Chapter 9

"'My son,' said I, 'listen to him who is your friend, who was the friend of Virginia, and who, in the bloom of your hopes, endeavoured to fortify your mind against the unforeseen accidents of life. What do you deplore with so much bitterness? Your own misfortunes, or those of Virginia? Your own misfortunes are indeed severe. You have lost the most amiable of women: she who sacrificed her own interests to yours, who preferred you to all that fortune could bestow, and considered you as the only recompense worthy of her virtues. But might not this very object, from whom you expected the purest happiness, have proved to you a source of the most cruel distress? She had returned poor, disinherited; and all you could henceforth have partaken with her was your labours: while rendered more delicate by her education, and more courageous by her misfortunes, you would have beheld her every day sinking beneath her efforts to share and soften your fatigues. Had she brought you children, this would only have served to increase her inquietudes and your own, from the difficulty of sustaining your aged parents and your infant family. You will tell me, there would have been reserved to you a happiness independent of fortune, that of protecting a beloved object, which attaches itself to us in proportion to its helplessness; that your pains and sufferings would have served to endear you to each other, and that your passion would have gathered strength from your mutual misfortunes. Undoubtedly virtuous love can shed a charm over pleasures which are thus mingled with bitterness. But Virginia is no more; yet those persons still live, whom, next to yourself, she held most dear; her mother, and your own, whom your inconsolable affliction is bending with sorrow to the grave. Place your happiness, as she did hers, in affording them succour. And why deplore the fate of Virginia? Virginia still exists. There is he assured, a region in which virtue receives its reward. Virginia now is happy. Ah! if, from the abode of angels, she could tell you, as she did when she bid you farewell. 'O, Paul! life is but a trial. I was faithful to the laws of nature, love, and virtue. Heaven found I had fulfilled my duties, and has snatched me for ever from all the miseries I might have endured myself, and all I might have felt for the miseries of others. I am placed above the reach of all human evils, and you pity me! I am become pure and unchangeable as a particle of light, and you would recall me to the darkness of human life! O, Paul! O, my beloved friend! recollect those days of happiness, when in the morning we felt the delightful sensations excited by the unfolding beauties of nature; when we gazed upon the sun, gilding the peaks of those rocks, and then spreading his rays over the bosom of the forests.

"'How exquisite were our emotions while we enjoyed the glowing colours of the opening day, the odours of our shrubs, the concerts of our birds! Now, at the source of beauty, from which flows all that is delightful upon earth, my soul intuitively sees, tastes, hears, touches, what before she could only be made sensible of through the medium of our weak organs. Ah! what language can describe those shores of eternal bliss which I inhabit for ever? All that infinite power and celestial bounty can confer, that harmony which results from friendship with numberless beings, exulting in the same felicity, we enjoy in unmixed perfection. Support, then the trial which is allotted you, that you may heighten the happiness of your Virginia by love which will know no termination, by hymeneals which will be immortal. There I will calm your regrets, I will wipe away your tears. Oh, my beloved friend! my husband! raise your thoughts towards infinite duration, and bear the evils of a moment.'

"My own emotion choked my utterance. Paul, looking's at me stedfastly, cried, 'She is no more! She is no more!' and a long fainting fit succeeded that melancholy exclamation. When restored to himself, he said, 'Since death is a good, and since Virginia is happy, I would die too, and be united to Virginia.' Thus the motives of consolation I had offered, only served to nourish his despair. I was like a man who attempts to save a friend sinking in the midst of a flood, and refusing to swim. Sorrow had overwhelmed his soul. Alas! the misfortunes of early years prepare man for the struggles of life: but Paul had never known adversity.

"I led him back to his own dwelling, where I found his mother and Madame de la Tour in a state of increased languor, but Margaret drooped most. Those lively characters upon which light afflictions make a small impression, are least capable of resisting great calamities.

"'O, my good friend,' said Margaret, 'me-thought, last night, I saw Virginia dressed in white, amidst delicious bowers and gardens. She said to me, 'I enjoy the most perfect happiness;' and then approaching Paul, with a smiling air, she bore him away. While I struggled to retain my son, I felt that I myself was quitting the earth, and that I followed him with inexpressible delight. I then wished to bid my friend farewell, when I saw she was hastening after me with Mary and Domingo. But what seems most strange is, that Madame de la Tour has this very night had a dream attended with the same circumstances.'

