I dressed quickly, my mind full of shadows. Perhaps they had discovered our secret. Perhaps she was ill. Perhaps worse.
If they had forbidden her to see me, I told myself, I would find her anyway, and out of spite do with her what honour had held love back from doing.
While I turned these ideas over, the gatekeeper entered, his face drawn.
"How is your wife?" I asked. "And Lucie?"
At her name, his eyes filled.
"What!" I cried. "Is she dead?"
"Would to God she were!" he said.
My heart lurched. "What has she done?"
"She has run away with Count Daniel's courier, and we have been unable to trace her anywhere."
His wife came in as he spoke. The words renewed her grief; she collapsed at his feet. He ran to her; I could only stand there, feeling his grief as if it were my own.
When she had been carried to a chair and given air, he turned back to me.
"This great misfortune befell us only a week before your arrival," he said.
"I know that man, l'Aigle," I answered. "He's a scoundrel. Did he ask to marry Lucie?"
"No; he knew well enough that our consent would have been refused!"
"I wonder at Lucie acting in such a way."
"He seduced her, and her running away made us suspect the truth, for she had become very stout."
"Had he known her long?"
"About a month after your last visit she saw him for the first time. He must have thrown a spell over her, for our Lucie was as pure as a dove, and you can, I believe, bear testimony to her goodness."
"I can," I said quietly. "And no one knows where they've gone?"
"No one. God alone knows what this villain will do with her."
I left them and walked into the woods, letting the trees swallow me. Regret followed with every step.
If I'd come a week earlier, she might have trusted me and I would have prevented this self-murder.
If I had acted with her as with Nanette and Marton, she would not have been left in that fever of desire, and she would not have fallen a prey to that scoundrel.
If she had never known me, her innocent soul would never have listened to such a man.
I was in despair.
Each if cut deeper than the last.
By the time I stopped, I could no longer pretend I was innocent.
In my conscience I acknowledged myself the primary agent of this infamous seduction; I had prepared the way for the villain.
Had I known where to find her, I would have set out that instant.
But the trail was empty. Lucie was gone, and the woods gave no answer.
Before I heard of Lucie's misfortune, I felt great pride at having had sufficient power over myself to respect her innocence.
But after hearing what had happened, I was ashamed of my own reserve, and I promised myself that for the future I would on that score act more wisely.
I began to picture her abandoned somewhere, poorer and more ashamed by the day, cursing my name as the first link in the chain that dragged her to misery.
This fatal event caused me to adopt a new system, which in after years I carried sometimes rather too far.
I joined the guests in the gardens.
The countess's welcome was warm, the company lively, and by dinner my grief had retreated behind stories and laughter as I amused everyone.
Still, the choice was simple: either let my great sorrow drive me away from Paséan or drown it at once.
But a new life crept into my being as I examined the face and the disposition of the newly-married lady.
Her sister was prettier, but I had begun to distrust novices; the work there looked too delicate.
The bride, nineteen or twenty, drew every eye by sheer effort.
She talked without resting, parading a memory crammed with maxims that rarely matched the moment.
Pious to the point of affectation, she bristled whenever her husband expressed his satisfaction at being seated at table opposite her sister.
Her jealousy made her look ridiculous; his vanity enjoyed it.
Her husband was a giddy young fellow who perhaps thought good breeding requires indifference, and who entertained himself by giving her constant causes for jealousy.
She, in her turn, had a great dread of passing for an idiot if she did not show her appreciation of, and her resentment for, his conduct.
In company she sat on edge precisely because she wanted to seem at ease.
If I tossed out some trivial nonsense, she fixed me with a look, then burst into laughter half a beat too late, fearing to miss a joke.
Her oddity, her awkwardness, and her self-conceit gave me the desire to know her better, and I began to dance attendance upon her.
Great and small attentions, invented errands, even my bits of foppery- all announced my intention.
The household noticed.
Friends warned the husband that I meditated conquest.
He shrugged, joked about it, and, to prove his courage and freedom of jealousy, sometimes urged me on in front of her.
I replied with modest shrugs and an air of carelessness.
The wife, for her part, did not yet know how to play fancy free.
After five or six days of this, we found ourselves walking together in the garden. The path was shaded; the others had gone ahead.
She chose that moment to imprudently confide to me the reason of her anxiety respecting her husband.
Her husband's behavior, she said, tormented her; and how wrong he was to give her any cause for jealousy.
Speaking as if I were an old friend, I suggested a remedy.
"Punish him by seeming not to notice his preference for your sister," I said. "And, to complete the lesson, pretend to be in love with me."
She hesitated.
To draw her in, I added, "Of course, it's not an easy role. To play such a character successfully a woman must be particularly witty."
I touched her weak point. Her eyes lit up.
"I shall play it to perfection," she declared.
She did not.
In spite of her self-confidence, her performance was so stiff, so transparently eager, that everybody understood that the plan was of my own scheming.
When I walked with her through the darker garden paths and pressed her to act her role with conviction, she always chose the simplest escape: she fled.
I returned alone to the guests and endured their jokes about my clumsy hunting, "frightening the bird away," as the old count put it.
Later I reproached her for these retreats. "You hand your husband a triumph," I would say.
"You have the wit, but your upbringing has left you timid. The tone I use with you is the tone of good society, proof of the esteem I have for your intelligence."
I spun compliments and arguments, and she listened with an expression that made me think I was making progress.
Then on the eleventh or twelfth day, in the middle of one of my polished speeches, she stopped me cold.
"You are a priest," she said. "You know as well as I do that such affairs are mortal sins. God sees everything. I will neither damn my soul nor go to confession to admit I have fallen with a priest."
"I'm not yet ordained," I countered.
She didn't flinch. "Is what you want one of the cardinal sins, or not?"
I opened my mouth and found no honest answer that served me.
The words died on my tongue.
At that point, I felt that I must give up the argument and put an end to the adventure.
By dinner I had recovered my composure.
The change was obvious enough that the old count, catching my calm expression, declared in front of everyone that such quiet must mean I had won my battle.
I repeated the line to my cruel devout lady, pointing out that this was how the world would read our situation.
She remained unmoved.
Fortune, however, has a way of rewarding persistence when wit fails.
My opportunity came soon enough, and with it, the success my arguments had not earned in a form neither of us expected