CHAPTER XV.
It needs no length of words to inform thee, my intelligent reader, be
thou man or woman--but more especially woman--of the consequences
following each other, as wave follows wave in a tide, that resulted from
the interview with which my last chapter closed. Gustave is removed to
his parents' house; he remains for weeks confined within doors, or, on
sunny days, takes an hour or so in his own carriage, drawn by the horse
bought from Rochebriant, into by-roads remote from the fashionable world;
Isaura visits his mother, liking, respecting, influenced by her more and
more; in those visits she sits beside the sofa on which Rameau reclines.
Gradually, gently--more and more by his mother's lips--is impressed on
her the belief that it is in her power to save a human life, and to
animate its career towards those goals which are never based wholly upon
earth in the earnest eyes of genius, or perhaps in the yet more upward
vision of pure-souled believing woman.
And Gustave himself, as he passes through the slow stages of
convalescence, seems so gratefully to ascribe to her every step in his
progress--seems so gently softened in character--seems so refined from
the old affectations, so ennobled above the old cynicism--and, above all,
so needing her presence, so sunless without it, that--well, need I finish
the sentence?--the reader will complete what I leave unsaid.
Enough, that one day Isaura returned home from a visit at Madame Rameau's
with the knowledge that her hand was pledged--her future life disposed
of; and that, escaping from the Venosta, whom she so fondly, and in her
hunger for a mother's love, called Madre, the girl shut herself up in her
own room with locked doors.
Ah, poor child! ah, sweet-voiced Isaura! whose delicate image I feel
myself too rude and too hard to transfer to this page in the purity of
its outlines, and the blended softnesses of its hues--thou who, when
saying things serious in the words men use, saidst them with a
seriousness so charming, and with looks so feminine--thou, of whom no man
I ever knew was quite worthy--ah, poor, simple, miserable girl, as I see
thee now in the solitude of that white-curtained virginal room; hast
thou, then, merged at last thy peculiar star into the cluster of all
these commonplace girls whose lips have said "Ay," when their hearts said
"No"?--thou, O brilliant Isaura! thou, O motherless child!
She had sunk into her chair--her own favourite chair, the covering of it
had been embroidered by Madame de Grantmesnil, and bestowed on her as a
birthday present last year--the year in which she had first learned what
it is to love--the year in which she had first learned what it is to
strive for fame. And somehow uniting, as many young people do, love and
fame in dreams of the future, that silken seat had been to her as the
Tripod of Delphi was to the Pythian: she had taken to it, as it were
intuitively, in all those hours, whether of joy or sorrow, when youth
seeks to prophesy, and does but dream.
There she sat now, in a sort of stupor--a sort of dreary bewilderment--
the illusion of the Pythian gone--desire of dream and of prophecy alike
extinct--pressing her hands together, and muttering to herself, "What has
happened?--what have I done?"
Three hours later you would not have recognised the same face that you
see now. For then the bravery, the honour, the loyalty of the girl's
nature had asserted their command. Her promise had been given to one
man--it could not be recalled. Thought itself of any other man must be
banished. On her hearth lay ashes and tinder--the last remains of every
treasured note from Graham Vane; of the hoarded newspaper extracts that
contained his name; of the dry treatise he had published, and which had
made the lovely romance-writer first desire "to know something about
politics." Ay, if the treatise had been upon fox-hunting, she would have
desired "to know something about" that! Above all, yet distinguishable
from the rest--as the sparks still upon stem and leaf here and there
faintly glowed and twinkled--the withered flowers which recorded that
happy hour in the arbour, and the walks of the forsaken garden--the hour
in which she had so blissfully pledged herself to renounce that career in
art wherein fame would have been secured, but which would not have united
Fame with Love--in dreams evermore over now.
