Thus cried poor Livette, delirious once more. But Renaud was sitting beside her bed with his face in his hands, listening to her.
“It is you,” she went on; “you think me dead, and I can feel you take me in your arms and quickly carry me away. But why do you not weep, when you see me so? It is you, at last! I am dead, and still I feel you. You have me in your arms. Your heart beats fast. Mine has ceased to beat. Where were you, bad boy? What did you say to her? But that is past and gone!—Is that woman very dear to your heart?—Why do you come no more to my father’s house in the evening? He is very fond of you. Grandma is a dear old soul. Do you see how faithful she is to her dead husband? People knew how to love one another better in her day, she says. Is it true? Do you believe it, Jacques? And if I die, won’t you keep my memory sacred, as she keeps grandpa’s?—Why do you make me suffer so?—Are we two never to walk under the great elm again? Our pretty stone bench under the rose-bushes is very sad now, and lonely like a tombstone. Ah! if you had chosen! I was pretty, yes, pretty, pretty! And now I shall be ugly. For I have done with life, even if I am not dead. My life is at an end, at an end!”
XXV
THE PHANTOM
Livette, who had been carried back to the Château d’Avignon many days before, had not left her bed. The fever clung to her obstinately. Nothing could be done.
Was it really true, O God, that she was doomed to die, and he to see it? Was he to lose the future he had dreamed of, a future of unruffled happiness, of love and peace, as her husband; the joy he had known for such a brief space, of having a woman, sweet and dear and helpless as a child, to cherish and protect?—Was he condemned never to know the pleasure of having a family—a pleasure that had been denied to him, an orphan, and of which he had often dreamed as of one of the joys of Paradise—was he condemned never to know it, because he had forgotten his longing for a single day? The picture, dear to country-folk, of the chimney with the smoke curling upward, that seems to say to them, as far as it can be seen: “The soup is hot, the wife is waiting, the children are calling,” recurred sometimes to his mind, and he sighed profoundly.
The punishment that he saw coming upon him did not seem to him proportionate to the offence. There was no justice in it!
What is the meaning of that most terrible of all mysteries: that the love of the senses is more powerful than the love of the heart when separated from its object, even though the last be recognized as the more certain and the sweeter?
Between the lofty chapel and the subterranean crypt of the church of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, on the level of human life, does the miracle come always from below? And if it be so, is it any less a miracle? Which of you has fathomed the meaning of life? Who can say: “It is unjust,” or: “It is useless,” or: “What I do not see does not exist”? Who can say if Livette’s sufferings and Renaud’s, their troubles and their heart-burnings, all the invisible and inexplicable movements within themselves,—of which they knew nothing,—were not preparing the way for realities inconceivable to our minds? The ideal, the dream of what is best, is the essential condition of the material development of mankind. No force is wasted; everything is transformed. “Everything is of some use,” said the old shepherd Sigaud. “It takes all kinds to make a world.”