He stooped over the bed, and, reverently lifting one of the old hands folded over the crucifix, put a kiss on its icy, shrivelled surface, while the priest gazed at him, full of sorrowful thoughts. Eight-and-twenty years ago, when those closed eyes had looked on him in his springtime, what might he not have become? Lucien, who had been struck by it, had told him how M. de Kersaint had objected to last night’s use of the Tu Marcellus eris, and the sad and lovely lines rushed into the priest’s mind anew. Yes, more poignant than the lament for youth cut off and blighted promise, was that for youth spent to no end and promise wasted. Tu Marcellus eris! At twenty-three he might have been . . . at fifty-one? . . .
For what the man who stood there with him by the dead had since done to redeem the light and sterile past he could not claim in his own name, and she—the bride of Mlle Magny’s memories—to whom this late justification of her faith in him would have been life’s supremest happiness, was no longer on earth to see it.
Truly, as the great Latin knew, there was a bitter sense of tears in human things.
BOOK II
MIRABEL
“And so, cold, courteous, a mere gentleman,
He bowed, we parted.
Parted. Face no more,
Voice no more, love no more! wiped wholly out
Like some ill scholar’s scrawl from heart and slate,—