Listen to her prattle; accept the music that she sings to you in her own heart. Later, if our souls are sisters, if our characters warrant the attempt, a white-haired old serving-man shall await you by the wayside and lead you to the cottage, the villa, the castle, the palace--I don't know yet what sort of bower it will be, nor what its color, nor whether this conclusion will ever be possible; but you will admit, will you not? that it is poetic, and that Mademoiselle d'Este has a complying disposition. Has she not left you free? Has she gone with jealous feet to watch you in the salons of Paris? Has she imposed upon you the labors of some high emprise, such as paladins sought voluntarily in the olden time?
No, she asks a perfectly spiritual and mystic alliance. Come to me when you are unhappy, wounded, weary. Tell me all, hide nothing; I
have balms for all your ills. I am twenty years of age, dear friend, but I have the sense of fifty, and unfortunately I have known through the experience of another all the horrors and the delights of love. I know what baseness the human heart can contain, what infamy; yet I myself am an honest girl. No, I have no illusions; but I have something better, something real,--I have beliefs and a religion. See! I open the ball of our confidences.
Whoever I marry--provided I choose him for myself--may sleep in peace or go to the East Indies sure that he will find me on his return working at the tapestry which I began before he left me;
and in every stitch he shall read a verse of the poem of which he has been the hero. Yes, I have resolved within my heart never to follow my husband where he does not wish me to go. I will be the divinity of his hearth. That is my religion of humanity. But why should I not test and choose the man to whom I am to be like the life to the body? Is a man ever impeded by life? What can that woman be who thwarts the man she loves?--an illness, a disease, not life. By life, I mean that joyous health which makes each hour a pleasure.
But to return to your letter, which will always be precious to me.
Yes, jesting apart, it contains that which I desired, an expression of prosaic sentiments which are as necessary to family life as air to the lungs; and without which no happiness is possible. To act as an honest man, to think as a poet, to love as women love, that is what I longed for in my friend, and it is now no longer a chimera.
Adieu, my friend. I am poor at this moment. That is one of the reasons why I cling to my concealment, my mask, my impregnable fortress. I have read your last verses in the "Revue,"--ah! with what delight, now that I am initiated in the austere loftiness of your secret soul.
Will it make you unhappy to know that a young girl prays for you;
that you are her solitary thought,--without a rival except in her father and mother? Can there be any reason why you should reject these pages full of you, written for you, seen by no eye but yours? Send me their counterpart. I am so little of a woman yet that your confidences--provided they are full and true--will suffice for the happiness of your O. d'Este M.
"Good heavens! can I be in love already?" cried the young secretary, when he perceived that he had held the above letter in his hands more than an hour after reading it. "What shall I do? She thinks she is writing to the great poet! Can I continue the deception? Is she a woman of forty, or a girl of twenty?"
Ernest was now fascinated by the great gulf of the unseen. The unseen is the obscurity of infinitude, and nothing is more alluring. In that sombre vastness fires flash, and furrow and color the abyss with fancies like those of Martin. For a busy man like Canalis, an adventure of this kind is swept away like a harebell by a mountain torrent, but in the more unoccupied life of the young secretary, this charming girl, whom his imagination persistently connected with the blonde beauty at the window, fastened upon his heart, and did as much mischief in his regulated life as a fox in a poultry-yard. La Briere allowed himself to be preoccupied by this mysterious correspondent;
and he answered her last letter with another, a pretentious and carefully studied epistle, in which, however, passion begins to reveal itself through pique.
Mademoiselle,--Is it quite loyal in you to enthrone yourself in the heart of a poor poet with a latent intention of abandoning him if he is not exactly what you wish, leaving him to endless regrets,--showing him for a moment an image of perfection, were it only assumed, and at any rate giving him a foretaste of happiness?