Farewell Part 5
"Oh! Philip, Philip!" he cried, "past troubles are as nothing. Is it quite hopeless?" he asked.
The doctor raised his eyes to heaven.
"Good-bye, monsieur," said M. d'Albon, pressing the old man's hand. "My friend is expecting me; you will see him here before long."
"Then it is Stephanie herself?" cried Sucy when the Marquis had spoken the first few words. "Ah! until now I did not feel sure!" he added.
Tears filled the dark eyes that were wont to wear a stern expression.
"Yes; she is the Comtesse de Vandieres," his friend replied.
The colonel started up, and hurriedly began to dress.
"Why, Philip!" cried the horrified magistrate. "Are you going mad?"
"I am quite well now," said the colonel simply. "This news has soothed all my bitterest grief; what pain could hurt me while I think of Stephanie? I am going over to the Minorite convent, to see her and speak to her, to restore her to health again. She is free; ah, surely, surely, happiness will smile on us, or there is no Providence above. How can you think she could hear my voice, poor Stephanie, and not recover her reason?"
"She has seen you once already, and she did not recognize you," the magistrate answered gently, trying to suggest some wholesome fears to this friend, whose hopes were visibly too high.
The colonel shuddered, but he began to smile again, with a slight involuntary gesture of incredulity. n.o.body ventured to oppose his plans, and a few hours later he had taken up his abode in the old priory, to be near the doctor and the Comtesse de Vandieres.
"Where is she?" he cried at once.
"Hush!" answered M. Fanjat, Stephanie's uncle. "She is sleeping. Stay; here she is."
Philip saw the poor distraught sleeper crouching on a stone bench in the sun. Her thick hair, straggling over her face, screened it from the glare and heat; her arms dropped languidly to the earth; she lay at ease as gracefully as a fawn, her feet tucked up beneath her; her bosom rose and fell with her even breathing; there was the same transparent whiteness as of porcelain in her skin and complexion that we so often admire in children's faces. Genevieve sat there motionless, holding a spray that Stephanie doubtless had brought down from the top of one of the tallest poplars; the idiot girl was waving the green branch above her, driving away the flies from her sleeping companion, and gently fanning her.
She stared at M. Fanjat and the colonel as they came up; then, like a dumb animal that recognizes its master, she slowly turned her face towards the countess, and watched over her as before, showing not the slightest sign of intelligence or of astonishment. The air was scorching. The glittering particles of the stone bench shone like sparks of fire; the meadow sent up the quivering vapors that hover above the gra.s.s and gleam like golden dust when they catch the light, but Genevieve did not seem to feel the raging heat.
The colonel wrung M. Fanjat's hands; the tears that gathered in the soldier's eyes stole down his cheeks, and fell on the gra.s.s at Stephanie's feet.
"Sir," said her uncle, "for these two years my heart has been broken daily. Before very long you will be as I am; if you do not weep, you will not feel your anguish the less."
"You have taken care of her!" said the colonel, and jealousy no less than grat.i.tude could be read in his eyes.
The two men understood one another. They grasped each other by the hand again, and stood motionless, gazing in admiration at the serenity that slumber had brought into the lovely face before them. Stephanie heaved a sigh from time to time, and this sigh, that had all the appearance of sensibility, made the unhappy colonel tremble with gladness.
"Alas!" M. Fanjat said gently, "do not deceive yourself, monsieur; as you see her now, she is in full possession of such reason as she has."
Those who have sat for whole hours absorbed in the delight of watching over the slumber of some tenderly-beloved one, whose waking eyes will smile for them, will doubtless understand the bliss and anguish that shook the colonel. For him this slumber was an illusion, the waking must be a kind of death, the most dreadful of all deaths.
Suddenly a kid frisked in two or three bounds towards the bench and snuffed at Stephanie. The sound awakened her; she sprang lightly to her feet without scaring away the capricious creature; but as soon as she saw Philip she fled, followed by her four-footed playmate, to a thicket of elder-trees; then she uttered a little cry like the note of a startled wild bird, the same sound that the colonel had heard once before near the grating, when the Countess appeared to M. d'Albon for the first time. At length she climbed into a laburnum-tree, ensconced herself in the feathery greenery, and peered out at the _strange man_ with as much interest as the most inquisitive nightingale in the forest.
