Livette, with head thrown back, face turned toward the sky, eyes closed, mouth open, and grass mingled with her straying hair, was lying among the water-lilies, as if asleep, and in the throes of a bad dream. He also saw her two little clenched hands, above the water, clinging to the reeds.
Transformed for a moment to a statue, Renaud soon aroused himself, and, bending over Livette, put his hands under her armpits. The poor body, buried in the thick, black ooze, came slowly forth, torn from its bed like the smooth stalk of a lily.
When he had the poor body in his arms, inert and cold, perhaps dead,—the body of the poor, dear child, whose skirts, entangled in a net-work of long grasses, clung tightly to her dangling legs,—Renaud suddenly uttered a roar as of an enraged wild beast, and ran like a madman at the top of his speed to the nearest farm-house.
XXIII
THE PURSUIT
One forgives only those whom one loves; only those who love forgive. Love at its apogee is naught but the power of inspiring forgiveness and bestowing it; and the social laws, which are of the mechanism of human justice, seem to have realized that fact, since they ignore the testimony of all those who would naturally be expected to love the culprit.
Sympathy is simply a laying aside—in favor of those we love—of the implacable severity which we use but little in dealing with ourselves, and which attributes to those who pass judgment an unerring wisdom which is not human, or a self-confidence which is too much so.
Livette, as she lay sick upon the best bed in the Icard farm-house, already had, in her sorrowing heart, an adorable feeling of indulgence for Renaud, which would have made the blessed maidens who laid the Crucified One in his shroud, smile with joy in the mystic heaven of the lofty chapel. She believed that she would die by her fiancé’s fault, and she pitied him. Forgiveness sooner or later redeems him who receives, and consoles him who accords it. In the sentiment of compassion is hidden the divine future of mankind.