidably have known. Well educated she was, through her father and the nuns, but it was a semi-religious and peculiar education, of which the chief literature had been the legendary and sacred poetry of France and Spain, the chief amus.e.m.e.nt copying the illuminated missals lent her by the nuns, or joining in the choral services of the convent; an education that taught her nothing of the world from which she was shut out, and encouraged all that was self-devoted, visionary, and fervid in her nature, leaving her at seventeen as unconscious of evil as the youngest child. I despair of making you imagine what Florelle then was. Had I never met her, I should have believed in her as little as yourself, and would have discredited the existence of so poetic a creation out of the world of fiction; her ethereal delicacy, her sunny gayety when anything amused her, her intense sensitiveness, pained in a moment by a harsh word, pleased as soon by a kind one, her innocence of all the blots and cruelties, artifices and evils, of that world beyond her Nid de l'Aigle, made a character strangely new to me, and strangely winning, but which to you I despair of portraying: I could not have _imagined_ it. Had I never seen her, and had I met with it in the pages of a novel, I should have put it aside as a graceful but impossible conception of romance.

"I went up that day to the Nid de l'Aigle, and Florelle received me with pleasure; perhaps Madame Cazot had instilled into her some scepticism that 'a grand seigneur,' as the woman was pleased to term me, would trouble himself to ride up the mountains from Luz merely to repeat his thanks for an hour's shelter and a supper of roasted chestnuts. She was a simple-minded, good-hearted old woman, who had lived all her life among the rocks and rivers of the Hautes-Pyrenees, her longest excursion a market-day to Luz or Bagneres. She looked on her young mistress and charge as a child--in truth, Florelle was but little more--and thought my visit paid simply from grat.i.tude and courtesy, never dreaming of attributing it to 'cette beaute hereditaire des L'Heris,' which she was proud of boasting was an inalienable heirloom to the family.

"I often repeated my visits; so often, that in a week or so the old ruined chateau grew a natural resort in the long summer days, and Florelle watched for my coming from the deep-arched window where I had seen her first, or from under the boughs of the great copper beech that grew before the gate, and looked for me as regularly as though I were to spend my lifetime in the valley of Luz. Poor child! I never told her my t.i.tle, but I taught her to call me by my christian name. It used to sound very pretty when she said it, with her long Southern p.r.o.nunciation--prettier than it ever sounds now from the lips of Beatrice Acqua d'Oro yonder, in her softest moments, when she plays at sentiment. She had great natural talent for art, hitherto uncultivated, of course, save by such instructions as one of the women at the convent, skilful at illuminating, had occasionally given her. I amused myself with teaching her to transfer to paper and canvas the scenery she loved so pa.s.sionately. I spent many hours training this talent of hers that was of very unusual calibre, and, with due culture, might have ranked her with Elisabetta Sirani or Rosa Bonheur. Sitting with her in the old room, or under the beech-trees, or by the side of the torrents that tore down the rocks into the Gave, it pleased me to draw out her unsullied thoughts, to spread her mind out before me like a book--a pure book enough, G.o.d knows, with not even a stain of the world upon it--to make her eyes glisten and glow and dilate, to fill them with tears or laughter at my will, to wake up her young life from its unconscious, untroubled, childish repose to a new happiness, a new pain, which she felt but could not translate, which dawned in her face for me, but never spoke in its true language to her, ignorant then of its very name--it amused me. Bah! our amus.e.m.e.nts are cruel sometimes, and costly too!

"It was at that time I took the head in pastels which you have seen, and she asked me, in innocent admiration of its loveliness, if she was _indeed_ like that?--This night is awfully oppressive. Is there water in that carafe? Is it iced? Push it to me. Thank you.

