第19章 THE COUNTRY DOCTOR'S CONFESSION(2)

Nevertheless I abandoned myself to my new life with almost frenzied eagerness,and sought to drown in gaiety any vague lingering remorse that I felt.A man who has lost his self-respect cannot endure his own society,so I led the dissipated life that wealthy young men lead in Paris.Owing to a good education and an excellent memory,I seemed cleverer than I really was,forthwith I looked down upon other people;and those who,for their own purposes,wished to prove to me that Iwas possessed of extraordinary abilities,found me quite convinced on that head.Praise is the most insidious of all methods of treachery known to the world;and this is nowhere better understood than in Paris,where intriguing schemers know how to stifle every kind of talent at its birth by heaping laurels on its cradle.So I did nothing worthy of my reputation;I reaped no advantages from the golden opinions entertained of me,and made no acquaintances likely to be useful in my future career.I wasted my energies in numberless frivolous pursuits,and in the short-lived love intrigues that are the disgrace of salons in Paris,where every one seeks for love,grows blase in the pursuit,falls into the libertinism sanctioned by polite society,and ends by feeling as much astonished at real passion as the world is over a heroic action.I did as others did.Often I dealt to generous and candid souls the deadly wound from which I myself was slowly perishing.Yet though deceptive appearances might lead others to misjudge me,I could never overcome my scrupulous delicacy.Many times I have been duped,and should have blushed for myself had it been otherwise;I secretly prided myself on acting in good faith,although this lowered me in the eyes of others.As a matter of fact the world has a considerable respect for cleverness,whatever form it takes,and success justifies everything.So the world was pleased to attribute to me all the good qualities and evil propensities,all the victories and defeats which had never been mine;credited me with conquests of which I knew nothing,and sat in judgment upon actions of which I had never been guilty.I scorned to contradict the slanders,and self-love led me to regard the more flattering rumors with a certain complacence.Outwardly my existence was pleasant enough,but in reality I was miserable.If it had not been for the tempest of misfortunes that very soon burst over my head,all good impulses must have perished,and evil would have triumphed in the struggle that went on within me;enervating self-indulgence would have destroyed the body,as the detestable habits of egotism exhausted the springs of the soul.But I was ruined financially.This was how it came about.

"No matter how large his fortune may be,a man is sure to find some one else in Paris possessed of yet greater wealth,whom he must needs aim at surpassing.In this unequal conquest I was vanquished at the end of four years;and,like many another harebrained youngster,I was obliged to sell part of my property and to mortgage the remainder to satisfy my creditors.Then a terrible blow suddenly struck me down.

"Two years had passed since I had last seen the woman whom I had deserted.The turn that my affairs were taking would no doubt have brought me back to her once more;but one evening,in the midst of a gay circle of acquaintances,I received a note written in a trembling hand.It only contained these few words:

"'I have only a very little while to live,and I should like to see you,my friend,so that I may know what will become of my child--whether henceforward he will be yours;and also to soften the regret that some day you might perhaps feel for my death.'

"The letter made me shudder.It was a revelation of secret anguish in the past,while it contained a whole unknown future.I set out on foot,I would not wait for my carriage,I went across Paris,goaded by remorse,and gnawed by a dreadful fear that was confirmed by the first sight of my victim.In the extreme neatness and cleanliness beneath which she had striven to hid her poverty I read all the terrible sufferings of her life;she was nobly reticent about them in her effort to spare my feelings,and only alluded to them after I had solemnly promised to adopt our child.She died,sir,in spite of all the care lavished upon her,and all that science could suggest was done for her in vain.The care and devotion that had come too late only served to render her last moments less bitter.

"To support her little one she had worked incessantly with her needle.

