XIV
They met again the next day, however. He begged her to give him one last day of fraternal conversation, and to take one last friendly, quiet, bourgeois walk with him. They went to the Jardin des Plantes, sat down under the great cedar, and visited the labyrinth. It was a mild day; there were no traces of the snow. The sun shone pale through the light-purple clouds. The buds were already bursting with sap. Laurent was a poet, a contemplative poet and artist, nothing else, that day: a profound, incredible tranquillity; no remorse, no desires, and no hopes; at intervals, flashes of ingenuous gaiety.
Thérèse, who watched him with amazement, could hardly believe that everything was at an end between them.
The next day, there was another terrible tempest, without cause or pretext, precisely as a storm gathers in the summer sky for no other reason than that it was fair the day before.
Then, from day to day, everything became darker and darker, and it was like the end of the world, like continual flashes of lightning in the darkness.
One night, he came to her house very late, in a completely dazed condition, and, having no idea where he was, without a word to her, threw himself on the sofa in the salon, and fell asleep.
Thérèse went into her studio, and prayed to God fervently and despairingly to deliver her from that torture. She was discouraged; her cup was full. She wept and prayed all night.
Day was just breaking when she heard the bell ring at her gate. Catherine was asleep, and Thérèse supposed that some belated passer-by had made a mistake in the house. The ring was repeated, once, twice. Thérèse looked out through the round window in the hall over the front door. She saw a child of ten or twelve years, whose clothes indicated that his family was well-to-do, and whose upturned face seemed like an angel’s.
“What is it, my little friend?” she said; “have you lost your way?”
“No,” he replied, “I was brought here; I am looking for a lady whose name is Mademoiselle Jacques.”
Thérèse ran down, opened the door, and gazed at the child with extraordinary emotion. It seemed to her that she had seen him before, or that he resembled some one whom she knew and whose name she could not remember. The child also seemed confused and undecided.
She led him into the garden to question him; but, instead of answering her questions, he asked: “Are you Mademoiselle Thérèse?” while trembling from head to foot.
“I am, my child; what do you want with me? what can I do for you?”
“You must take me and keep me with you, if you will have me!”
“Who are you? Pray tell me!”
“I am the son of the Comte de ——”
Thérèse restrained a cry, and her first impulse was to spurn the child; but suddenly she was struck by his resemblance to a face she had recently painted, looking at it in a mirror, in order to send it to her mother; and that face was her own.
“Wait!” she cried, taking the boy in her arms with a convulsive movement. “What is your name?”
“Manuel.”
“Oh! Mon Dieu! who is your mother?”
“She is—I was told not to tell you right away! My mother used to be the Comtesse de ——, at Havana; she didn’t love me, and she used often to say to me: ‘You are not my son, I am not obliged to love you.’—But my papa loved me, and he often said to me: ‘You are all mine, you haven’t any mother.’—Then he died a year and a half ago, and the countess said: ‘You belong to me and you are going to stay with me.’—That was because my father left her some money on condition that I should always be known as their son. But she didn’t love me any better, and I was very unhappy with her, when a gentleman from the United States, whose name is Monsieur Richard Palmer, came all of a sudden and asked for me. The countess said: ‘No, I am not willing.’—Then Monsieur Palmer said to me: ‘Do you want me to take you to your real mother, who thinks you are dead, and who will be very happy to see you again?’—I said: ‘Yes, indeed I do!’ Then Monsieur Palmer came at night in a boat, because we lived on the sea-shore, and I got up very softly, very softly, and we sailed together to a big ship, and then we crossed the great ocean, and here we are.”
“Here you are!” said Thérèse, who held the child close to her heart, and, trembling with frantic joy, enveloped him in a single, fervent kiss while he was speaking; “where is Palmer?”
“I don’t know,” said the child. “He brought me to the door, and told me to ring; then I didn’t see him again.”
“Let us look for him,” said Thérèse, rising; “he cannot be far away!”