"I was always welcome at the Nid de l'Aigle. Old Cazot, with the instinct of servants who have lived with people of birth till they are as proud of their master's heraldry as though it were their own, discerned that I was of the same rank as her adored House of De l'Heris--if indeed she admitted any equal to them--and with all the cheery familiarity of a Frenchwoman treated me with punctilious deference, being as thoroughly imbued with respect and adoration for the aristocracy as any of those who died for the white lilies in the Place de la Revolution. And Florelle--Florelle watched for me, and counted her hours by those I spent with her. You are sure I had not read and played with women's hearts so long--women, too, with a thousand veils and evasions and artifices, of which she was in pure ignorance even of the existence--without having this heart, young, unworn, and unoccupied, under my power at once, plastic to mould as wax, ready to receive any impressions at my hands, and moulded easily to my will. Florelle had read no love stories to help her to translate this new life to which I awoke her, or to put her on her guard against it. I went there often, every day at last, teaching my pupil the art which she was only too glad and too eager to learn, stirring her vivid imagination with descriptions of that brilliant outside world, of whose pleasures, gayeties and pursuits she was as ignorant as any little gentian flower on the rocks; keeping her spell-bound with glimpses of its life, which looked to her like fairyland, bizarre bal masque though it be to us; and pleasing myself with awakening new thoughts, new impressions, new emotions, which swept over her tell-tale face like the lights and shades over meadow-land as the sun fades on and off it. She was a new study, a new amus.e.m.e.nt to me, after the women of our world, and I beguiled my time with her, not thoughtlessly, as I might have done, not too hastily, as I _should_ have done ten years before, but pleased with my new amus.e.m.e.nt, and more charmed with Florelle than I at first knew, though I confess I soon wished to make her love me, and soon tried my best to make her do so--an easy task when one has had some practice in the rose-hued atmosphere of the boudoir, among the most difficile and the most brilliant coquettes of Europe! Florelle, with a nature singularly loving, and a mind singularly imaginative, with no rival for me even in her fancy, soon lavished on me all the love of which her impa.s.sioned and poetic character was capable. She did not know it, but I did. She loved me, poor child!--love more pure, unselfish, and fond than I ever won before, than I shall ever win again.

"Basta! why need you have lighted on that crayon-head, and make me rake up this story? I loathe looking at the past. What good ever comes of it?

A wise man lives only in his present. 'La vita e appunto una memoria, una speranza, un punto,' writes the fool of a poet, as though the bygone memories and the unrealized hopes were worth a straw! It is that very present 'instant' that he despises which is available, and in which, when we are in our senses, we absorb ourselves, knowing that that alone will yield a fruit worth having. What are the fruits of the others? only Dead Sea apples that crumble into ash.

"I knew that Florelle loved me; that I, and I alone, filled both her imagination and her heart. I would not precipitately startle her into any avowal of it. I liked to see it dawn in her face and gleam in her eyes, guilelessly and unconsciously. It was a new pleasure to me, a new charm in that book of Woman of which I had thought I knew every phase, and had exhausted every reading. I taught Florelle to love me, but I would not give her a name to my teaching till she found it herself. I returned it? O yes, I loved her, selfishly, as most people, men or women, do love, let them say what they will; _very_ selfishly, perhaps--a love that was beneath her--a love for which, had she seen into my heart, she might have disdained and hated me, if her soft nature could have been moved to so fierce a thing as hate--a love that sought its own gratification, and thought nothing of her welfare--a love _not_ worthy of her, as I sometimes felt then, as I believe now.

"I had been about six weeks in the Pyrenees since the day I lost myself en route from Gavarnie; most of the days I had spent three or four hours, often more, at the Nid de l'Aigle, giving my painting lessons to Florelle, or being guided by her among the beech-wooded and mountain pa.s.ses near her home. The dreariest fens and flats might have gathered interest from such a guide, and the glorious beauties of the Midi, well suited to her, gained additional poetry from her impa.s.sioned love for them, and her fond knowledge of all their legends, superst.i.tions, histories, and a.s.sociated memories, gathered from the oral lore of the peasantry, the cradle songs of Madame Cazot, and the stories of the old chronicles of the South. Heavens! what a wealth of imagination, talent, genius, lay in her if _I_ had not destroyed it!