Love for her child had given her strength to endure her life of hardship;but it had not enabled her to bear my desertion,the keenest of all her griefs.Many times she had thought of trying to see me,but her woman's pride had always prevented this.While I squandered floods of gold upon my caprices,no memory of the past had ever bidden a single drop to fall in her home to help mother and child to live;but she had been content to weep,and had not cursed me;she had looked upon her evil fortune as the natural punishment of her error.With the aid of a good priest of Saint Sulpice,whose kindly voice had restored peace to her soul,she had sought for hope in the shadow of the altar,whither she had gone to dry her tears.The bitter flood that I had poured into her heart gradually abated;and one day,when she heard her child say 'Father,'a word that she had not taught him,she forgave my crime.But sorrow and weeping and days and nights of ceaseless toil injured her health.Religion had brought its consolations and the courage to bear the ills of life,but all too late.She fell ill of a heart complaint brought on by grief and by the strain of expectation,for she always thought that I should return,and her hopes always sprang up afresh after every disappointment.Her health grew worse;and at last,as she was lying on her deathbed,she wrote those few lines,containing no word of reproach,prompted by religion,and by a belief in the goodness in my nature.She knew,she said,that I was blinded rather than bent on doing wrong.She even accused herself of carrying her womanly pride too far.'If I had only written sooner,'she said,'perhaps there might have been time for a marriage which would have legitimated our child.'

"It was only on her child's account that she wished for the solemnization of the ties that bound us,nor would she have sought for this if she had not felt that death was at hand to unloose them.But it was too late;even then she had only a few hours to live.By her bedside,where I learned to know the worth of a devoted heart,my nature underwent a final change.I was still at an age when tears are shed.During those last days,while the precious life yet lingered,my tears,my words,and everything I did bore witness to my heartstricken repentance.The meanness and pettiness of the society in which I had moved,the emptiness and selfishness of women of fashion,had taught me to wish for and to seek an elect soul,and now I had found it--too late.I was weary of lying words and of masked faces;counterfeit passion had set me dreaming;I had called on love;and now I beheld love lying before me,slain by my own hands,and had no power to keep it beside me,no power to keep what was so wholly mine.

"The experience of four years had taught me to know my own real character.My temperament,the nature of my imagination,my religious principles,which had not been eradicated,but had rather lain dormant;my turn of mind,my heart that only now began to make itself felt--everything within me led me to resolve to fill my life with the pleasures of affection,to replace a lawless love by family happiness --the truest happiness on earth.Visions of close and dear companionship appealed to me but the more strongly for my wanderings in the wilderness,my grasping at pleasures unennobled by thought or feeling.So though the revolution within me was rapidly effected,it was permanent.With my southern temperament,warped by the life I led in Paris,I should certainly have come to look without pity on an unhappy girl betrayed by her lover;I should have laughed at the story if it had been told me by some wag in merry company (for with us in France a clever bon mot dispels all feelings of horror at a crime),but all sophistries were silenced in the presence of this angelic creature,against whom I could bring no least word of reproach.There stood her coffin,and my child,who did not know that I had murdered his mother,and smiled at me.

"She died.She died happy when she saw that I loved her,and that this new love was due neither to pity nor to the ties that bound us together.Never shall I forget her last hours.Love had been won back,her mind was at rest about her child,and happiness triumphed over suffering.The comfort and luxury about her,the merriment of her child,who looked prettier still in the dainty garb that had replaced his baby-clothes,were pledges of a happy future for the little one,in whom she saw her own life renewed.

"The curate of Saint Sulpice witnessed my terrible distress.His words well-nigh made me despair.He did not attempt to offer conventional consolation,and put the gravity of my responsibilities unsparingly before me,but I had no need of a spur.The conscience within me spoke loudly enough already.A woman had placed a generous confidence in me.

I had lied to her from the first;I had told her that I loved her,and then I had cast her off;I had brought all this sorrow upon an unhappy girl who had braved the opinion of the world for me,and who therefore should have been sacred in my eyes.She had died forgiving me.Her implicit trust in the word of a man who had once before broken his promise to her effaced the memory of all her pain and grief,and she slept in peace.Agatha,who had given me her girlish faith,had found in her heart another faith to give me--the faith of a mother.Oh!sir,the child,HER child!God alone can know all that he was to me!The dear little one was like his mother;he had her winning grace in his little ways,his talk and ideas;but for me,my child was not only a child,but something more;was he not the token of my forgiveness,my honor?