"Farewell, farewell, farewell," she said, but the soul sent no trace of expression of feeling through the words, spoken with the careless intonation of a bird's notes.
"She does not know me!" the colonel exclaimed in despair. "Stephanie!
Here is Philip, your Philip!... Philip!" and the poor soldier went towards the laburnum-tree; but when he stood three paces away, the Countess eyed him almost defiantly, though there was timidity in her eyes; then at a bound she sprang from the laburnum to an acacia, and thence to a spruce-fir, swinging from bough to bough with marvelous dexterity.
"Do not follow her," said M. Fanjat, addressing the colonel. "You would arouse a feeling of aversion in her which might become insurmountable; I will help you to make her acquaintance and to tame her. Sit down on the bench. If you pay no heed whatever to her, poor child, it will not be long before you will see her come nearer by degrees to look at you."
"That _she_ should not know me; that she should fly from me!" the colonel repeated, sitting down on a rustic bench and leaning his back against a tree that overshadowed it.
He bowed his head. The doctor remained silent. Before very long the Countess stole softly down from her high refuge in the spruce-fir, flitting like a will-o'-the-wisp; for as the wind stirred the boughs, she lent herself at times to the swaying movements of the trees. At each branch she stopped and peered at the stranger; but as she saw him sitting motionless, she at length jumped down to the gra.s.s, stood a while, and came slowly across the meadow. When she took up her position by a tree about ten paces from the bench, M. Fanjat spoke to the colonel in a low voice.
"Feel in my pocket for some lumps of sugar," he said, "and let her see them, she will come; I willingly give up to you the pleasure of giving her sweetmeats. She is pa.s.sionately fond of sugar, and by that means you will accustom her to come to you and to know you."
"She never cared for sweet things when she was a woman," Philip answered sadly.
When he held out the lump of sugar between his thumb and finger, and shook it, Stephanie uttered the wild note again, and sprang quickly towards him; then she stopped short, there was a conflict between longing for the sweet morsel and instinctive fear of him; she looked at the sugar, turned her head away, and looked again like an unfortunate dog forbidden to touch some sc.r.a.p of food, while his master slowly recites the greater part of the alphabet until he reaches the letter that gives permission. At length the animal appet.i.te conquered fear; Stephanie rushed to Philip, held out a dainty brown hand to pounce upon the coveted morsel, touched her lover's fingers, s.n.a.t.c.hed the piece of sugar, and vanished with it into a thicket. This painful scene was too much for the colonel; he burst into tears, and took refuge in the drawing-room.
"Then has love less courage than affection?" M. Fanjat asked him. "I have hope, Monsieur le Baron. My poor niece was once in a far more pitiable state than at present."
"Is it possible?" cried Philip.
"She would not wear clothes," answered the doctor.
The colonel shuddered, and his face grew pale. To the doctor's mind this pallor was an unhealthy symptom; he went over to him and felt his pulse.
M. de Sucy was in a high fever; by dint of persuasion, he succeeded in putting the patient in bed, and gave him a few drops of laudanum to gain repose and sleep.
The Baron de Sucy spent nearly a week, in a constant struggle with a deadly anguish, and before long he had no tears left to shed. He was often well-nigh heartbroken; he could not grow accustomed to the sight of the Countess' madness; but he made terms for himself, as it were, in this cruel position, and sought alleviations in his pain. His heroism was boundless. He found courage to overcome Stephanie's wild shyness by choosing sweetmeats for her, and devoted all his thoughts to this, bringing these dainties, and following up the little victories that he set himself to gain over Stephanie's instincts (the last gleam of intelligence in her), until he succeeded to some extent--she grew _tamer_ than ever before. Every morning the colonel went into the park; and if, after a long search for the Countess, he could not discover the tree in which she was rocking herself gently, nor the nook where she lay crouching at play with some bird, nor the roof where she had perched herself, he would whistle the well-known air _Partant pour la Syrie_, which recalled old memories of their love, and Stephanie would run towards him lightly as a fawn. She saw the colonel so often that she was no longer afraid of him; before very long she would sit on his knee with her thin, lithe arms about him. And while thus they sat as lovers love to do, Philip doled out sweetmeats one by one to the eager Countess.
When they were all finished, the fancy often took Stephanie to search through her lover's pockets with a monkey's quick instinctive dexterity, till she had a.s.sured herself that there was nothing left, and then she gazed at Philip with vacant eyes; there was no thought, no grat.i.tude in their clear depths. Then she would play with him. She tried to take off his boots to see his foot; she tore his gloves to shreds, and put on his hat; and she would let him pa.s.s his hands through her hair, and take her in his arms, and submit pa.s.sively to his pa.s.sionate kisses, and at last, if he shed tears, she would gaze silently at him.
She quite understood the signal when he whistled _Partant pour la Syrie_, but he could never succeed in inducing her to p.r.o.nounce her own name--_Stephanie_. Philip persevered in his heart-rending task, sustained by a hope that never left him. If on some bright autumn morning he saw her sitting quietly on a bench under a poplar tree, grown brown now as the season wore, the unhappy lover would lie at her feet and gaze into her eyes as long as she would let him gaze, hoping that some spark of intelligence might gleam from them. At times he lent himself to an illusion; he would imagine that he saw the hard, changeless light in them falter, that there was a new life and softness in them, and he would cry, "Stephanie! oh, Stephanie! you hear me, you see me, do you not?"
But for her the sound of his voice was like any other sound, the stirring of the wind in the trees, or the lowing of the cow on which she scrambled; and the colonel wrung his hands in a despair that lost none of its bitterness; nay, time and these vain efforts only added to his anguish.
One evening, under the quiet sky, in the midst of the silence and peace of the forest hermitage, M. Fanjat saw from a distance that the Baron was busy loading a pistol, and knew that the lover had given up all hope. The blood surged to the old doctor's heart; and if he overcame the dizzy sensation that seized on him, it was because he would rather see his niece live with a disordered brain than lose her for ever. He hurried to the place.
"What are you doing?" he cried.
"That is for me," the colonel answered, pointing to a loaded pistol on the bench, "and this is for her!" he added, as he rammed down the wad into the pistol that he held in his hands.
The Countess lay stretched out on the ground, playing with the b.a.l.l.s.
"Then you do not know that last night, as she slept, she murmured 'Philip?'" said the doctor quietly, dissembling his alarm.
"She called my name?" cried the Baron, letting his weapon fall.
Stephanie picked it up, but he s.n.a.t.c.hed it out of her hands, caught the other pistol from the bench, and fled.
"Poor little one!" exclaimed the doctor, rejoicing that his stratagem had succeeded so well. He held her tightly to his heart as he went on. "He would have killed you, selfish that he is! He wants you to die because he is unhappy. He cannot learn to love you for your own sake, little one! We forgive him, do we not? He is senseless; you are only mad. Never mind; G.o.d alone shall take you to Himself. We look upon you as unhappy because you no longer share our miseries, fools that we are!... Why, she is happy," he said, taking her on his knee; "nothing troubles her; she lives like the birds, like the deer--"
Stephanie sprang upon a young blackbird that was hopping about, caught it with a little shriek of glee, twisted its neck, looked at the dead bird, and dropped it at the foot of a tree without giving it another thought.
The next morning at daybreak the colonel went out into the garden to look for Stephanie; hope was very strong in him. He did not see her, and whistled; and when she came, he took her arm, and for the first time they walked together along an alley beneath the trees, while the fresh morning wind shook down the dead leaves about them. The colonel sat down, and Stephanie, of her own accord, lit upon his knee. Philip trembled with gladness.
"Love!" he cried, covering her hands with pa.s.sionate kisses, "I am Philip..."