She looked at me with speechless embarrassment, sighed deeply, and a tear stole down her cheek. At length, withdrawing her hand, she said, in almost a whisper, and with an evident effort, "This must not be. I feel infinite honour in your good opinion—deeply grateful for your kindness. But this must not be. No. I should rather wear this habit for my life, than make so ungenerous a return to the noble spirit that can thus offer its friendship to a stranger."
"No, Clotilde, no. Again, in my turn, I say, this must not be; you are no stranger. I know you at this hour as well as if I had known you from the first hour of my being. I gave my heart to you from the moment when I first saw you among your countrywomen in England. It required no time to make me feel that you were my fate. It was an instinct, a spell, a voice of nature, a voice of heaven within me!"
She listened and trembled. I again took the hand, which was withheld no more. "From that day, Clotilde, you were my thought by day and my dream by night. All my desires of distinction were, that it might be seen by your eye; all my hopes of fortune, that I might be enabled to lay it at your feet. If a throne were offered to me on condition of renouncing you, I should have rejected it. If it were my lot to labour in the humblest rank of life, with you by my side I should have cheerfully laboured; and, with your hand in mine, I should have said, I have found what is worth the world—happiness!"
Tears flowed down her cheeks, which were now like marble. She feebly attempted to smile, while, with eyelids drooping, and her whole frame quivering with emotion, she murmured in broken accents, "It is impossible—utterly impossible! leave me. I must not bring you a portionless, a helpless, a nameless being—a mere dependent on your kindness, a burden on your fortune, an obstacle to your whole advance in the world!" A rich flush suddenly lighted up her lovely countenance, and a new splendour flashed from her eyes. She threw back her head loftily, and looking upwards, as if to draw thoughts from above—"Sir," said she, "I am as proud as you. I have had noble ancestors; I have borne a noble name. If that name has fallen, it is in the common wreck of my country. Our fortunes have sunk, only where the monarchy has gone down along with them; and I shall never degrade the memory of those ancestors, nor humiliate still more the fallen name of our house, by imposing my obscurity, my poverty, on one who has honoured me as you have done. Now—farewell! My resolution is fixed. Farewell, my friend! I shall never forget this day." She turned away her face, and wept abundantly; then, fixing a deep look on me, she added—"I own that it would be a consolation to Clotilde de Tourville to believe that she may be sometimes remembered; but, until times change, we meet no more—if they change not, we part for ever."
I was so completely startled, so thunderstruck, by this declaration, that I could not utter a word. I stood gazing at her with open lips. I felt a mist gathering over my eyes; a strange sensation about my heart chilled my whole frame. I tottered to the sofa and pressed my hand in pain upon my eyes; when I withdrew it, I was alone—Clotilde was gone, she had vanished with the silence of a vision.
I left the house immediately, in a state of mind which seemed like a dissolution of all my faculties. I could not speak—I could scarcely see—I could only gasp for air, and retain sufficient power over my limbs to guide my steps to my melancholy dwelling. There I threw myself on my rough bed, and lingered throughout the day in an exhaustion of mind and body, which I sometimes thought to be the approach of death. How little could Clotilde have intended that I should suffer thus for her high-toned delicacy! Still, in all my misery of soul, I did her justice. I remembered the countenance of melancholy beauty with which she announced her final determination. The accents of her impassioned voice continually rose in my recollection, giving the deepest testimony of a heart struggling at once with affection and a sense of duty. In my wildest reveries during that day and night of wretchedness, I felt that, if she could have spared me a single pang, she would have rejoiced to cheer, to console, to tranquillize me. Those were strange feelings for a rejected lover, but they were entirely mine. There was so lofty a spirit in her glance, so true a sincerity in her language, so pure and transparent a truth in her sighs, and smiles, and involuntary tears, that I acquitted her, from my soul, of all attempts to try, or triumph over, my devotion to her. More than once, during that night of anguish, I almost imagined the scene of the day actually passing again before my eyes. I saw her sorrows, and vainly endeavoured to subdue them; I heard her convulsive tones, and attempted to calm them; I reasoned with her, talked of our common helplessness, acknowledged the dignity and the delicacy of her conduct, and even gave her lip the kiss of peace and sorrow as I bade her farewell. Deep but exquisite illusion! which I cherished, and strove to renew; until, suddenly aroused by some changing of the sentinels, or passing of the attendants, I looked round, and saw nothing but the gloomy roof, the old flickering of the huge lantern hanging from the centre of the hall, and the beds where so many had slept their last, and which so many of the sleepers were never to leave with life. I then had the true experience of human passion. Love, in the light and gay, may be as sportive as themselves; in the calm and grave, it may be strong and deep; but in some, it is strong as tempest and consuming as flame.