"At length the time drew near when my so-called sojourn at the Baths must end. One day Florelle and I were out sketching, as usual; she sat under one of the great beeches, within a few feet of one of the cascades that fell into the Gave du Pau, and I lay on the gra.s.s by her, looking into those clear gazelle eyes that met mine so brightly and trustfully, watching the progress of her brush, and throwing twigs and stones into the spray of the torrent. I can remember the place as though it were yesterday, the splash of the foam over the rocks, the tinkle of the sheep-bells from the hills, the scent of the wild flowers growing round, the glowing golden light that spread over the woodlands, touching even the distant crest of Mount Aigu and the Pic du Midi. Strange how some scenes will stamp themselves on the camera of the brain never to be effaced, let one try all that one may.

"There, that morning, I, for the first time since we had met, spoke of leaving Luz, and of going back to that life which I had so often amused her by describing. Happy in her present, ignorant of how soon the scenes so familiar and dear to her would tire and pall on me, and infinitely too much of a child to have looked beyond, or speculated upon anything which I had not spoken of to her, it had not presented itself to her that this sort of life could not go on for ever; that even she would not reconcile me long to the banishment from my own world, and that in the nature of things we must either become more to each other than we were now, or part as strangers, whom chance had thrown together for a little time. She loved me, but, as I say, so innocently and uncalculatingly, that she never knew it till I spoke of leaving her; then she grew very pale, her eyes filled with tears, and shunned mine for the first time, and, as an anatomist watches the quiver of pain in his victim, so I watched the suffering of mine. It was her first taste of the bitterness of life, and while I inflicted the pain I smiled at it, pleased in my egotism to see the power I had over her. It was cruel, I grant it, but in confessing it I only confess to what nine out of ten men have felt, though they may conceal or deny it.

"'You will miss me, Florelle?' I asked her. She looked at me reproachfully, wistfully, piteously, the sort of look I have seen in the eyes of a dying deer; too bewildered by this sudden mention of my departure to answer in words. No answer was needed with eyes so eloquent as hers, but I repeated it again. I knew I gave pain, but I knew, too, I should soon console her. Her lips quivered, and the tears gathered in her eyes; she had not known enough of sorrow to have learnt to dissemble it. I asked her if she loved me so much that she was unwilling to bid me farewell. For the first time her eyes sank beneath mine, and a hot painful color flushed over her face. Poor child! if ever I have been loved by any woman, I was loved by her. Then I woke her heart from its innocent peaceful rest, with words that spoke a language utterly new to her. I sketched to her a life with me that made her cheeks glow, and her lips quiver, and her eyes grow dark. She was lovelier in those moments than any art could ever attempt to picture! She loved me, and I made her tell me so over and over again. She put her fate unhesitatingly into my hands, and rejoiced in the pa.s.sion I vowed her, little understanding how selfishly I sought her, little thinking, in her ignorance of the evil of the world, that while she rejoiced in the fondness I lavished on her, and wors.h.i.+pped me as though I were some superior unerring G.o.dlike being, she was to me only a new toy, only a pursuit of the hour, a plaything, too, of which I foresaw I should tire! Isn't it Benjamin Constant who says,'Malheureux l'homme qui, dans le commencement d'un amour, prevoit avec une precision cruelle l'heure ou il en sera la.s.se'?

"As it happened, I had made that morning an appointment in Luz with some men I knew, who happened to be pa.s.sing through it, and had stopped there that day to go up the Pic du Midi the next, so that I could spend only an hour or two with Florelle. I took her to her home, parted with her for a few hours, and went down the path. I remember how she stood looking after me under the heavy gray stone-work of the gateway, the tendrils of the ivy hanging down and touching her hair that glistened in the suns.h.i.+ne as she smiled me her adieux. My words had translated, for the first time, all the newly-dawned emotions that had lately stirred in her heart, while she knew not their name.

