We sat down. I do not know if she recognized the spot. Even I did not recognize it at first, bewildered like a man who has had both his eyes bandaged for some time. We both looked about us, then we looked at one another, and in our eyes we had the same thought. A crowd of tender recollections were connected with this old stone bench. My heart swelled, not with regret, but with a restless covetousness, with a sort of frenzy of living that, in a flash, gave me a chimerical, dazzling vision of the future. "Ah! she is ignorant of what new tenderness I am capable! In my soul there is a paradise for her." And the flaming up of that ideal of love was so strong that I became exalted.
"Are you sad? But what creature in all the world was ever loved as I love you? To what woman has it been given to obtain a proof of love equal to that I give you? You said just now: 'We should never have left here.' Without doubt, we should have been happy: you would not have suffered a martyrdom, you would not have shed so many tears, you would not have lost so many years of your life; but you would not have known my love, all my love."
Her head was bent on her bosom, her eyes half-closed, and she listened, motionless. Her eyelashes threw on the upper part of her cheeks a shadow that disturbed me more than a look would have done.
"And I myself would have had no knowledge of my love. Did I not believe the first time I left you that all was at an end? I sought another passion, another fever, another intoxication; I wished to embrace life in one single clasp. You did not suffice me. And during all those years I weakened myself by an atrocious life, oh! so atrocious that I have a horror of it, as a convict has a horror of the prison in which he has lived, dying a little every day. And I had to wander from darkness into darkness, before light fell on my soul, before this great truth appeared to me. I have loved only one woman, and you are she. You alone, in all the world, are good and gentle; and you are the best and most gentle creature I have ever dreamed of; you are the Unique. And you were in my house, while I sought you afar off. Do you understand, now? Do you understand? You were in my house, while I sought you afar off. Ah, tell me, is not this confession worth all your tears? Do you not wish you had shed more, much more, in order to purchase this certitude?"
"Yes, still more," she said, so low that I scarcely heard her.
The words passed like a breath from her pallid lips. And the tears gushed from between her eyelashes, rolled down her cheeks, wetted the convulsed mouth, fell on that palpitating bosom.
"Juliana, my love! Oh, my love!" I cried, with a thrill of supreme felicity, throwing myself on my knees before her.
And I threw my arms around her, I laid my head on her bosom, I felt again in all my being that frenetic tension in which ends useless effort to express by an action, by a gesture, by a caress, the inexpressible internal passion. Her tears fell on my cheek. If the material effect of these warm life-drops had equalled the sensations that I received from them, I should carry an indelible mark on my skin.
"Oh! let me drink," I begged.
Raising myself, I placed my lips to her eyelids and I bathed them with her tears, while my hands lavished on her distracted caresses. My limbs had acquired an extraordinary flexibility, a sort of illusory fluidity that prevented me from noticing the obstacle presented by the clothes. It seemed to me that I had the power to enclose and envelop the entire person of the loved one.