The Hated Son | Page 8

this
relation whom she did not know. But, in spite of the rapidity with
which she opened and shut the door, a single glance had put into her
soul so vigorous an impression of the scene that even at this moment
she seemed to see it still occurring. Her eye again wandered from the
violet velvet mantle embroidered with gold and lined with satin to the
spurs on the boots, the pretty lozenges slashed into the doublet, the
trunk-hose, and the rich collaret which gave to view a throat as white as

the lace around it. She stroked with her hand the handsome face with its
tiny pointed moustache, and "royale" as small as the ermine tips upon
her father's hood.
In the silence of the night, with her eyes fixed on the green silk curtains
which she no longer saw, the countess, forgetting the storm, her
husband, and her fears, recalled the days which seemed to her longer
than years, so full were they,--days when she loved, and was
beloved!--and the moment when, fearing her mother's sternness, she
had slipped one morning into her father's study to whisper her girlish
confidences on his knee, waiting for his smile at her caresses to say in
his ear, "Will you scold me if I tell you something?" Once more she
heard her father say, after a few questions in reply to which she spoke
for the first time of her love, "Well, well, my child, we will think of it.
If he studies well, if he fits himself to succeed me, if he continues to
please you, I will be on your side."
After that she had listened no longer; she had kissed her father, and,
knocking over his papers as she ran from the room, she flew to the
great linden-tree where, daily, before her formidable mother rose, she
met that charming cousin, Georges de Chaverny.
Faithfully the youth promised to study law and customs. He laid aside
the splendid trappings of the nobility of the sword to wear the sterner
costume of the magistracy.
"I like you better in black," she said.
It was a falsehood, but by that falsehood she comforted her lover for
having thrown his dagger to the winds. The memory of the little
schemes employed to deceive her mother, whose severity seemed great,
brought back to her the soulful joys of that innocent and mutual and
sanctioned love; sometimes a rendezvous beneath the linden, where
speech could be freer than before witnesses; sometimes a furtive clasp,
or a stolen kiss,--in short, all the naive instalments of a passion that did
not pass the bounds of modesty. Reliving in her vision those delightful
days when she seemed to have too much happiness, she fancied that she
kissed, in the void, that fine young face with the glowing eyes, that rosy

mouth that spoke so well of love. Yes, she had loved Chaverny, poor
apparently; but what treasures had she not discovered in that soul as
tender as it was strong!
Suddenly her father died. Chaverny did not succeed him. The flames of
civil war burst forth. By Chaverny's care she and her mother found
refuge in a little town of Lower Normandy. Soon the deaths of other
relatives made her one of the richest heiresses in France. Happiness
disappeared as wealth came to her. The savage and terrible face of
Comte d'Herouville, who asked her hand, rose before her like a
thunder-cloud, spreading its gloom over the smiling meadows so lately
gilded by the sun. The poor countess strove to cast from her memory
the scenes of weeping and despair brought about by her long resistance.
At last came an awful night when her mother, pale and dying, threw
herself at her daughter's feet. Jeanne could save Chaverny's life by
yielding; she yielded. It was night. The count, arriving bloody from the
battlefield was there; all was ready, the priest, the altar, the torches!
Jeanne belonged henceforth to misery. Scarcely had she time to say to
her young cousin who was set at liberty:--
"Georges, if you love me, never see me again!"
She heard the departing steps of her lover, whom, in truth, she never
saw again; but in the depths of her heart she still kept sacred his last
look which returned perpetually in her dreams and illumined them.
Living like a cat shut into a lion's cage, the young wife dreaded at all
hours the claws of the master which ever threatened her. She knew that
in order to be happy she must forget the past and think only of the
future; but there were days, consecrated to the memory of some
vanished joy, when she deliberately made it a crime to put on the gown
she had worn on the day she had seen