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Page 45
"God bless you, sir!" she exclaimed. "I should have died with the very
thought that a breath of suspicion was harboured against him."
"Ah! madam, who could possibly attach any reality to the action of a
somnambulist?"
"That is quite true, sir; I had had that thought myself, but
appearances--pardon me--yet I feared--still I knew Doctor Fritz was a man
of honour."
"Pray, madam, be calm."
"No," she cried, "let me weep on. It is such a relief; for ten years I
have suffered in secret. Oh, how I suffered! That secret, so long shut up
in my breast, was killing me. I should soon have died, like my dear
mother. God has had pity upon me, and has sent you, and made you share it
with me. Let me tell you all, sir, do let me!"
She could speak no more. Sobs and tears broke her voice. So it always
is with proud and lofty natures. After having conquered grief, and
imprisoned it, buried, and, as it were, crushed down in the secret depths
of the mind, they seem happy, or, at any rate, indifferent to the eyes of
the uninformed around, and the eye of the most watchful observer might be
mistaken; but let a sudden shock break the seal, an unexpected rending of
a portion of the veil, then, as with the crash of a thunderstorm, the
tower in which the sufferer hid his sorrow falls in ruins to the ground.
The conquered foe rises more fierce than before his defeat and captivity;
he shakes with fury the prison doors, the frame trembles with long
shudderings, sobs and sighs heave the breast, the tears, too long
contained within bounds, overflow their swollen banks, bounding and
rushing as if after the heavy rain of a thunderstorm.
Such was Odile.
At length she lifted her beautiful head; she wiped her tear-stained
cheeks, and with her arm on the elbow of her chair, her cheek resting
on her hand, and her eyes tenderly fixed on a picture on the wall, she
resumed in slow and melancholy tones:--
"When I go back into the past, sir, when I return to my first
impressions, my mother's is the picture before me. She was a tall, pale,
and silent woman. She was still young at the period to which I am
referring. She was scarcely thirty, and yet you would have thought her
fifty. Her brow was silvered round with hair white as snow; her thin,
hollow cheeks, her sharp, clear profile--her lips ever closed together
with an expression of pain--gave to her features a strange character in
which pride and pain seemed to contend for the mastery. There was nothing
left of the elasticity of youth in that aged woman of thirty--nothing
but her tall, upright figure, her brilliant eyes, and her voice, which
was always as gentle and as sweet as a dream of childhood. She often
walked up and down for hours in this very room, with her head hanging
down, and I, an unthinking child, ran happily along by her side, never
aware that my mother was sad, never understanding the meaning of the deep
melancholy revealed by those furrows that traversed her fair brow. I knew
nothing of the past, to me the present was joy and happiness, and oh! the
future!--the dark, miserable future!--there was none! My only future was
to-morrow's play!"
Odile smiled bitterly and went on:--
"Sometimes I would happen, in my noisy play, to disturb my mother in her
silent walk; then she would stop, look down, and, seeing me at her feet,
would slowly bend, kiss me with an absent smile, and then again resume
her interrupted walk and her sad gait. Since then, sir, whenever I have
desired to search back in my memory for remembrances of my early days
that tall, pale woman has risen before me, the image of melancholy. There
she is," pointing to a picture on the wall--"there she is!--not such as
illness made her as my father supposes, but that fatal and terrible
secret. See!"
I turned round, and as my eye dwelt upon the portrait the lady pointed
to, I shuddered.
It was a long, pale, thin face, cold and rigid as death, and only luridly
lighted up by two dark, deep-set eyes, fixed, burning, and of a terrible
intensity.
There was a moment's silence.
"How much that woman must have suffered!" I said to myself with a pain
striking at my heart.
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