第42章 LOUISE DE CHAULIEU TO RENEE DE L'ESTORADE June(1)

Dear wedded sweetheart,--Your letter has arrived at the very moment to hearten me for a bold step which I have been meditating night and day.

I feel within me a strange craving for the unknown,or,if you will,the forbidden,which makes me uneasy and reveals a conflict in progress in my soul between the laws of society and of nature.Icannot tell whether nature in me is the stronger of the two,but Isurprise myself in the act of meditating between the hostile powers.

In plain words,what I wanted was to speak with Felipe,alone,at night,under the lime-trees at the bottom of our garden.There is no denying that this desire beseems the girl who has earned the epithet of an "up-to-date young lady,"bestowed on me by the Duchess in jest,and which my father has approved.

Yet to me there seems a method in this madness.I should recompense Felipe for the long nights he has passed under my window,at the same time that I should test him,by seeing what he thinks of my escapade and how he comports himself at a critical moment.Let him cast a halo round my folly--behold in him my husband;let him show one iota less of the tremulous respect with which he bows to me in the Champs-Elysees--farewell,Don Felipe.

As for society,I run less risk in meeting my lover thus than when Ismile to him in the drawing-rooms of Mme.de Maufrigneuse and the old Marquise de Beauseant,where spies now surround us on every side;and Heaven only knows how people stare at the girl,suspected of a weakness for a grotesque,like Macumer.

I cannot tell you to what a state of agitation I am reduced by dreaming of this idea,and the time I have given to planning its execution.I wanted you badly.What happy hours we should have chattered away,lost in the mazes of uncertainty,enjoying in anticipation all the delights and horrors of a first meeting in the silence of night,under the noble lime-trees of the Chaulieu mansion,with the moonlight dancing through the leaves!As I sat alone,every nerve tingling,I cried,"Oh!Renee,where are you?"Then your letter came,like a match to gunpowder,and my last scruples went by the board.

Through the window I tossed to my bewildered adorer an exact tracing of the key of the little gate at the end of the garden,together with this note:

"Your madness must really be put a stop to.If you broke your neck,you would ruin the reputation of the woman you profess to love.Are you worthy of a new proof of regard,and do you deserve that I should talk with you under the limes at the foot of the garden at the hour when the moon throws them into shadow?"Yesterday at one o'clock,when Griffith was going to bed,I said to her:

"Take your shawl,dear,and come out with me.I want to go to the bottom of the garden without anyone knowing."Without a word,she followed me.Oh!my Renee,what an awful moment when,after a little pause full of delicious thrills of agony,I saw him gliding along like a shadow.When he had reached the garden safely,I said to Griffith:

"Don't be astonished,but the Baron de Macumer is here,and,indeed,it is on that account I brought you with me."No reply from Griffith.

"What would you have with me?"said Felipe,in a tone of such agitation that it was easy to see he was driven beside himself by the noise,slight as it was,of our dresses in the silence of the night and of our steps upon the gravel.

"I want to say to you what I could not write,"I replied.

Griffith withdrew a few steps.It was one of those mild nights,when the air is heavy with the scent of flowers.My head swam with the intoxicating delight of finding myself all but alone with him in the friendly shade of the lime-trees,beyond which lay the garden,shining all the more brightly because the white facade of the house reflected the moonlight.The contrast seemed,as it were,an emblem of our clandestine love leading up to the glaring publicity of a wedding.

Neither of us could do more at first than drink in silently the ecstasy of a moment,as new and marvelous for him as for me.At last Ifound tongue to say,pointing to the elm-tree:

"Although I am not afraid of scandal,you shall not climb that tree again.We have long enough played schoolboy and schoolgirl,let us rise now to the height of our destiny.Had that fall killed you,Ishould have died disgraced ..."

I looked at him.Every scrap of color had left his face.

"And if you had been found there,suspicion would have attached either to my mother or to me ...""Forgive me,"he murmured.

"If you walk along the boulevard,I shall hear your step;and when Iwant to see you,I will open my window.But I would not run such a risk unless some emergency arose.Why have you forced me by your rash act to commit another,and one which may lower me in your eyes?"The tears which I saw in his eyes were to me the most eloquent of answers.

"What I have done to-night,"I went on with a smile,"must seem to you the height of madness ..."After we had walked up and down in silence more than once,he recovered composure enough to say: