“Chere enfant,” said she, “I have bad news for you. Poor Gustave is very ill—an attack of the lungs and fever; you know how delicate he is.”
“I am sincerely grieved,” said Isaura, in earnest tender tones; “it must be a very sudden attack: he was here last Thursday.”
“The malady only declared itself yesterday morning, but surely you must have observed how ill he has been looking for several days past? It pained me to see him.”
“I did not notice any change in him,” said Isaura, somewhat conscience-stricken. Wrapt in her own happy thoughts, she would not have noticed change in faces yet more familiar to her than that of her young admirer.
“Isaura,” said Madame Savarin, “I suspect there are moral causes for our friend’s failing health. Why should I disguise my meaning? You know well how madly he is in love with you, and have you denied him hope?”
“I like M. Rameau as a friend; I admire him—at times I pity him.”
“Pity is akin to love.”
“I doubt the truth of that saying, at all events as you apply it now. I could not love M. Rameau; I never gave him cause to think I could.”
“I wish for both your sakes that you could make me a different answer; for his sake, because, knowing his faults and failings, I am persuaded that they would vanish in a companionship so pure, so elevating as yours: you could make him not only so much happier but so much better a man. Hush! let me go on, let me come to yourself,—I say for your sake I wish it. Your pursuits, your ambition, are akin to his; you should not marry one who could not sympathise with you in these. If you did, he might either restrict the exercise of your genius or be chafed at its display. The only authoress I ever knew whose married lot was serenely happy to the last, was the greatest of English poetesses married to a great English poet. You cannot, you ought not, to devote yourself to the splendid career to which your genius irresistibly impels you, without that counsel, that support, that protection, which a husband alone can give. My dear child, as the wife myself of a man of letters, and familiarised to all the gossip, all the scandal, to which they who give their names to the public are exposed, I declare that if I had a daughter who inherited Savarin’s talents, and was ambitious of attaining to his renown, I would rather shut her up in a convent than let her publish a book that was in every one’s hands until she had sheltered her name under that of a husband; and if I say this of my child, with a father so wise in the world’s ways, and so popularly respected as my bon homme, what must I feel to be essential to your safety, poor stranger in our land! poor solitary orphan! with no other advice or guardian than the singing mistress whom you touchingly call ‘Madre!’ I see how I distress and pain you—I cannot help it. Listen! The other evening Savarin came back from his favourite cafe in a state of excitement that made me think he came to announce a revolution. It was about you; he stormed, he wept—actually wept—my philosophical laughing Savarin. He had just heard of that atrocious wager made by a Russian barbarian. Every one praised you for the contempt with which you had treated the savage’s insolence. But that you should have been submitted to such an insult without one male friend who had the right to resent and chastise it,—you cannot think how Savarin was chafed and galled. You know how he admires, but you cannot guess how he reveres you; and since then he says to me every day: ‘That girl must not remain single. Better marry any man who has a heart to defend a wife’s honour and the nerve to fire a pistol: every Frenchman has those qualifications!’”
Here Isaura could no longer restrain her emotions; she burst into sobs so vehement, so convulsive, that Madame Savarin became alarmed; but when she attempted to embrace and soothe her, Isaura recoiled with a visible shudder, and gasping out, “Cruel, cruel!” turned to the door, and rushed to her own room.