"That is the generous, insane cry of youth: what does it matter if you fail, providing only that you are doing something, eh? You yield to a craving for activity and do not see the obstacles. There are obstacles, however, and the worst of all is this: that there are no men. In that sense your father is right in appealing to a brutal but none the less powerful fact. Men's minds are not ripe, their hearts are not well-disposed; I see much land and many arms, but I do not see a single mind detached from the ego which governs the earth. A little more time, Emile, for the idea to bloom and spread; it will not be so long as people think; I shall not see it, but you will. Be patient, therefore!"
"What do you mean? does time do anything without us?"
"No, but it will do nothing without us all. There are times when one should be consoled for not being at work, if one is learning; then comes the time when one can learn and work at the same time. Do you feel that you are strong?"
"Very!"
"So much the better! And I believe it!—Well, Emile, we will talk some day—soon perhaps, in my next attack of fever, when my pulse beats a little faster than it does to-day."
In such conversations as this Emile found strength to live through the hours that he could not pass with Gilberte. There was something lacking in his friendship with Monsieur de Boisguilbault: it was the being able to speak to him of her and to tell him of his love. But there is in happy love a something superb which can do very well without advice of others, and the time when Emile would feel the need of complaining and of seeking a support under the burden of despair had not yet arrived.
In what did this happiness consist, do you ask? In the first place, he was in love—that is almost enough for him who loves dearly. And then he knew that he was loved, although he had never dared to ask the question and she would have dared even less to tell him so.
Meanwhile clouds were gathering on the horizon and Emile was destined to feel the approach of the storm. One day Janille said to him as he was leaving Châteaubrun: "Don't come again for three or four days; we have some business to attend to in the neighborhood and we shall be away." Emile turned pale: he thought that he was receiving his sentence, and he hardly had strength to ask what day the family would have returned to its penates. "Oh! toward the end of the week, I suppose," said Janille. "Indeed it is probable that I shall stay here; I am too old to run about over mountains, and you might come in as you ride by and ask if Monsieur Antoine and his daughter have returned."
"You will allow me then to call upon you?" said Emile, striving to conceal his mortal suffering.
"Why not, if your heart bids you?" replied the little old woman, drawing herself up with an air in which the distrustful Emile fancied that he could detect a touch of malice. "I am not afraid of being compromised!"