The evening, so sad for all the rest, was not so for Clement. Even his anxiety for his father was suspended: he felt a renewed hope for him as well as for everything else—yes, every thing. He no longer took a dark view of things: he was, as it were, intoxicated with hope. With what a sweet confiding look she had pressed his hand! In what a tone she cried: “Dear Clement, how happy I am to see you again”! Could the future, then, be as doubtful as he had so recently feared? As to the smiles of fortune, he no longer doubted: he was sure of winning them henceforth. He once thought himself inefficient, but he was mistaken. Might he not also be mistaken in thinking himself incapable of ever pleasing?—To this question he heard no other reply but the quickened pulsations of his heart, and the rippling of the water flowing past the seat to which he had betaken himself on the banks of the river.
Meanwhile, Fleurange and her cousins went up-stairs. Clement soon saw them all talking together in [pg 021] low tones on the large wooden gallery that extended around the house, and on which all the windows opened. Then they retired; but the light that shone for the first time that night was a long time visible, and Clement did not quit his post till he saw it was extinguished.
XXXV.
Fleurange gradually resumed the habits of domestic life—once the realization of all her dreams—and then, only then, she realized the extent and depth of the change she had undergone while separated from her friends.
She was no longer the same. No effort of her will could conceal this fact. Her heart, her thoughts, her regrets, her desires, and her hopes, were all elsewhere. Italy in all its brilliancy did not differ more from the peaceful landscape before her, charming as it was, with the little garden of roses and the river winding around it, the ruins beyond, and the dark forest in the background, than the vanished scenes—still so vividly remembered—of which that land was the enchanting theatre, differed from those now occurring beneath the more misty sky of Germany. At Florence, her struggles and efforts, and the necessity of action, stimulated her courage. The peace she found at Santa Maria revived her strength. But there, as we have said, the past and the future seemed suspended, as it were. Now the struggle was over as well as the pause that succeeded it, and she must again set forth on the way—act, live in the present, and courageously take up life again as she found it, with its actual duties and new combats. Fleurange had never felt more difficulty and repugnance in overcoming herself.
After the long restraint she had been obliged to make, it would have been some relief to be dispensed from all effort, especially at concealment, and freely give herself up to a profound melancholy, to pass away the hours in dreamy inaction, to weep when her heart was swelling with tears, and, if not to speak to every one of her sadness, at least take no trouble to conceal it.
This would have been her natural inclination, and it was only by an effort she refrained from yielding to it. But this would have shown the strength gained in her retreat to have been only factitious, and her intercourse with Madre Maddalena to have left, this time, no permanent influence. We have, however, no such act of cowardice to record respecting our heroine.
On the contrary, whoever saw her up at the first gleam of light in the east to relieve her aunt from all the cares of the ménage; whoever followed her first to the store-rooms to dispense the provisions for the day, accompanied by little Frida, whom she initiated into the mysteries of housekeeping, and then to the kitchen to give directions and sometimes even lend assistance to the old and not over-skilful cook; whoever saw her even going sometimes to market with a firm step, basket in hand, and returning with her cloak covered with dew, would not have imagined from the freshness she brought back from these matutinal walks, and the brilliancy which youth and health imparted to her complexion, that, more than once, the night had passed without sleep, and while hearing her early Mass, never neglected, she had shed so many scalding tears.
Other cares, more congenial and better calculated to absorb her mind, occupied the remainder of the day. Her special talent for waiting on the sick, and the beneficent influence she exercised over them, were again brought into requisition around her uncle, and Madame Dornthal blessed the day of her return as she witnessed the evident progress of so prolonged and painful a convalescence—a progress that gave them reason to hope in the complete restoration of the professor's faculties, if not in the possibility of his ever resuming constant or arduous labor. The young girl found these cares delightful, and her new duties towards her dear old friend Mademoiselle Josephine no less so.
Josephine Leblanc's affections had all been centred in her brother. She lived exclusively for him, and had never once thought of the possibility of surviving him. A person left alone in a house standing in a district devastated by war or fire, would not have felt more suddenly and strangely left alone than our poor old mademoiselle after the fatal blow that deprived her of her brother, so dear, so admired, and so venerated—the brother younger than herself, and in whose arms she had felt so sure of dying!