"He should have more than a father's affection.He should be loved as his mother would have loved him.My remorse might change to happiness if I could only make him feel that his mother's arms were still about him.I clung to him with all the force of human love and the hope of heaven,with all the tenderness in my heart that God has given to mothers.The sound of the child's voice made me tremble.I used to watch him while he slept with a sense of gladness that was always new,albeit a tear sometimes fell on his forehead;I taught him to come to say his prayer upon my bed as soon as he awoke.How sweet and touching were the simple words of the Pater noster in the innocent childish mouth!Ah!and at times how terrible!'OUR FATHER WHICH ART INHEAVEN,'he began one morning;then he paused--'Why is it not OURMOTHER?'he asked,and my heart sank at his words.

"From the very first I had sown the seeds of future misfortune in the life of the son whom I idolized.Although the law has almost countenanced errors of youth by conceding to tardy regret a legal status to natural children,the insurmountable prejudices of society bring a strong force to the support of the reluctance of the law.All serious reflection on my part as to the foundations and mechanism of society,on the duties of man,and vital questions of morality date from this period of my life.Genius comprehends at first sight the connection between a man's principles and the fate of the society of which he forms a part;devout souls are inspired by religion with the sentiments necessary for their happiness;but vehement and impulsive natures can only be schooled by repentance.With repentance came new light for me;and I,who only lived for my child,came through that child to think over great social questions.

"I determined from the first that he should have all possible means of success within himself,and that he should be thoroughly prepared to take the high position for which I destined him.He learned English,German,Italian,and Spanish in succession;and,that he might speak these languages correctly,tutors belonging to each of these various nationalities were successively placed about him from his earliest childhood.His aptitude delighted me.I took advantage of it to give him lessons in the guise of play.I wished to keep his mind free from fallacies,and strove before all things to accustom him from childhood to exert his intellectual powers,to make a rapid and accurate general survey of a matter,and then,by a careful study of every least particular,to master his subject in detail.Lastly,I taught him to submit to discipline without murmuring.I never allowed an impure or improper word to be spoken in his hearing.I was careful that all his surroundings,and the men with whom he came in contact,should conduce to one end--to ennoble his nature,to set lofty ideals before him,to give him a love of truth and a horror of lies,to make him simple and natural in manner,as in word and deed.His natural aptitude had made his other studies easy to him,and his imagination made him quick to grasp these lessons that lay outside the province of the schoolroom.

What a fair flower to tend!How great are the joys that mothers know!

In those days I began to understand how his own mother had been able to live and to bear her sorrow.This,sir,was the great event of my life;and now I am coming to the tragedy which drove me hither.

"It is the most ordinary commonplace story imaginable;but to me it meant the most terrible pain.For some years I had thought of nothing but my child,and how to make a man of him;then,when my son was growing up and about to leave me,I grew afraid of my loneliness.Love was a necessity of my existence;this need for affection had never been satisfied,and only grew stronger with years.I was in every way capable of a real attachment;I had been tried and proved.I knew all that a steadfast love means,the love that delights to find a pleasure in self-sacrifice;in everything I did my first thought would always be for the woman I loved.In imagination I was fain to dwell on the serene heights far above doubt and uncertainty,where love so fills two beings that happiness flows quietly and evenly into their life,their looks,and words.Such love is to a life what religion is to the soul;a vital force,a power that enlightens and upholds.I understood the love of husband and wife in nowise as most people do;for me its full beauty and magnificence began precisely at the point where love perishes in many a household.I deeply felt the moral grandeur of a life so closely shared by two souls that the trivialities of everyday existence should be powerless against such lasting love as theirs.But where will the hearts be found whose beats are so nearly isochronous (let the scientific term pass)that they may attain to this beatific union?If they exist,nature and chance have set them far apart,so that they cannot come together;they find each other too late,or death comes too soon to separate them.There must be some good reasons for these dispensations of fate,but I have never sought to discover them.I cannot make a study of my wound,because I suffer too much from it.Perhaps perfect happiness is a monster which our species should not perpetuate.There were other causes for my fervent desire for such a marriage as this.I had no friends,the world for me was a desert.There is something in me that repels friendship.More than one person has sought me out,but,in spite of efforts on my part,it came to nothing.With many men I have been careful to show no sign of something that is called 'superiority;'I have adapted my mind to theirs;I have placed myself at their point of view,joined in their laughter,and overlooked their defects;any fame I might have gained,I would have bartered for a little kindly affection.They parted from me without regret.If you seek for real feeling in Paris,snares await you everywhere,and the end is sorrow.Wherever I set my foot,the ground round about me seemed to burn.My readiness to acquiesce was considered weakness though if I unsheathed my talons,like a man conscious that he may some day wield the thunderbolts of power,I was thought ill-natured;to others,the delightful laughter that ceases with youth,and in which in later years we are almost ashamed to indulge,seemed absurd,and they amused themselves at my expense.

