The outward appearance of her conduct and her inward consciousness of herself; the conflict of these would fall heavily upon her, but she thought upon the struggle with a smile, with joy beaming through her heart, for this bitterness would be endured for him, deliberately for him, alone for him. Oh, the luxury to suffer for one loved as she loved him; to be tortured with longing within oneself, that he might not come to her with the embrace of his arms and the kiss of his mouth; and to feel that the torture was for the sake of his happiness, his! To feel that she loved him sufficiently to go to him with wide arms and beg for alms of his caresses; but also to feel that she had more love for him than that, and higher, and that – not out of pride or bashfulness, which are really egoism, but solely from sacrifice of herself to his happiness – she never would, never could, be a suppliant in that sense.
To suffer, to suffer for him! To wear a sword through her soul for him! To be a martyr for her god, for whom there was no happiness save through her martyrdom! And she had passed her life, long, long years, without having felt until this day that such luxury could exist, not as fantasy in rhymes, but as reality in her heart. She had been a young girl, and had read the poets and what they rhyme of love, and she had thought she understood it all, with a subtle comprehension; yet without ever having had the least acquaintance with the emotion itself. She had been a young woman, had been married, had borne children. Her married life dashed through her mind in a lightning-flash of memory, and she stopped still before the portrait of her dead husband, standing there on its easel, draped in sombre plush. The mask it wore was of ambition: an austere, refined face, with features sharp, as if engraved in fine steel; coldly intelligent eyes with a fixed portrait look; thin, clean-shaven lips, closed firmly like a lock. Her husband! And she still lived in the same house where she had lived with him, where she had had to receive her many guests when he was Foreign Minister.
Her receptions and dinners flickered up in her mind, scenes of worldliness, and she clearly recalled her husband’s eye taking in everything with a quick glance of approval or condemnation: the arrangement of her rooms, her dress, the ordering of her parties. Her marriage had not been an unhappy one; her husband was a little cold and unexpansive, wrapped wholly in his ambition, but he was attached to her after his fashion, even with tenderness; she too had been fond of him; she thought at the time that she was marrying him for love: her dependent womanliness loving the male, the master. Of a delicate constitution, probably undermined by excessive brain-work, he had died after a short illness. Cecile remembered her sorrow, her loneliness with the two children, about whom he had already feared lest she should spoil them. And her loneliness had been sweet to her, among the clouds of her dreaming …
This portrait – a costly life-size photograph; a carbon impression dark with a Rembrandt shadow – why had she never had it copied in oils, as she had at first intended? The intention had died down of itself; for months she had not thought of the matter, now suddenly it recurred to her … And she felt no self-reproach or remorse. She would not now have it done. It was well enough as it was. She thought of the dead man without sorrow. She had never had cause to complain of him; he had never had anything with which to reproach her.
And now she was free; she became conscious of the fact with exultation. Free to feel what she would. Her freedom arched above her as a blue firmament in which new love ascended with a dove’s immaculate flight. Freedom, air, light! She turned away from the portrait with a smile of rapture; she thrust her arms above her head as if she would measure her freedom, the width of the air, as if she would go to meet the light. Love, she was in love! There was nothing but love; nothing but the harmony of their souls, the harmony of her handmaiden’s soul with the soul of her god, an exile upon the earth. Oh, how blessed that this harmony could exist between him so exalted and her so lowly! But he must not see her lowliness; she must remain the madonna, for his sake, in the martyrdom of his reverence, in the dizziness of the high place to which he raised her, beside himself. She felt this dizziness shuddering about her like rings of light. She threw herself upon her sofa, and locked her fingers; her eyelids quivered, and then she remained staring towards some very distant point.
VI
Jules had been away from school for a day or two with a bad headache, which had made him look pale, and given him an air of sadness; but he was a little better now, and growing weary of his own room he went downstairs to the empty drawing-room and sat at the piano. Papa was at work in his study, but it would not interfere with papa if he played. Dolf spoilt him, seeing something in his son that was wanting in himself and that therefore attracted him, as this had possibly formerly attracted him in his wife also; Jules could do no wrong in his eyes, and if the boy had only been willing, Dolf would have spared no expense to give him a careful musical education. But Jules opposed himself violently to anything in any way resembling lessons, and maintained besides that it was not worthwhile. He had no ambition; his vanity was not tickled by his father’s hopes in him and appreciation of his playing; he played for himself only, to express himself in the vague language of musical sounds. At this moment he felt himself alone, abandoned in the great house, though he knew that papa was at work two rooms away, and that when he pleased he could take refuge on papa’s great couch; he felt within himself an almost physical feeling of dread at his loneliness, which caused something to reel about him, an inward sense of inner desolation.
He was fourteen years old, but he felt himself neither child nor boy: a certain feebleness, a need almost feminine of dependency, of devotion to someone who would be everything to him, had already, in his earliest childhood, struck into his virility, and it shivered through him in his dread of this inner loneliness, as if he were afraid of himself. He suffered greatly from the vague moods in which that strange something oppressed him; then, not knowing where to hide his inner being, he would go to play, so that he might lose himself in the great sound-soul of music. His thin, nervous fingers would grope over the keys, and false chords would be struck in his search; then he would let himself go, find some single motive, very short, of plaintive minor melancholy and caress that motive in his joy at having found it, caress it until it returned each moment as a monotony of sorrow, thinking it so beautiful that he could not leave it. So well did they sing all that he felt, those four or five notes, that he would play them over and over again, until Suzette would burst into the room and make him stop lest she should be driven mad.
Thus he played now. It was pitiful at first; he barely recognised the notes; harsh discords wailed up and cut into his poor brain, still smarting from his headache. He moaned as if he were in pain afresh; but his fingers were hypnotised, they could not desist, they still sought on, and the notes became purer; a short phrase released itself with a cry, a cry which continually returned on the same note, suddenly high after the bass of the prelude. This note came as a surprise to Jules; that fair cry of sorrow frightened him, and he was glad to have found it, glad to have so sweet a sorrow. Then he was no longer himself; he played on until he felt it was not himself who was playing, but another within him who compelled him; he found the full pure chords as by intuition; through the sobbing of the sounds ran the same musical figure, higher and higher, with silver feet of purity, following the curve of crystal rainbows lightly spanned on high; reaching the topmost point of the crystal arch it struck a cry, this time in very drunkenness, out into the major, throwing up wide arms in gladness to heavens of intangible blue. Then it was like souls of men, which first live and suffer and utter their complaint, and then die, to glitter in forms of light whose long wings spring from their pure shoulders in sheets of silver fight; they trip one behind the other over the rainbows, over the bridges of glass, blue, and rose, and yellow; and there come more and more, kindreds and nations of souls; they hurry their silver feet, they press across the rainbows, they laugh and sing and push one another; in their jostling their wings clash together, scattering silver down.