Philippe was sustained in his agonizing enterprise by hope, which never abandoned him. When, on fine autumn mornings, he found the countess sitting peacefully on a bench, beneath a poplar now yellowing, the poor lover would sit at her feet, looking into her eyes as long as she would let him, hoping ever that the light that was in them would become intelligent. Sometimes the thought deluded him that he saw those hard immovable rays softening, vibrating, living, and he cried out,--

"Stephanie! Stephanie! thou hearest me, thou seest me!"

But she listened to that cry as to a noise, the soughing of the wind in the tree-tops, or the lowing of the cow on the back of which she climbed. Then the colonel would wring his hands in despair,--despair that was new each day.

One evening, under a calm sky, amid the silence and peace of that rural haven, the doctor saw, from a distance, that the colonel was loading his pistols. The old man felt then that the young man had ceased to hope; he felt the blood rushing to his heart, and if he conquered the vertigo that threatened him, it was because he would rather see his niece living and mad than dead. He hastened up.

"What are you doing?" he said.

"That is for me," replied the colonel, pointing to a pistol already loaded, which was lying on the bench; "and this is for her," he added, as he forced the wad into the weapon he held.

The countess was lying on the ground beside him, playing with the b.a.l.l.s.

"Then you do not know," said the doctor, coldly, concealing his terror, "that in her sleep last night she called you: Philippe!"

"She called me!" cried the baron, dropping his pistol, which Stephanie picked up. He took it from her hastily, caught up the one that was on the bench, and rushed away.

"Poor darling!" said the doctor, happy in the success of his lie. He pressed the poor creature to his breast, and continued speaking to himself: "He would have killed thee, selfish man! because he suffers. He does not love thee for thyself, my child! But we forgive, do we not? He is mad, out of his senses, but thou art only senseless. No, G.o.d alone should call thee to Him. We think thee unhappy, we pity thee because thou canst not share our sorrows, fools that we are!--But," he said, sitting down and taking her on his knee, "nothing troubles thee; thy life is like that of a bird, of a fawn--"

As he spoke she darted upon a young blackbird which was hopping near them, caught it with a little note of satisfaction, strangled it, looked at it, dead in her hand, and flung it down at the foot of a tree without a thought.

The next day, as soon as it was light, the colonel came down into the gardens, and looked about for Stephanie,--he believed in the coming happiness. Not finding her he whistled. When his darling came to him, he took her on his arm; they walked together thus for the first time, and he led her within a group of trees, the autumn foliage of which was dropping to the breeze. The colonel sat down. Of her own accord Stephanie placed herself on his knee. Philippe trembled with joy.

"Love," he said, kissing her hands pa.s.sionately, "I am Philippe."

She looked at him with curiosity.

"Come," he said, pressing her to him, "dost thou feel my heart? It has beaten for thee alone. I love thee ever. Philippe is not dead; he is not dead, thou art on him, in his arms. Thou art MY Stephanie; I am thy Philippe."

"Adieu," she said, "adieu."

The colonel quivered, for he fancied he saw his own excitement communicated to his mistress. His heart-rending cry, drawn from him by despair, that last effort of an eternal love, of a delirious pa.s.sion, was successful, the mind of his darling was awaking.

"Ah! Stephanie! Stephanie! we shall yet be happy."

She gave a cry of satisfaction, and her eyes brightened with a flash of vague intelligence.

"She knows me!--Stephanie!"

His heart swelled; his eyelids were wet with tears. Then, suddenly, the countess showed him a bit of sugar she had found in his pocket while he was speaking to her. He had mistaken for human thought the amount of reason required for a monkey's trick. Philippe dropped to the ground unconscious. Monsieur Fanjat found the countess sitting on the colonel's body. She was biting her sugar, and testifying her pleasure by pretty gestures and affectations with which, had she her reason, she might have imitated her parrot or her cat.

"Ah! my friend," said Philippe, when he came to his senses, "I die every day, every moment! I love too well! I could still bear all, if, in her madness, she had kept her woman's nature. But to see her always a savage, devoid even of modesty, to see her--"

"You want opera madness, do you? something picturesque and pleasing,"

said the doctor, bitterly. "Your love and your devotion yield before a prejudice. Monsieur, I have deprived myself for your sake of the sad happiness of watching over my niece; I have left to you the pleasure of playing with her; I have kept for myself the heaviest cares. While you have slept, I have watched, I have--Go, monsieur, go! abandon her! leave this sad refuge. I know how to live with that dear darling creature; I comprehend her madness, I watch her gestures, I know her secrets. Some day you will thank me for thus sending you away."

The colonel left the old monastery, never to return but once. The doctor was horrified when he saw the effect he had produced upon his guest, whom he now began to love when he saw him thus. Surely, if either of the two lovers were worthy of pity, it was Philippe; did he not bear alone the burden of their dreadful sorrow?

After the colonel's departure the doctor kept himself informed about him; he learned that the miserable man was living on an estate near Saint-Germain. In truth, the baron, on the faith of a dream, had formed a project which he believed would yet restore the mind of his darling.

Unknown to the doctor, he spent the rest of the autumn in preparing for his enterprise. A little river flowed through his park and inundated during the winter the marshes on either side of it, giving it some resemblance to the Beresina. The village of Satout, on the heights above, closed in, like Studzianka, the scene of horror. The colonel collected workmen to deepen the banks, and by the help of his memory, he copied in his park the sh.o.r.e where General Eble destroyed the bridge.