People may be bored nowadays,but none the less they expect you to treat every trivial topic with befitting seriousness.

"A hateful era!You must bow down before mediocrity,frigidly polite mediocrity which you despise--and obey.On more mature reflection,Ihave discovered the reasons of these glaring inconsistencies.

Mediocrity is never out of fashion,it is the daily wear of society;genius and eccentricity are ornaments that are locked away and only brought out on certain days.Everything that ventures forth beyond the protection of the grateful shadow of mediocrity has something startling about it.

"So,in the midst of Paris,I led a solitary life.I had given up everything to society,but it had given me nothing in return;and my child was not enough to satisfy my heart,because I was not a woman.

My life seemed to be growing cold within me;I was bending under a load of secret misery when I met the woman who was to make me know the might of love,the reverence of an acknowledged love,love with its teeming hopes of happiness--in one word--love.

"I had renewed my acquaintance with that old friend of my father's who had once taken charge of my affairs.It was in his house that I first met her whom I must love as long as life shall last.The longer we live,sir,the more clearly we see the enormous influence of ideas upon the events of life.Prejudices,worthy of all respect,and bred by noble religious ideas,occasioned my misfortunes.This young girl belonged to an exceeding devout family,whose views of Catholicism were due to the spirit of a sect improperly styled Jansenists,which,in former times,caused troubles in France.You know why?""No,"said Genestas.

"Jansenius,Bishop of Ypres,once wrote a book which was believed to contain propositions at variance with the doctrines of the Holy See.

When examined at a later date,there appeared to be nothing heretical in the wording of the text,some authors even went so far as to deny that the heretical propositions had any real existence.However it was,these insignificant disputes gave rise to two parties in the Gallican Church--the Jansenists and the Jesuits.Great men were found in either camp,and a struggle began between two powerful bodies.The Jansenists affected an excessive purity of morals and of doctrine,and accused the Jesuits of preaching a relaxed morality.The Jansenists,in fact,were Catholic Puritans,if two contradictory terms can be combined.During the Revolution,the Concordat occasioned an unimportant schism,a little segregation of ultra-catholics who refused to recognize the Bishops appointed by the authorities with the consent of the Pope.This little body of the faithful was called the Little Church;and those within its fold,like the Jansenists,led the strictly ordered lives that appear to be a first necessity of existence in all proscribed and persecuted sects.Many Jansenist families had joined the Little Church.The family to which this young girl belonged had embraced the equally rigid doctrines of both these Puritanisms,tenets which impart a stern dignity to the character and mien of those who hold them.It is the nature of positive doctrine to exaggerate the importance of the most ordinary actions of life by connecting them with ideas of a future existence.This is the source of a splendid and delicate purity of heart,a respect for others and for self,of an indescribably keen sense of right and wrong,a wide charity,together with a justice so stern that it might well be called inexorable,and lastly,a perfect hatred of lies and of all the vices comprised by falsehood.

"I can recall no more delightful moments than those of our first meeting at my old friend's house.I beheld for the first time this shy young girl with her sincere nature,her habits of ready obedience.All the virtues peculiar to the sect to which she belonged shone in her,but she seemed to be unconscious of her merit.There was a grace,which no austerity could diminish,about every movement of her lissome,slender form;her quiet brow,the delicate grave outlines of her face,and her clearly cut features indicated noble birth;her expression was gentle and proud;her thick hair had been simply braided,the coronet of plaits about her head served,all unknown to her,as an adornment.Captain,she was for me the ideal type that is always made real for us in the woman with whom we fall in love;for when we love,is it not because we recognize beauty that we have dreamed of,the beauty that has existed in idea for us is realized?

