XXIII.
We reached the little mole that stretches out into the lake where the boats are moored; it is the harbor of Aix, and is situated at about half a league from the town. It was midnight, and there were no longer any carriages or donkeys on the pier to convey strangers to the town. The distance was too great for a delicate suffering woman to walk, and after knocking fruitlessly at the doors of one or two cottages in the vicinity of the lake, the boatmen proposed carrying the lady to Aix. They cheerfully slipped their oars from the rings which fastened them to the boat, and tied them together with the ropes of their nets; then they placed one of the cushions of the boat on these ropes, and thus formed a soft and flexible kind of litter for the stranger. Four of them then took up the oars, and each placing one end on his shoulder, they set off with the palanquin, to which they imparted no other motion than that of their steps. I would have wished to have my share in the pleasure of bearing their precious burden, but was repulsed by them with jealous eagerness. I walked beside the litter with my right hand in hers, so that she might cling to me when the movement of her conveyance was too rough. I thus prevented her slipping off the narrow cushion on which she was stretched. We walked in this manner slowly and silently in the moonlight down the long avenue of poplars. Oh, how short that avenue seemed to me, and how I wished that it could have led us on thus to the last step of both our lives! She did not speak, and I said nothing, but I felt the whole weight of her body trustingly suspended to my arm; I felt both her cold hands clasp mine, and from time to time an involuntary pressure, or a warmer breath upon them, made me feel that she had approached her lips to my hand to warm it. Never was silence so eloquent in its mute revealings. We enjoyed the happiness of a century in one hour. By the time we arrived at the old doctor's house, and had deposited the invalid at her chamber door, the whole world that lay between us had disappeared. My hand was wet with her tears; I dried them with my lips, and threw myself without undressing on my bed.
XXIV.
In vain I tossed and turned on my pillow; I could not sleep. The thousand impressions of the preceding days were traced so vividly on my mind that I could not believe they were past, and I seemed to hear and see over again all I had seen or heard the previous day. The fever of my soul had extended to my body. I rose and laid down again without finding repose. At last I gave it up. I tried by bodily motion to calm the agitation of my mind; I opened the window, turned over the leaves of books which I did not understand as I read them, paced up and down, and changed the position of my table and my chair a dozen times, without finding a place where I could bear to spend the night. All this noise was heard in the adjoining room; and my steps disturbed the poor invalid, who, doubtless, was as wakeful as I was. I heard a light step on the creaking floor approach the bolted oak door which separated her sitting-room from my bedroom; I listened with my ear close to the door, and heard a suppressed breathing, and the rustle of a silk gown against the wall. The light of a lamp shone through the chinks of the door, and streamed from beneath it on my floor. It was she! she was there listening too, with her ear perhaps close to my brow; she might have heard my heart beat. "Are you ill?" whispered a voice, which I should have recognized by a single sigh. "No," I answered, "but I am too happy! Excess of joy is as exciting as excess of anguish. The fever I feel is one of life; I do not wish to dispel it, or to fly from it, but I am sitting up to enjoy it." "Child that you are!" she said, "go and sleep while I watch; it is now my turn to watch over you." "But you," whispered I, "why are you not sleeping?" "I never wish to sleep more," she replied; "I would not lose one minute of the consciousness of my overwhelming bliss. I have but little time in which to enjoy my happiness, and do not like to give any portion of it to forgetfulness in sleep. I came to sit here in the hopes of hearing you, or at any rate to feel nearer to you." "Oh, why still so far?" I murmured. "Why so far? Why is this wall between us?" "Is there only this door between us then," she said, "and not our will and our vow? There! if you are only restrained by this material obstacle, it is removed!" and I heard her withdraw the bolt on her side. "Yes," she continued, "if there be not in you some feeling stronger than love itself to subdue and master your passion, you can pass. Yes," she added with an accent at once more solemn and more impassioned, "I will owe nothing but to yourself,—you may pass; you will meet with love equal to your own, but such love would be my death…."
I was overcome by the violence of my feelings, the impetuous impulse of my heart that impelled me towards that voice, and the moral violence that repulsed me; and I fell as one mortally wounded on the threshold of that closed door. As to her, I heard her sit down on a cushion which she had taken from a sofa, and thrown on the floor. During the greater part of the night we continued to converse in a low tone, through the intervals between the floor and the rough wood-work of the door. Who can describe the outpourings of our hearts, the words unused in the ordinary language of men that seemed to be wafted like night-dreams between heaven and earth, and were interrupted by silence in which our hearts and not our lips communed revealed their unutterable thoughts? At length the intervals of silence became longer, the voices grew faster and, overcome with fatigue, I fell asleep, with my hand clasped on my knees, and my cheek leaning against the wall.
XXV.
The sun was already high in the heavens when I woke, and my room was flooded with light. The redbreasts were chirping and pecking at the vines and currant bushes beneath my windows; all nature seemed to be illumined and adorned and to have awakened before me, to usher in and welcome this first day of my new life. All the sounds and noises in the house seemed joyful as I was. I heard the light steps of the maid who went and came in the passage to carry breakfast to her mistress, the childish voices of the little girls of the mountains who brought flowers from the edge of the glaciers, and the tinkling bells and stamping hoofs of the mules which were waiting in the yard to carry her to the lake or to the mountain. I changed my soiled and dusty clothes, I bathed my red and swollen eyes, smoothed my disordered hair, put on my leather gaiters, like a chamois hunter of the Alps, and taking my gun in hand, I went down to join the old doctor and his family at the breakfast-table.
At breakfast they talked of the storm on the lake, of the danger in which the stranger had been, her fainting at Haute-Combe, her absence during two days, and my good fortune in having met with her and brought her home. I begged the doctor to request for me the favor of inquiring in person after her health, and accompanying her in her excursions. He came down again with her; she looked lovelier and more interesting than ever, and happiness seemed to have given her fresh youth. She enchanted every one, but she looked only at me. I alone understood her looks and words with their double meaning. The guides lifted her joyfully on the seat with the swinging foot-board, which serves as a saddle for the women of Savoy; and I walked beside the mule with the tinkling bells which was that day to carry her to the highest chalets of the mountain.
We passed the whole day there, but we scarcely spoke, so well did we already understand each other without words. Sometimes we stood contemplating the cheerful valley of Chambery which appeared to widen as we mounted higher; or we loitered on the edge of cascades, whose sun-tinted vapors enveloped us in watery rainbows that seemed to be the mysterious halo of our love; or we would gather the latest flowers of earth on the sloping meadows before the chalets, and exchange them between us, as the letters of the fragrant alphabet of Nature, intelligible to us alone; or we gathered chestnuts which we brought home to roast at night by her fire; or we sat under shelter of the highest chalets which were already abandoned by their owners, and thought how happy two beings like ourselves might be, confined by fate to one of these deserted huts, made from rough boards and trunks of trees,—so near the stars, so near the murmuring winds, the snows and glaciers, but divided from man by solitude, and sufficing to each other during a life filled with one thought and but one feeling!