The Red Lily, vol 2 | Page 9

in the depth of her being.
She had a sudden vision of Robert, his gun under his arm, in the woods.
He walked with firm and regular step in the shadowy thicket. She could
not see his face, and that troubled her. She bore him no ill-will. She
was not discontented with him, but with herself. Robert went straight
on, without turning his head, far, and still farther, until he was only a
black point in the desolate wood. She thought that perhaps she had
been capricious and harsh in leaving him without a word of farewell,
without even a letter. He was her lover and her only friend. She never
had had another. "I do not wish him to be unfortunate because of me,"
she thought.
Little by little she was reassured. He loved her, doubtless; but he was
not susceptible, not ingenious, happily, in tormenting himself. She said
to herself:
"He is hunting and enjoying the sport. He is with his aunt, whom he
admires." She calmed her fears and returned to the charming gayety of
Florence. She had seen casually, at the Offices, a picture that Dechartre
liked. It was a decapitated head of the Medusa, a work wherein
Leonardo, the sculptor said, had expressed the minute profundity and
tragic refinement of his genius. She wished to see it again, regretting

that she had not seen it better at first. She extinguished her lamp and
went to sleep.
She dreamed that she met in a deserted church Robert Le Menil
enveloped in furs which she had never seen him wear. He was waiting
for her, but a crowd of priests had separated them. She did not know
what had become of him. She had not seen his face, and that frightened
her. She awoke and heard at the open window a sad, monotonous cry,
and saw a humming-bird darting about in the light of early dawn. Then,
without cause, she began to weep in a passion of self-pity, and with the
abandon of a child.
CHAPTER XI
"THE DAWN OF FAITH AND LOVE"
She took pleasure in dressing early, with delicate and subtle taste. Her
dressing-room, an aesthetic fantasy of Vivian Bell, with its coarsely
varnished pottery, its tall copper pitchers, and its faience pavement, like
a chess-board, resembled a fairy's kitchen. It was rustic and marvellous,
and the Countess Martin could have in it the agreeable surprise of
mistaking herself for a fairy. While her maid was dressing her hair, she
heard Dechartre and Choulette talking under her windows. She
rearranged all the work Pauline had done, and uncovered the line of her
nape, which was fine and pure. She looked at herself in the glass, and
went into the garden.
Dechartre was there, reciting verses of Dante, and looking at Florence:
"At the hour when our mind, a greater stranger to the flesh. . ."
Near him, Choulette, seated on the balustrade of the terrace, his legs
hanging, and his nose in his beard, was still at work on the figure of
Misery on his stick.
Dechartre resumed the rhymes of the canticle: "At the hour when our
mind, a greater stranger to the flesh; and less under the obsession of
thoughts, is almost divine in its visions, . . . ."

She approached beside the boxwood hedge, holding a parasol and
dressed in a straw-colored gown. The faint sunlight of winter enveloped
her in pale gold.
Dechartre greeted her joyfully.
She said:
"You are reciting verses that I do not know. I know only Metastasio.
My teacher liked only Metastasio. What is the hour when the mind has
divine visions?"
"Madame, that hour is the dawn of the day. It may be also the dawn of
faith and of love."
Choulette doubted that the poet meant dreams of the morning, which
leave at awakening vivid and painful impressions, and which are not
altogether strangers to the flesh. But Dechartre had quoted these verses
in the pleasure of the glorious dawn which he had seen that morning on
the golden hills. He had been, for a long time, troubled about the
images that one sees in sleep, and he believed that these images were
not related to the object that preoccupies one the most, but, on the
contrary, to ideas abandoned during the day.
Therese recalled her morning dream, the hunter lost in the thicket.
"Yes," said Dechartre, "the things we see at night are unfortunate
remains of what we have neglected the day before. Dreams avenge
things one has disdained. They are reproaches of abandoned friends.
Hence their sadness."
She was lost in dreams for a moment, then she said:
"That is perhaps true."
Then, quickly, she asked Choulette if he had finished the portrait of
Misery on his stick. Misery had now become a figure