"'My dear friend,' I replied, 'nothing, I believe, happens in this world without the permission of God. Dreams sometimes foretell the truth.'

"Madame de la Tour related to me her dream, which was exactly similar; and, as I had never observed in either of those persons any propensity to superstition, I was struck with the singular coincidence of their dreams, which, I had little doubt, would soon be realized.

"What I expected took place. Paul died two months after the death of Virginia, whose name dwelt upon his lips even in his expiring moments. Eight days after the death of her son, Margaret saw her last hour approach with that serenity which virtue only can feel. She bade Madame de la Tour the most tender farewell, 'in the hope,' she said, 'of a sweet and eternal reunion. Death is the most precious good,' added she, 'and we ought to desire it. If life be a punishment we should wish for its termination; if it be a trial, we should be thankful that it is short.'

"The governor took care of Domingo and Mary, who were no longer able to labour, and who survived their mistresses but a short time. As for poor Fidele, he pined to death, at the period he lost his master.

"I conducted Madame de la Tour to my dwelling, and she bore her calamities with elevated fortitude. She had endeavoured to comfort Paul and Margaret till their last moments, as if she herself had no agonies to bear. When they were no more, she used to talk of them as of beloved friends, from whom she was not distant. She survived them but one month. Far from reproaching her aunt for those afflictions she had caused, her benign spirit prayed to God to pardon her, and to appease that remorse which the consequences of her cruelty would probably awaken in her breast.

"I heard, by successive vessels which arrived from Europe, that this unnatural relation, haunted by a troubled conscience, accused herself continually of the untimely fate of her lovely niece, and the death of her mother, and became at intervals bereft of her reason. Her relations, whom she hated, took the direction of her fortune, after shutting her up as a lunatic, though she possessed sufficient use of her reason to feel all the pangs of her dreadful situation, and died at length in agonies of despair.

"The body of Paul was placed by the side of his Virginia, at the foot of the same shrubs; and on that hallowed spot the remains of their tender mothers, and their faithful servants, are laid. No marble covers the turf, no inscription records their virtues; but their memory is engraven upon our hearts, in characters, which are indelible; and surely, if those pure spirits still take an interest in what passes upon earth, they love to wander beneath the roofs of these dwellings, which are inhabited by industrious virtue, to console the poor who complain of their destiny, to cherish in the hearts of lovers the sacred flame of fidelity, to inspire a taste for the blessing of nature, the love of labour, and the dread of riches.

"The voice of the people, which is often silent with regard to those monuments raised to flatter the pride of kings, has given to some parts of this island names which will immortalize the loss of Virginia. Near the Isle of Amber, in the midst of sandbanks, is a spot called the Pass of Saint Geran, from the name of the vessel which there perished. The extremity of that point of land, which is three leagues distant, and half covered by the waves, and which the Saint Geran could not double on the night preceding the huricane, is called the Cape of Misfortune; and before us, at the end of the valley, is the Bay of the Tomb, where Virginia was found buried in the sand; as if the waves had sought to restore her corpse to her family, that they might render it the last sad duties on those shores of which her innocence had been the ornament.

"Ye faithful lovers, who were so tenderly united! unfortunate mothers! beloved family! those woods which sheltered you with their foliage, those fountains which flowed for you, those hillocks upon which you reposed, still deplore your loss! No one has since presumed to cultivate that desolated ground, or repair those fallen huts. Your goats are become wild, your orchards are destroyed, your birds are fled, and nothing is heard but the cry of the sparrowhawk, who skims around the valley of rocks. As for myself, since I behold you no more, I am like a father bereft of his children, like a traveller who wanders over the earth, desolate and alone."

In saying these words, the good old man retired, shedding tears, and mine had often flowed, during this melancholy narration.

THE END.

End of Project Gutenberg's Paul and Virginia, by Bernadin de Saint-Pierre