On arriving at home, Berthe found a costume which had just come from M. Grandhomme’s laid out on her bed. At any other moment, the sight would have claimed her delighted attention, but she turned from it with a feeling of indifference now, almost of disgust. Antoinette, who had been puzzling over some new trick in the tunic, took it up in a flurry and was for trying it on at once, to see how it fitted and whether the novelty became her mistress, but Berthe, with a movement of impatience, told her to put it away, that she was in no mood for attending to bétises just then. The girl opened her eyes in astonishment. A costume of Grandhomme’s, that cost eleven hundred francs, to be called a bétise! It was flat profanity. She left the room with a painful presentiment that something very serious was amiss with Madame la Comtesse.
A soon as Berthe was alone, she began to think. It was a new experience in her life, this process of thinking, and she was hard pressed by it, for it was no vacant reverie that she was indulging in, but a sharp, compulsory review of her past and present existence—and the result was anything but soothing. Her life up to this day had been the life of a human butterfly, gay, airy, amusing, very enjoyable as regarded herself, and harmless enough as regarded her fellow-creatures. She had drunk her fill of the good things of life, enjoying herself in every possible way, but legitimately; she was incapable of wronging or hurting any one; she was extravagant in her dress and other luxuries, but her fortune allowed this, and she made no debts. So far, her life was blameless, and indeed, if she compared it with that of many of those around her, it was a very respectable one. But suddenly all her theories had collapsed, and her comfortable standard been upset. It turned out that she had a soul somewhere, though she had forgotten all about it, and been living, as if happily free from that incumbrance, in selfishness and folly, that were counted by this newly revealed standard little short of guilt. It was an unexpected discovery, and a most unpleasant one. That exclamation which had escaped her twice, and the thought of the great general sorrow, kept ringing in her ears like a warning and a reproach—“Thank God, I have no brother!” Who, then, were these men that she had just seen going forth in voluntary self-devotion to fight for her, and those who, like her, could not depend on themselves? Was there such a thing in Christendom as a woman or a man who had no brothers? Yet Berthe had believed herself to be this impossibility; she had been living up to it in utter forgetfulness of her brethren, ignoring them as a heathen might, or using them coldly for her own selfish purposes, to work for her and minister to her interests or her pleasures. There were some people whom she loved, but it was a love that narrowed to self; those who were disagreeable, or stupid, or bad she disliked, and, unknown to herself perhaps, despised. There were no wide sympathies in this discarded soul of hers for the great family of mankind; for the publicans and sinners and the lepers and the blind and the lame; she was kind-hearted, but suffering, to touch her, must be seen through some æsthetic coloring; the miseries and follies and infirmities of a prosaic kind that abounded on all sides of her she turned from in disgust, she avoided them like noisome things that belonged to creatures of an inferior clay and had no kinship with her more refined and privileged individuality. “Sacrifice is within the reach of all of you; you must help by sacrifice,” that old man had said. What a strange sound the words had! What did he mean? Sacrifice! Was there any place in her life for such a thing? She looked round at the azure hangings of her room, at the bright mirrors that reflected her figure in a dozen varying aspects, at the costly goods and trinkets that littered her dressing-table, at the couches and chairs of every modern contrivance inviting the body to luxurious repose, and she saw that her nest was fair to look at, but too full for this unbidden guest called sacrifice to find a place in it. Her eye wandered absently from one object to another till it fell upon a pale ivory figure on a velvet background, fastened to the wall, and half-shrouded by the curtains of the bed.
“I am young; it is not too late; I will begin life afresh,” said Berthe, rising and moving restlessly across the room; “I will begin to-morrow, no, to-day—now.”
She went close up to the bed, and stood for a moment with clasped hands, her lips moving in quick, low utterances, and then fell upon her knees before the pale, thorn-crowned head looking down upon her.
They never knew it, but this conquest of a noble woman’s life was perhaps the first victory won by the Breton soldiers who set out to battle that day!
AFTER READING MR. TUPPER’S PROVERBIAL PHILOSOPHY.
On wisdom’s steed sit Solomon and Tupper,
The saddle one bestrides, and one the crupper.