"To be loved!" said he."It is a great word and I hardly dare to pronounce it.To be loved! I have never been.I believe, though, that my mother loved me,--what do I say? I am sure of it, but it was a long time ago.My mother,--it is like a legend to me.It seems to me I was not born when I knew her.I remember that she often took me upon her knees and covered me with kisses.Such joys are not of this world; I must have tasted them in some distant star, where hearts are less hard than here, and where I lived some time, a sojourn of peace and innocence.But one day my mother dropped me from her arms, and I was thrown upon this earth where hatred expected me and received me in her bosom.Oh, hatred! Iknow her! This second mother cradled me in her arms, nourished me with her milk, lavished upon me her careful lessons and watched over me night and day.Ah! hatred is a marvelous providence.It sees everything, thinks of everything, notices everything, is omnipresent, always on the alert, unconscious of fatigue, ennui, or sleep.Hatred! she is the mistress of this castle, she governs it;these great corridors are full of her.I cannot take a step without meeting her; even here in this solitary room I see her image floating upon the paneling, upon the tapestry, about the curtains of this bed, and often at night in my sleep, she comes and sits upon my breast and peoples my dreams with specters and terrors.To be hated without knowing wherefore,--what torment!
And remember, too, that in my early infancy, this father who hates me was then a father to me.He rarely caressed me and I feared him; he was imperious and severe; but he was a father after all, and occasionally he took the trouble to tell us so.Often in our presence his gravity relaxed, and I recollect that he sometimes smiled upon me.But one day, a cursed day,--I was then ten years old; my mother had been dead a month.--He was shut up in his room while a week passed, during which I did not see him.I said to my governess: 'I want to see my father.' I knocked at his door, entered, and ran to him.He repelled me with such violence that Ifell and struck my head against the leg of a chair.I got up bleeding, and he looked at me with scorn, laughed, and left the room.My mind wandered, all my ideas were thrown into confusion; Ithought the sun had gone out and that the world had come to an end.
A father who could laugh at the sight of the blood gushing from his child! And what a laugh! He has made me hear it often since, but I have not been able to accustom myself to it yet.A fever attacked me, and I became delirious.They put me to bed, and Icried to those who took care of me: 'I am cold, I am cold, make me warm.' And in that icy body I felt a heart that seemed on fire, which consumed itself.I could have sworn that a red-hot iron had been passed into it."Stephane dried his tears with a curl of his hair, and then, leaning with his elbows upon the table, he resumed in a feeble voice: "I do not want you to be deceived.You entertain friendship for me and you ask a return; that is very simple, friendship lives by exchange.If I had nothing to give you, you would soon cease to love me.Listen to me then.Yesterday, for the first time in my life, I went into myself,--a singular fancy, which you alone have been able to inspire in me; for the first time I examined myself seriously, I laid hold of my heart with both hands, and examined it as a physician does his patient; I carried my researches even to the very bottom, and I recognized there a strange barrenness and blight, which frightened me.It has been suffering a long time,--this poor heart; but within a year a fearful crisis has passed within me, which has killed it.And now there is nothing in this breast but a handful of ashes, good for nothing but to be thrown out of the window and scattered in the air.
"What! you are orthodox," said Gilbert, in a tone of authority;"you believe in the saints after your own fashion, and nevertheless you have yet to learn that death is but a word, or better, a respite, a pause in life, a fallow time followed by fresh harvests.
You are ignorant of the fact, or you forget, that there are no ashes so cold but that when the wind of the spirit breathes upon them, they will be seen to start, rise up, and walk.You have left to me the care of teaching you that your soul is capable of rejuvenescence, of unexpected regeneration; that upon the sole condition that you wish and desire it, you will feel unknown powers awakened in your breast, and that without changing your nature, but by transforming yourself from day to day, you will become to yourself an eternal novelty!
Stephane looked at him, smiling.