She ran out with the child, and they found Palmer, who was waiting at a little distance, to make sure that the boy was recognized by his mother.
“Richard! Richard!” cried Thérèse, throwing herself at his feet in the middle of the still deserted street, as she would have done if it had been full of people. “To me you are God!”
She could say no more; suffocated by tears of joy, she well-nigh went mad.
Palmer led her beneath the trees on the Champs-Elysées, and made her sit down. It was at least an hour before she became calm and recovered her wits, and could manage to caress her son without danger of smothering him.
“Now,” said Palmer, “I have paid my debt. You gave me days of happiness and hope, and I did not choose to remain under obligations to you. I give you a whole life-time of affection and consolation, for this child is an angel, and it costs me dear to part from him. I have deprived him of one inheritance, and I owe him one in exchange. You have no right to object; my measures are taken, and all his interests are properly cared for. He has a purse in his pocket which assures his present and his future. Adieu, Thérèse! Be sure that I am your friend in life and in death.”
Palmer went away happy; he had done a good deed. Thérèse did not choose to return to the house where Laurent was sleeping. She took a cab, after sending a messenger to Catherine with her instructions, which she wrote at a small café where she and her son breakfasted. They passed the day driving about Paris, equipping themselves for a long journey. In the evening, Catherine joined them with the boxes she had packed during the day, and Thérèse left Paris to conceal her child, her happiness, her repose, her toil, her joy, her life, in the depths of Germany. She was selfishly happy; she thought no more of what would become of Laurent without her. She was a mother, and the mother had killed the mistress beyond recall.
Laurent slept all day, and awoke in solitude. He rose, cursing Thérèse for going out to walk without thinking of ordering supper for him. He was surprised not to find Catherine; consigned the house to all the devils, and went away.
Not until some days later did he understand what had happened to him. When he saw that Thérèse’s house was sublet, the furniture stored or sold, and when he waited weeks and months without receiving a word from her, he abandoned hope, and thought of nothing but wooing oblivion.
Not until a year had elapsed did he find a way to send a letter to Thérèse. He charged himself with all his misfortunes, and implored a return of the former friendship; then reverted to the vein of passion, and concluded thus:
“I know that I do not deserve even this from you, for I cursed you, and in my despair at losing you I made the efforts of a desperate man to cure myself. Yes, I strove to make your character and your conduct unnatural in my own eyes; I said evil of you with people who hate you, and I took delight in hearing evil said of you by people who did not know you. I treated you absent as I treated you when you were here. And why are you not here? It is your fault if I go mad; you should not have abandoned me. Oh! wretch that I am, I feel that I hate you at the same time that I adore you. I feel that my whole life will be passed in loving you and cursing you. And I see that you detest me! And I would like to kill you! And if you were here I should fall at your feet! Thérèse, Thérèse, have you become a monster, that you no longer know pity? Oh! what a horrible punishment is this incurable love, combined with this unsatisfied anger! What have I done, O my God! to be reduced to lose everything, even liberty to love or hate?”
Thérèse replied:
“Adieu forever! But be sure that you have done nothing to me which I have not forgiven, and that you can never do anything which I cannot forgive. God condemns certain men of genius to wander about in the tempest and to create while in pain. I have studied you enough in your lights and shadows, in your grandeur and your weakness, to know that you are the victim of destiny, and that you should not be weighed in the same scales with most other men. Your suffering and your doubt, which you call your punishment, may be the conditions upon which your glory depends. Learn, therefore, to submit to them. You aspired with all your might to ideal happiness, and you grasped it only in your dreams. But your dreams, my child, are your reality, they are your talent, they are your life; are you not an artist?
“Have no fear, God will forgive you for not being able to love! He doomed you to that insatiable aspiration, so that your youth should not be engrossed by one woman. The women of the future, they who will gaze at your work from century to century,—they are your sisters and your sweethearts.”