St Ives | Page 5

accent.
'What am I to say?' I replied. 'If you were carried from this country, for
which you seem so wholly suited, where the very rains and winds seem
to become you like ornaments, would you regret, do you think? We
must surely all regret! the son to his mother, the man to his country;
these are native feelings.'
'You have a mother?' she asked.
'In heaven, mademoiselle,' I answered. 'She, and my father also, went
by the same road to heaven as so many others of the fair and brave:
they followed their queen upon the scaffold. So, you see, I am not so
much to be pitied in my prison,' I continued: 'there are none to wait for
me; I am alone in the world. 'Tis a different case, for instance, with yon
poor fellow in the cloth cap. His bed is next to mine, and in the night I
hear him sobbing to himself. He has a tender character, full of tender
and pretty sentiments; and in the dark at night, and sometimes by day
when he can get me apart with him, he laments a mother and a
sweetheart. Do you know what made him take me for a confidant?'
She parted her lips with a look, but did not speak. The look burned all
through me with a sudden vital heat.
'Because I had once seen, in marching by, the belfry of his village!' I
continued. 'The circumstance is quaint enough. It seems to bind up into
one the whole bundle of those human instincts that make life beautiful,
and people and places dear--and from which it would seem I am cut
off!'
I rested my chin on my knee and looked before me on the ground. I had
been talking until then to hold her; but I was now not sorry she should
go: an impression is a thing so delicate to produce and so easy to
overthrow! Presently she seemed to make an effort.
'I will take this toy,' she said, laid a five-and-sixpenny piece in my hand,
and was gone ere I could thank her.
I retired to a place apart near the ramparts and behind a gun. The beauty,
the expression of her eyes, the tear that had trembled there, the
compassion in her voice, and a kind of wild elegance that consecrated
the freedom of her movements, all combined to enslave my
imagination and inflame my heart. What had she said? Nothing to

signify; but her eyes had met mine, and the fire they had kindled
burned inextinguishably in my veins. I loved her; and I did not fear to
hope. Twice I had spoken with her; and in both interviews I had been
well inspired, I had engaged her sympathies, I had found words that she
must remember, that would ring in her ears at night upon her bed. What
mattered if I were half shaved and my clothes a caricature? I was still a
man, and I had drawn my image on her memory. I was still a man, and,
as I trembled to realise, she was still a woman. Many waters cannot
quench love; and love, which is the law of the world, was on my side. I
closed my eyes, and she sprang up on the background of the darkness,
more beautiful than in life. 'Ah!' thought I, 'and you too, my dear, you
too must carry away with you a picture, that you are still to behold
again and still to embellish. In the darkness of night, in the streets by
day, still you are to have my voice and face, whispering, making love
for me, encroaching on your shy heart. Shy as your heart is, IT is
lodged there--I am lodged there; let the hours do their office--let time
continue to draw me ever in more lively, ever in more insidious
colours.' And then I had a vision of myself, and burst out laughing.
A likely thing, indeed, that a beggar-man, a private soldier, a prisoner
in a yellow travesty, was to awake the interest of this fair girl! I would
not despair; but I saw the game must be played fine and close. It must
be my policy to hold myself before her, always in a pathetic or pleasing
attitude; never to alarm or startle her; to keep my own secret locked in
my bosom like a story of disgrace, and let hers (if she could be induced
to have one) grow at its own rate; to move just so fast, and not by a
hair's- breadth any faster, than the inclination of her heart. I was the
man, and yet I was passive, tied by the foot in prison. I could not go to
her; I must cast a spell upon her at