"I soon lost sight of her through a sharp turn of the bridle-path round the rocks, and went on my way thinking of my new love, of how completely I held the threads of her fate in my hands, and how entirely it lay in my power to touch the chords of her young heart into acute pain or into as acute pleasure with one word of mine--of how utterly I could mould her character, her life, her fate, whether for happiness or misery, at my will. I loved her well enough, if only for her unusual beauty, to feel triumph at my entire power, and to feel a tinge of her own poetry and tenderness of feeling stirring in me as I went on under the green, drooping, fanlike boughs of the pines, thinking of Florelle de l'Heris.

"'M'sieu! permettez-moi vous parle un p't.i.t mot?'

"Madame Cazot's patois made me look up, almost startled for the moment, though there was nothing astonis.h.i.+ng in her appearance there, in her accustomed spot under the shade of a mountain-ash and a great boulder of rock, occupied at her usual task, was.h.i.+ng linen in the Gave, as it foamed and rushed over its stones. She raised herself from her work and looked up at me, shading her eyes from the light--a sunburnt, wrinkled, hardy old woman, with her scarlet capulet, her blue cloth jacket, and her brown woollen petticoat, so strange a contrast to the figure I had lately left under the gateway of the Nid de l'Aigle, that it was difficult to believe them even of the same s.e.x or country.

"She spoke with extreme deference, as she always did, but so earnestly, that I looked at her in surprise, and stopped to hear what it might be she had to say. She was but a peasant woman, but she had a certain dignity of manner for all that, caught, no doubt, from her long service with, and her pride in, the De l'Heris.

"'M'sieu, I have no right, perhaps, to address you; you are a grand seigneur, and I but a poor peasant woman. Nevertheless, I must speak. I have a charge to which I shall have to answer in the other world to G.o.d and to my master. M'sieu, pardon me what I say, but you love Ma'amselle Florelle?'

"I stared at the woman, astonished at her interference and annoyed at her presumption, and motioned her aside with my stick. But she placed herself in the path--a narrow path--on which two people could not have stood without one or other going into the Gave, and stopped me resolutely and respectfully, shading her eyes from the sun, and looking steadily at my face.

"'M'sieu, a little while ago, in the gateway yonder, when you parted with Ma'amselle Florelle, I was coming out behind you to bring my linen to the river, and I saw you take her in your arms and kiss her many times, and whisper to her that you would come again "ce soir!" Then, m'sieu, I knew that you must love my little lady, or, at least, must have made her love you. I have thought her--living always with her--but a beautiful child still; but you have found her a beautiful woman, and loved her, or taught her love, m'sieu. Pardon me if I wrong your honor, but my master left her in my charge, and I am an ignorant old peasant, ill fitted for such a trust; but is this love of yours such as the Sieur de l'Heris, were he now on earth, would put his hand in your own and thank you for, or is it such that he would wash out its insult in your blood or his?'

"Her words amazed me for a moment, first at the presumption of an interference of which I had never dreamt, next at the iron firmness with which this old woman, nothing daunted, spoke as though the blood of a race of kings ran in her veins. I laughed a little at the absurdity of this cross-questioning from her to me, and not choosing to bandy words with her, bade her move aside; but her eyes blazed like fire; she stood firm as the earth itself.

"'M'sieu, answer me! You love Ma'amselle Florelle--you have asked her in marriage?'

"I smiled involuntarily:

"'My good woman, men of my cla.s.s don't marry every pretty face they meet; we are not so fond of the inst.i.tution. You mean well, I know; at the same time, you are deucedly impertinent, and I am not accustomed to interference. Have the goodness to let me pa.s.s, if you please.'

"But she would not move. She folded her arms across her chest, quivering from head to foot with pa.s.sion, her deep-set eyes flas.h.i.+ng like coals under her bushy eyebrows.