He planted piles, and made b.u.t.tresses and burned them, leaving their charred and blackened ruins, standing in the water from sh.o.r.e to sh.o.r.e.

Then he gathered fragments of all kinds, like those of which the raft was built. He ordered dilapidated uniforms and clothing of every grade, and hired hundreds of peasants to wear them; he erected huts and cabins for the purpose of burning them. In short, he forgot nothing that might recall that most awful of all scenes, and he succeeded.

Toward the last of December, when the snow had covered with its thick, white mantle all his imitative preparations, he recognized the Beresina.

This false Russia was so terribly truthful, that several of his army comrades recognized the scene of their past misery at once. Monsieur de Sucy took care to keep secret the motive for this tragic imitation, which was talked of in several Parisian circles as a proof of insanity.

Early in January, 1820, the colonel drove in a carriage, the very counterpart of the one in which he had driven the Comte and Comtesse de Vandieres from Moscow to Studzianka. The horses, too, were like those he had gone, at the peril of his life, to fetch from the Russian outposts.

He himself wore the soiled fantastic clothing, the same weapons, as on the 29th of November, 1812. He had let his beard grow, also his hair, which was tangled and matted, and his face was neglected, so that nothing might be wanting to represent the awful truth.

"I can guess your purpose," cried Monsieur Fanjat, when he saw the colonel getting out of the carriage. "If you want to succeed, do not let my niece see you in that equipage. To-night I will give her opium.

During her sleep, we will dress her as she was at Studzianka, and place her in the carriage. I will follow you in another vehicle."

About two in the morning, the sleeping countess was placed in the carriage and wrapped in heavy coverings. A few peasants with torches lighted up this strange abduction. Suddenly, a piercing cry broke the silence of the night. Philippe and the doctor turned, and saw Genevieve coming half-naked from the ground-floor room in which she slept.

"Adieu, adieu! all is over, adieu!" she cried, weeping hot tears.

"Genevieve, what troubles you?" asked the doctor.

Genevieve shook her head with a motion of despair, raised her arm to heaven, looked at the carriage, uttering a long-drawn moan with every sign of the utmost terror; then she returned to her room silently.

"That is a good omen!" cried the colonel. "She feels she is to lose her companion. Perhaps she SEES that Stephanie will recover her reason."

"G.o.d grant it!" said Monsieur Fanjat, who himself was affected by the incident.

Ever since he had made a close study of insanity, the good man had met with many examples of the prophetic faculty and the gift of second sight, proofs of which are frequently given by alienated minds, and which may also be found, so travellers say, among certain tribes of savages.

As the colonel had calculated, Stephanie crossed the fict.i.tious plain of the Beresina at nine o'clock in the morning, when she was awakened by a cannon shot not a hundred yards from the spot where the experiment was to be tried. This was a signal. Hundreds of peasants made a frightful clamor like that on the sh.o.r.e of the river that memorable night, when twenty thousand stragglers were doomed to death or slavery by their own folly.

At the cry, at the shot, the countess sprang from the carriage, and ran, with delirious emotion, over the snow to the banks of the river; she saw the burned bivouacs and the charred remains of the bridge, and the fatal raft, which the men were launching into the icy waters of the Beresina.

The major, Philippe, was there, striking back the crowd with his sabre.

Madame de Vandieres gave a cry, which went to all hearts, and threw herself before the colonel, whose heart beat wildly. She seemed to gather herself together, and, at first, looked vaguely at the singular scene. For an instant, as rapid as the lightning's flash, her eyes had that lucidity, devoid of mind, which we admire in the eye of birds; then pa.s.sing her hand across her brow with the keen expression of one who meditates, she contemplated the living memory of a past scene spread before her, and, turning quickly to Philippe, she SAW HIM. An awful silence reigned in the crowd. The colonel gasped, but dared not speak; the doctor wept. Stephanie's sweet face colored faintly; then, from tint to tint, it returned to the brightness of youth, till it glowed with a beautiful crimson. Life and happiness, lighted by intelligence, came nearer and nearer like a conflagration. Convulsive trembling rose from her feet to her heart. Then these phenomena seemed to blend in one as Stephanie's eyes cast forth a celestial ray, the flame of a living soul. She lived, she thought! She shuddered, with fear perhaps, for G.o.d himself unloosed that silent tongue, and cast anew His fires into that long-extinguished soul. Human will came with its full electric torrent, and vivified the body from which it had been driven.

"Stephanie!" cried the colonel.

"Oh! it is Philippe," said the poor countess.

She threw herself into the trembling arms that the colonel held out to her, and the clasp of the lovers frightened the spectators. Stephanie burst into tears. Suddenly her tears stopped, she stiffened as though the lightning had touched her, and said in a feeble voice,--

"Adieu, Philippe; I love thee, adieu!"

"Oh! she is dead," cried the colonel, opening his arms.

The old doctor received the inanimate body of his niece, kissed it as though he were a young man, and carrying it aside, sat down with it still in his arms on a pile of wood. He looked at the countess and placed his feeble trembling hand upon her heart. That heart no longer beat.

"It is true," he said, looking up at the colonel, who stood motionless, and then at Stephanie, on whom death was placing that resplendent beauty, that fugitive halo, which is, perhaps, a pledge of the glorious future--"Yes, she is dead."

"Ah! that smile," cried Philippe, "do you see that smile? Can it be true?"