“Ah, then am I his heir, and all his riches ours. Oh, Marmaduke, why should you longer hesitate to take this step, or longer pause for foolish whims? Then call again the priest. Why loiters he?”
But our hero was not yet sensible of the duty that devolved upon him—he did not yet fully realize his position—he still hung back—and his poetical objections having been one by one confuted, he now had the excess of baseness to offer another.
“Alas, I know not well thy foreign tongue. How couldst thou hear me always in my rough tongue, when thine, so sweet, so soft, so beautiful—”
“No! speak not so!” cried Sauterelle. “I will not hear thee speak so! Oh, slander not the language that is thine. And, ah!—thou art a ready youth, I see it in thine eye,—how sweet the task of teaching thee my polished mode of thought and speech! But yet, even as it is, we can converse quite easily! Père Tortenson, the time for marrying is here.”
“Ah, that is truth!” our hero cried. “You speak my English quite as well as I!”
Then, in a rational moment, he said rationally, “As you have said, dear Sauterelle, we love each other well; but being still so young, so very young, we must not think of marriage yet a while. ’Tis hard to part with thee,—our lot is doubly hard,—but fate is ever merciless. Farewell, my love, we part.”
He tore himself away, as though he would have fled.
“’Tis true that we are young,” said Sauterelle. “Our hearts are warm and young, not chilled and seared with age and woe. To leave me? No! it shall not be! Thou must not go!”
“To love is either happiness or pain; to love, and to be loved again,—oh, this is ecstasy!”