When I spoke to her,she answered simply,without shyness or eagerness;she did not know the pleasure it was to me to see her,to hear the musical sounds of her voice.All these angels are revealed to our hearts by the same signs;by the sweetness of their tongues,the tenderness in their eyes,by their fair,pale faces,and their gracious ways.All these things are so blended and mingled that we feel the charm of their presence,yet cannot tell in what that charm consists,and every movement is an expression of a divine soul within.

I loved passionately.This newly awakened love satisfied all my restless longings,all my ambitious dreams.She was beautiful,wealthy,and nobly born;she had been carefully brought up;she had all the qualifications which the world positively demands of a woman placed in the high position which I desired to reach;she had been well educated,she expressed herself with a sprightly facility at once rare and common in France;where the most prettily worded phrases of many women are emptiness itself,while her bright talk was full of sense.Above all,she had a deep consciousness of her own dignity which made others respect her;I know of no more excellent thing in a wife.I must stop,captain;no one can describe the woman he loves save very imperfectly,preexistent mysteries which defy analysis lie between them.

"I very soon took my old friend into my confidence.He introduced me to her family,and gave me the countenance of his honorable character.

I was received at first with the frigid politeness characteristic of those exclusive people who never forsake those whom they have once admitted to their friendship.As time went on they welcomed me almost as one of the family;this mark of their esteem was won by my behavior in the matter.In spite of my passionate love,I did nothing that could lower me in my own eyes;I did not cringe,I paid no court to those upon whom my fate depended,before all things I showed myself a man,and not other than I really was.When I was well known to them,my old friend,who was as desirous as I myself that my life of melancholy loneliness should come to an end,spoke of my hopes and met with a favorable reception;but with the diplomatic shrewdness which is almost a second nature with men of the world,he was silent with regard to an error of my youth,as he termed it.He was anxious to bring about a 'satisfactory marriage'for me,an expression that makes of so solemn an act a business transaction in which husband and wife endeavor to cheat each other.In his opinion,the existence of my child would excite a moral repugnance,in comparison with which the question of money would be as nought,and the whole affair would be broken off at once,and he was right.

"'It is a matter which will be very easily settled between you and your wife;it will be easy to obtain her full and free forgiveness,'

he said.

"In short,he tried to silence my scruples,and all the insidious arguments that worldly wisdom could suggest were brought to bear upon me to this end.I will confess to you,sir,that in spite of my promise,my first impulse was to act straightforwardly and to make everything known to the head of the family,but the thought of his uncompromising sternness made me pause,and the probable consequences of the confession appalled me;my courage failed,I temporized with my conscience,I determined to wait until I was sufficiently sure of the affection of the girl I hoped to win,before hazarding my happiness by the terrible confession.My resolution to acknowledge everything openly,at a convenient season,vindicated the sophistries of worldly wisdom and the sagacity of my old friend.So the young girl's parents received me as their future son-in-law without,as yet,taking their friends into their confidence.

"An infinite discretion is the distinguishing quality of pious families;they are reticent about everything,even about matters of no importance.You would not believe,sir,how this sedate gravity and reserve,pervading every least action,deepens the current of feeling and thought.Everything in that house was done with some useful end in view;the women spent their leisure time in making garments for the poor;their conversation was never frivolous;laughter was not banished,but there was a kindly simplicity about their merriment.

Their talk had none of the piquancy which scandal and ill-natured gossip give to the conversation of society;only the father and uncle read the newspapers,even the most harmless journal contains references to crimes or to public evils,and she whom I hoped to win had never cast her eyes over their sheets.How strange it was,at first,to listen to these orthodox people!But in a little while,the pure atmosphere left the same impression upon the soul that subdued colors give to the eyes,a sense of serene repose and of tranquil peace.