The Countess von Rudolstadt by George Sand

Author:George Sand
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Published: 2018-08-17T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter XXV

Finding him once more, like an angel of consolation, in that intolerable solitude filled her with a joy that silenced all the scruples and fears still in her mind only a second before, when she had been musing about him without any immediate hope of seeing him again. She responded to his embrace with passion; and as he was already trying to break loose from her arms to pick up his black mask which had fallen off, she clung to him, crying, “Don’t leave me, don’t abandon me!” Her voice was supplicating, her caresses irresistible. The stranger sank down to her feet and hid his face in the folds of her dress, covering it with kisses. There he remained a few seconds as though torn between delight and despair. Then he grabbed his mask, slipped a letter into Consuelo’s hand, and dashed into the lodge, disappearing before she could catch a glimpse of his face.

She followed him, and by the light of a little alabaster lamp that Matteus lit every evening at the foot of the steps, she hoped to find him again, but before she had gone up a few stairs, he seemed to have vanished into thin air. In vain she searched every nook and cranny in the lodge; there was not a trace of him to be found; were it not for the letter in her trembling hand, she could have thought that she had been dreaming.

At last she decided to go back to her boudoir to read the letter. This time the handwriting struck her as deliberately disguised rather than deformed by pain. The letter said more or less this:

“I can neither see you nor talk to you; but I’ve not been forbidden to write to you. Will you allow me this? Will you dare reply to the stranger? Were I to be so fortunate, I could, while you were sleeping, go fetch your letters and place my own in a book that you would leave in the evening on the garden bench at the water’s edge. My love for you is passionate, idolatrous, mad. I am vanquished, my strength is broken; my activity, my zeal, my enthusiasm for the work to which I’ve devoted my life, everything, even the sense of duty, is annihilated in me if you don’t love me. Bound to strange and terrible duties by my vows, by the surrender and renunciation of my will, I am floating between thoughts of infamy and suicide, for I can’t convince myself that you truly love me and that distrust and fear haven’t already blotted out your involuntary love for me. Could it be otherwise? For you I’m nothing but a shadow, a night’s dream, a fleeting illusion. Well, in order to make you love me, I feel ready, twenty times a day, to sacrifice my honor, to betray my word, to defile my conscience by breaking a vow. If you managed to escape from this prison, I’d follow you to the ends of

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