The Hated Son | Page 7

refused even to think of the happy
days when her heart was free to love. Like as the melodies of their
native land make exiles weep, so these memories revived sensations so
delightful that her young conscience thought them crimes, and sued

them to enforce still further the savage threat of the count. There lay the
secret of the horror which was now oppressing her soul.
Sleeping figures possess a sort of suavity, due to the absolute repose of
both body and mind; but though that species of calmness softened but
slightly the harsh expression of the count's features, all illusion granted
to the unhappy is so persuasive that the poor wife ended by finding
hope in that tranquillity. The roar of the tempest, now descending in
torrents of rain, seemed to her no more than a melancholy moan; her
fears and her pains both yielded her a momentary respite.
Contemplating the man to whom her life was bound, the countess
allowed herself to float into a reverie, the sweetness of which was so
intoxicating that she had no strength to break its charm. For a moment,
by one of those visions which in some way share the divine power,
there passed before her rapid images of a happiness lost beyond recall.
Jeanne in her vision saw faintly, and as if in a distant gleam of dawn,
the modest castle where her careless childhood had glided on; there
were the verdant lawns, the rippling brook, the little chamber, the
scenes of her happy play. She saw herself gathering flowers and
planting them, unknowing why they wilted and would not grow,
despite her constancy in watering them. Next, she saw confusedly the
vast town and the vast house blackened by age, to which her mother
took her when she was seven years old. Her lively memory showed her
the old gray heads of the masters who taught and tormented her. She
remembered the person of her father; she saw him getting off his mule
at the door of the manor-house, and taking her by the hand to lead her
up the stairs; she recalled how her prattle drove from his brow the
judicial cares he did not always lay aside with his black or his red robes,
the white fur of which fell one day by chance under the snipping of her
mischievous scissors. She cast but one glance at the confessor of her
aunt, the mother-superior of a convent of Poor Clares, a rigid and
fanatical old man, whose duty it was to initiate her into the mysteries of
religion. Hardened by the severities necessary against heretics, the old
priest never ceased to jangle the chains of hell; he told her of nothing
but the vengeance of Heaven, and made her tremble with the assurance
that God's eye was on her. Rendered timid, she dared not raise her eyes

in the priest's presence, and ceased to have any feeling but respect for
her mother, whom up to that time she had made a sharer in all her
frolics. When she saw that beloved mother turning her blue eyes
towards her with an appearance of anger, a religious terror took
possession of the girl's heart.
Then suddenly the vision took her to the second period of her
childhood, when as yet she understood nothing of the things of life. She
thought with an almost mocking regret of the days when all her
happiness was to work beside her mother in the tapestried salon, to
pray in the church, to sing her ballads to a lute, to read in secret a
romance of chivalry, to pluck the petals of a flower, discover what gift
her father would make her on the feast of the Blessed Saint-John, and
find out the meaning of speeches repressed before her. Passing thus
from her childish joys through the sixteen years of her girlhood, the
grace of those softly flowing years when she knew no pain was
eclipsed by the brightness of a memory precious though ill-fated. The
joyous peace of her childhood was far less sweet to her than a single
one of the troubles scattered upon the last two years of her
childhood,--years that were rich in treasures now buried forever in her
heart.
The vision brought her suddenly to that morning, that ravishing
morning, when in the grand old parlor panelled and carved in oak,
which served the family as a dining-room, she saw her handsome
cousin for the first time. Alarmed by the seditions in Paris, her mother's
family had sent the young courtier to Rouen, hoping that he could there
be trained to the duties of the magistracy by his uncle, whose office
might some day devolve upon him. The countess smiled involuntarily
as she remembered the haste with which she retired on seeing