Sarrasine | Page 9

a daughter's solicitude, the spectre in human attire, who had driven us from the music-room; as she led him, she watched with some anxiety the slow movement of his feeble feet. They walked painfully across the boudoir to a door hidden in the hangings. Marianina knocked softly. Instantly a tall, thin man, a sort of familiar spirit, appeared as if by magic. Before entrusting the old man to this mysterious guardian, the lovely child, with deep veneration, kissed the ambulatory corpse, and her chaste caress was not without a touch of that graceful playfulness, the secret of which only a few privileged women possess.
"/Addio, addio!/" she said, with the sweetest inflection of her young voice.
She added to the last syllable a wonderfully executed trill, in a very low tone, as if to depict the overflowing affection of her heart by a poetic expression. The old man, suddenly arrested by some memory, remained on the threshold of that secret retreat. In the profound silence we heard the sigh that came forth form his breast; he removed the most beautiful of the rings with which his skeleton fingers were laden, and placed it in Marianina's bosom. The young madcap laughed, plucked out the ring, slipped it on one of her fingers over her glove, and ran hastily back toward the salon, where the orchestra were, at that moment, beginning the prelude of a contra-dance.
She spied us.
"Ah! were you here?" she said, blushing.
After a searching glance at us as if to question us, she ran away to her partner with the careless petulance of her years.
"What does this mean?" queried my young partner. "Is he her husband? I believe I am dreaming. Where am I?"
"You!" I retorted, "you, madame, who are easily excited, and who, understanding so well the most imperceptible emotions, are able to cultivate in a man's heart the most delicate of sentiments, without crushing it, without shattering it at the very outset, you who have compassion for the tortures of the heart, and who, with the wit of the Parisian, combine a passionate temperament worthy of Spain or Italy----"
She realized that my words were heavily charged with bitter irony; and, thereupon, without seeming to notice it, she interrupted me to say:
"Oh! you describe me to suit your own taste. A strange kind of tyranny! You wish me not to be /myself/!"
"Oh! I wish nothing," I cried, alarmed by the severity of her manner. "At all events, it is true, is it not, that you like to hear stories of the fierce passions, kindled in our heart by the enchanting women of the South?"
"Yes. And then?"
"Why, I will come to your house about nine o'clock to-morrow evening, and elucidate this mystery for you."
"No," she replied, with a pout; "I wish it done now."
"You have not yet given me the right to obey you when you say, 'I wish it.' "
"At this moment," she said, with an exhibition of coquetry of the sort that drives men to despair, "I have a most violent desire to know this secret. To-morrow it may be that I will not listen to you."
She smiled and we parted, she still as proud and as cruel, I as ridiculous, as ever. She had the audacity to waltz with a young aide- de-camp, and I was by turns angry, sulky, admiring, loving, and jealous.
"Until to-morrow," she said to me, as she left the ball about two o'clock in the morning.
"I won't go," I thought. "I give up. You are a thousand times more capricious, more fanciful, than--my imagination."
The next evening we were seated in front of a bright fire in a dainty little salon, she on a couch, I on cushions almost at her feet, looking up into her face. The street was silent. The lamp shed a soft light. It was one of those evenings which delight the soul, one of those moments which are never forgotten, one of those hours passed in peace and longing, whose charm is always in later years a source of regret, even when we are happier. What can efface the deep imprint of the first solicitations of love?
"Go on," she said. "I am listening."
"But I dare not begin. There are passages in the story which are dangerous to the narrator. If I become excited, you will make me hold my peace."
"Speak."
"I obey.
"Ernest-Jean Sarrasine was the only son of a prosecuting attorney of Franche-Comte," I began after a pause. "His father had, by faithful work, amassed a fortune which yielded an income of six to eight thousand francs, then considered a colossal fortune for an attorney in the provinces. Old Maitre Sarrasine, having but one child, determined to give him a thorough education; he hoped to make a magistrate of him, and to live long enough to see, in his old age, the