Part 25

"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 amusement 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 grass-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 amusement 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 gratitude 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 title, 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 pronunciation--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 passionately. 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, God 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 amusements 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 amusement 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 amusement, 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 impassioned 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 passes 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 impassioned love for them, and her fond knowledge of all their legends, superstitions, histories, and associated 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 grass 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 passion 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 worshipped me as though I were some superior unerring godlike 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 lasse'?

"As it happened, I had made that morning an appointment in Luz with some men I knew, who happened to be passing 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 sunshine 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'tit mot?'

"Madame Cazot's patois made me look up, almost startled for the moment, though there was nothing astonishing 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, washing 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 sex 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 God 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 class don't marry every pretty face they meet; we are not so fond of the institution. 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 pass, if you please.'

"But she would not move. She folded her arms across her chest, quivering from head to foot with passion, her deep-set eyes flashing 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 passionate 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 passion 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.