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O Richard! O mon roi, L’univers t’abandonne! |
It would seem as if he could not but remember how they had often sung and played it together in their golden youth, and the secret, tender meaning they had affixed to it, known only to themselves. And Francezka, in her unhappy time, had often played that air upon the harpsichord as recalling her lost love. But Gaston only shook his head.
“It is gone from me with other things—the sweetest recollections—the sacredest memories—never to return.”
“When you begin to play the guitar once more, as 355 you used,” said Francezka gently, and smiling, to encourage him, “all these songs will come back to you again.”
Gaston raised his right hand, brown and sinewy.
“This hand looks to be the same it was when I gave it you,” he said, smiling back sadly at Francezka, “but, like my memory, it is not what it once was. I can neither play the guitar nor write, nor do anything with it as I once did.”
It was sad to see so young a man in the full vigor of manhood with these cruel marks of mental and physical suffering left upon him, but on the whole, few men living could at that moment reckon themselves happier than Gaston Cheverny. If he had suffered he had certainly come into a royal recompense.
We sat late, and afterward there was dancing in the Diana gallery. Francezka walked the minuet with Count Saxe, and afterward danced in a very merry branle. She had danced since Gaston’s return, for the first time in eight years, she told me, having no heart to dance in that first year, when she was secretly Gaston Cheverny’s wife, because he was away at the wars, and having never seen dancing in those seven years of sorrow when she waited and longed for him. But she had not lost either her grace or her gaiety, and danced as she had done in her first girlhood. Madame Riano did some strange Scotch dances with great agility in spite of her sixty years, and rated everybody soundly who could not do the Scotch dances and did not know the Scotch airs.
It was midnight before the company dispersed. I did not go to my chamber, but driven by some impulse 356 stronger than myself, slipped out of the château and took my way toward a spot sure to be silent and deserted at this hour—the Italian garden.
A great bright moon rode in the heavens, making the landscape all black and silver. The yews and box trees were as dark as the darkest night, and the lake lay in its ever-present gloom shadowed by its sad cypresses and cedars, with but a shimmering of light in its center. In the deep silence its faintly mournful sound was softly heard. Francezka was happy, that was plain. All else mattered little—even a strange and hateful feeling within my own breast—I no longer loved Gaston Cheverny.