"'M'sieu, I understand you well enough. The house of the L'Heris is fallen, ruined, and beggared, and you deem dishonor may approach it unrebuked and unrevenged. Listen to me, m'sieu; I am but a woman, it is true, and old, but I swore by Heaven and Our Lady to the Sieur de l'Heris, when he lay dying yonder, years ago, that I would serve the child he left, as my forefathers had served his in peace and war for centuries, and keep and guard her as best I might dearer than my own heart's blood. Listen to me. Before this love of yours shall breathe another word into her ear to scorch and sully it; before your lips shall ever meet hers again; before you say again to a De l'Heris poor and powerless, what you would never have dared to say to a De l'Heris rich and powerful, I will defend her as the eagles by the Nid de l'Aigle defend their young. You shall only reach her across my dead body!'

"She spoke with the vehemence and pa.s.sionate gesticulation of a Southern; in her patois, it is true, and with rude eloquence, but there was an odd _timbre_ of pathos in her voice, harsh though it was, and a certain wild dignity about her through the very earnestness and pa.s.sion that inspired her. I told her she was mad, and would have put her out of my path, but, planting herself before me, she laid hold of my arm so firmly that I could not have pushed forwards without violence, which I would not have used to a woman, and a woman, moreover, as old as she was.

"'Listen to one word more, m'sieu. I know not what t.i.tle you may bear in your own country, but I saw a coronet upon your handkerchief the other day, and I can tell you are a grand seigneur--you have the air of it, the manner. M'sieu, you can have many women to love you; cannot you spare this one? you must have many pleasures, pursuits, enjoyments in your world, can you not leave me this single treasure? Think, m'sieu! If Ma'amselle Florelle loves you now, she will love you only the dearer as years go on; and _you_, you will tire of her, weary of her, want change, fresh beauty, new excitement--you must know that you will, or why should you shrink from the bondage of marriage?--you will weary of her; you will neglect her first and desert her afterwards; what will be the child's life _then_? Think! You have done her cruel harm enough now with your wooing words, why will you do her more? What is your love beside hers? If you have heart or conscience, you cannot dare to contrast them together; _she_ would give up everything for you, and _you_ would give up nothing! M'sieu, Florelle is not like the women of your world; she is innocent of evil as the holy saints; those who meet her should guard her from the knowledge, and not lead her to it. Were the Sieur De l'Heris living now, were her House powerful as I have known them, would you have dared or dreamt of seeking her as you do now? M'sieu, he who wrongs trust, betrays hospitality, and takes advantage of that very purity, guilelessness, and want of due protection which should be the best and strongest appeal to every man of chivalry and honor--he, whoever he be, the De l'Heris would have held, as what he is, a coward! Will you not now have pity upon the child, and let her go?'

"I have seldom been moved in, never been swayed from, any pursuit or any purpose, whether of love, or pleasure, or ambition; but something in old Cazot's words stirred me strangely, more strangely still from the daring and singularity of the speaker. Her intense love for her young charge gave her pathos, eloquence, and even a certain rude majesty, as she spoke; her bronzed wrinkled features worked with emotions she could not repress, and hot tears fell over her hard cheeks. I felt that what she said was true; that as surely as the night follows the day would weariness of it succeed to my love for Florelle, that to the hospitality I had so readily received I had, in truth, given but an ill return, and that I had deliberately taken advantage of the very ignorance of the world and faith in me which should have most appealed to my honor. I knew that what she said was true, and this epithet of 'coward' hit me harder from the lips of a woman, on whom her s.e.x would not let me avenge it, with whom my conscience would not let me dispute it, than it would have done from any man. _I_ called a coward by an old peasant woman!

absurd idea enough, wasn't it? It is a more absurd one still that I could not listen to her unmoved, that her words touched me--how or why I could not have told--stirred up in me something of weakness, unselfishness, or chivalrousness--I know not what exactly--that prompted me for once to give up my own egotistical evanescent pa.s.sions and act to Florelle as though all the males of her house were on earth to make me render account of my acts. At old Cazot's words I shrank for once from my own motives and my own desires, shrank from cla.s.sing Florelle with the _cocottes_ of my world, from bringing her down to their level and their life.