I should probably have closed my days in that place of all afflicting sights and sounds, but for my good old Béguine. On her first visit at dawn, she lectured me prodigiously on the folly of exposing myself to the hazards of the night air, of which she evidently thought much more than of the Austrian cannon-balls. "They might shower upon the buildings as they pleased, but," said the Béguine, "if they kill, their business is done. It is your cold, your damp, your night air, that carries off, without letting any one know how," the perplexity of science on the subject plainly forming the chief evil in poor Juliet's mind.
"See my own condition," said she, striving to bring her recollections in aid of her advice. "At fifteen I was a barmaid at the Swartz Adler; there I ran in and out, danced at all the family fêtes, and was as gay as a bird on the tree. But that life was too good to last. At twenty, a corporal of Prussian dragoons fell in love with me, or I with him—it is all the same. His regiment was ordered to Silesia, and away we all marched. But if ever there was a country of fogs, that was the one. There are, now and then, a few even in our delightful France; but, in Silesia, they have a patent for them, they have them par privilège; if men could eat them, there would never be a chance of starving in Silesia. So we all got sore throats. Cannon and musketry were nothing to them. Our dragoons dropped off like flies at the end of summer; and, unless we had been ordered away to keep the Turks from marching to Berlin, or the saints know where, the regiment would have had its last quarters in this world within a league of the marshes of Breslau. So I say ever since—take care of damp."
Having thus relieved her good-natured spirit of its burden, she proceeded to give me sketches of her history. The corporal had fallen a victim—though whether to Silesian fog, brandy, or bullet, she left doubtful—and she had married his successor in the rank. Love and matrimony in the army are of a different order from either in civil life; for the love is perpetual, the matrimony precarious. Juliet acknowledged that she never left above a month's interval between her afflictions as a widow and her consolations as a wife. In the course of time she changed her service. A handsome Austrian sergeant won her heart and hand, and she followed him to Hungary. There, between marsh fever and Turkish skirmishing, various casualties occurred in the matrimonial list; and Juliet, who evidently had been a handsome brunette, and whose French vivacity distanced all the heavy charms of the Austrian peasantry, was never without a husband. At length, like other veterans, having served her country to the full extent of her patriotism, she was discharged with her tenth husband, and of course induced the honest Austrian to come to the only country on which, in a Frenchwoman's creed, the sun shines. There the Austrian died.
"I loved him," said the Béguine, wiping her eyes. "He was an excellent fellow, though dull; and I believe, next to smoking and schnaps, he loved me better than any thing else in the world. But on his emperor's birth-day, which he always kept with a bottle of brandy additional, he rambled out into the fog, and came back with a cold. Peste! I knew it was all over with him; but I nursed him like a babe, and he died, like a true Austrian, with his meerschaum in his mouth, bequeathing me his snuff-box, the certificate of his pension, and his blessing. I buried him, got pensioned, and was broken-hearted. What, then, was to be done? I was born for society. I once or twice thought of an eleventh husband; but I was rich. I had above a thousand francs, and a pension of a hundred; this perplexed me. I was determined to be married for myself alone. Yet, how could I know whether the hypocrites who clustered round me were not thinking of my money all the while? So I determined to marry no more—and became a Béguine."