Had my constant intercourse with the Baroness affected the expression of her features? Or had the expression of her face influenced mine during this six months' union of our souls? Had the instinctive desire to please one another at any price been the cause of an unconscious selection of gestures and expressions, suppressing the less pleasing in favour of the more seductive? It was not at all unthinkable that a blending of our souls had taken place, and that we no longer belonged to ourselves. Destiny, or rather instinct, had played its fateful, inevitable part; the ball had been set rolling, overthrowing and destroying everything that barred its way: honour, reason, happiness, loyalty, wisdom, virtue!
... And this guilelessness to propose to receive under her roof an ardent young man, a man of the age when the passions are so strong that control is often almost impossible! Was she vicious, or had love obscured her reason? Vicious! No, a thousand times no! I appreciated her candid ways, her gaiety, her sincerity, her motherly tenderness. That she was eccentric, that her mind was badly balanced, she had herself acknowledged in speaking of her faults—but vicious? No! Even the little tricks which she occasionally resorted to in order to cheer me up were much more the tricks of a mature woman who amuses herself by teasing and bewildering a timid youth, and then laughs at his confusion, than those of a coquette whose object it is to excite a man's passions.
But I must exorcise the demon, and continue to mislead my friends. I sat down at the writing-table and wrote a letter on the hackneyed subject of my unhappy love affair. I added two impassioned poems entitled "To Her"—poems which could be understood in two ways. It was open to the Baroness to be annoyed.
Letter and poems remained unanswered; perhaps the trick had grown threadbare, perhaps the subject was no longer found interesting.
The calm and tranquil days which followed hastened my recovery. The surrounding landscape seemed to have adopted the favourite colours of the adored woman. The wood, in which I had spent hours of purgatory, now smiled on me. Never in my morning rambles did I find as much as the shadow even of a painful memory lurking in its deep recesses, where I had fought with all the demons of the human heart. Her visit, and the certainty that I should see her again, had given me back life and reason.
[VII]
Knowing from experience that nobody who returns unexpectedly is quite welcome, it was not without a feeling of constraint, not without misgivings, that I called on the Baroness as soon as I was back in town.
In the front garden everything proclaimed the winter; the trees were bare, the garden seats had been removed; there were gaps in the fence where the gates had been; the wind was playing with the withered leaves on the paths; the cellar holes were stuffed with straw.
I found it difficult to breathe in the close atmosphere of the drawing-room, heated by a tiled stove. Fixed to the walls, the stoves had the appearance of sheets suspended from the ceiling, large and white. The double-windows hung in their hinges, every chink was pasted over with paper; the space between the inner and outer windows was filled with snow-white cotton wool, giving the large room the appearance of a death-chamber. In imagination I endeavoured to strip it of its semi-fashionable furniture, and recall its former aspect of rough homeliness. In those days the walls had been bare, the floor plain deal; the memory of the black dinings table, which could boast of no cover and with its eight legs resembled a huge spider, called up the severe faces of my father and stepmother.