Beck Center English Dept. University Libraries Emory University
Emory Women Writers Resource Project Collections:
Women's Genre Fiction Project

Adrienne, an electronic edition

by Rita

date: 1898
source publisher: Hutchinson & Co.
collection: Genre Fiction

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CHAPTER XXXII.

THE lights burned soft and dim in Adrienne de Valtour's pretty boudoir.

The firelight played on her beautiful face, the languid grace of the reclining figure in its loose white draperies. Close beside her was the cradle that Maï had described as being fit for a prince. A prince indeed was its occupant; a sovereign by royal right of love, a young despot who exercised undisputed sway over the entire household of the château, and had brought to Adrienne's heart the purest, sweetest bliss her life had ever known.

It is marvellous this mother-love that God sends to woman. This passionate, unselfish, heart-filled worship for the little helpless being, whose presence brings its own welcome, for whose sake all suffering and anguish are accounted nothing; whose faintest cry thrills her whole being; whose tiny fingers unlock the gates of such love as never yet has filled her soul; a love earth cannot destroy, and heaven might almost envy.

Adrienne lay there with closed eyes and smiling lips. She was too happy to sleep, though Mdlle. de Valtour and Odylle had left her for that purpose. She was thinking of the letter she had received from her husband--a letter that had brought the tears to | | 342 her eyes, and yet made her heart throb once more with the old remembered joy, and won the full and free forgiveness of her pure and loving heart. He would be with her soon. Ill and weak as he was, that message of hers had fired him with a restless impatience no counsel could combat. In André's care, under André's guardianship, the long and difficult journey was to be made. A week, a few days, perhaps, and he would be by her side.

A cry from her child disturbed her. She bent forward, and took him from his cradle, and hushed him to sleep once more. The sound of his voice had deadened her ears to the sound of carriage wheels--the echo of footsteps.

She kept the child in her arms and lay down to rest, her eyes on the little waxen face, the dark eye-lashes, the baby features that yet wore so ridiculous a likeness to those of its absent father, and in Adrienne's eyes were the very perfection of infantile beauty.

Softly the door of her boudoir was opened. She glanced suddenly up, and saw Armand standing there leaning on his sister's arm. A little startled cry left her lips; she would have started to her feet, but an imperative gesture forbade her. He crossed the room with slow and halting steps, and then stood beside her, looking down with tear-dimmed eyes at the touching picture before him. Céline stole softly away. Husband and wife mere once more alone.

The sight of that changed face, still pale and haggard from long illness--the wasted form--the | | 343 helplessness which his lameness had caused, and which appealed to her instincts of pity as a man's helplessness always does appeal to a woman--these feelings swept over Adrienne's heart, and the old love shone in her eyes, the old tenderness spoke in her voice.

"You have come--so soon! Oh, darling, was it wise? How ill you look! Sit down here and tell me all about your accident. I have scarcely understood it yet."

There was no word of reproach--no allusion to the past, or their long separation. It was a greeting that put Armand de Valtour at once at ease, that made him love and bless his wife as he had never done before.

Weak and exhausted, and overcome by vivid emotion, he sank down on the couch by her side. Her beautiful eyes looked up to his, her face was pale, her lips tremulous. The hot blood rushed from his heart to his brow, and instinctively he bent forward and took her hands in both his own, and looked down at her agitated face.

"Do you permit?" he asked softly, hesitatingly; and then, taking silence as consent, he stooped down and kissed the lovely, tremulous lips whose touch had been so long unknown.

Such was their reconciliation.

. . . . . . .

Half an hour had passed. To Armand it seemed but a few moments. He sat there and his eyes grew, | | 344 dim with tears as he looked on the sleeping child, the fair young mother.

Adrienne had stopped his broken pleas, his humble entreaties, with just a few gentle words.

"I have said I forgive. Tell me no more."

It was a pardon so noble that if he could have felt a greater reverence and adoration for her than he did, he would have felt it then; but emotion made him speechless, he only bowed his head before her, and the hot tears fell from his eyes--tear of penitence, of shame, of joy.

Never again in all the years to come would Adrienne ever have cause to distrust her husband's love, or grieve for his misdoings. The lesson that he had learnt in suffering would go with him now for all the future, and keep him humble and true to that pure and tender devotion which had been strong to resent injustice, yet comprehensive enough to pardon all wrongs for love's sake alone.

"We will go to Paris no more;" said Armand de Valtour, later on that first joyful evening of re-union and forgiveness. "I told you, on our first arrival here, this should be our home; that you should make it so! Heaven forgive me if I broke that promise. For the future, I will keep it so long as it is your wish."

"And that will be always," answered Adrienne, looking up with her sweet and tender smile. "What | | 345 is the world to me? We were never suited to one another. Let this be our home; here our duties lie--here all ties of love and relationship claim us. We can forget the fret and fever of life, the sorrows of the past. Here we can be happy and at rest."

In the soft gloom she wound her arms around his neck and laid her head upon his breast, and he, looking back at the evil he had escaped, the sins he had sinned, the misery and remorse he had suffered, bent over her with a prayer upon his lips, a silent thanksgiving in his heart.

"God give me strength to atone," he murmured, and she, hearing the earnest words, looked up at him with eyes to which all the old radiance and glory had returned.

"You have atoned," she said softly, and placed her child in his arms, and gazed down at the little face with such rapture in her own as he had never seen.

Armand de Valtour understood her then.

"I am so glad they are happy at last," said Céline de Valtour, coming into Madame de Savigny's dressing-room that night to talk over all these events.

"So am I," answered the little Marquise. "It is wonderful--it is like the romances one reads of. And so life is to be a pastoral idyl in the future to both of them. That is the only part of it I don't approve; but then, you see," she added, with one of her droll grimaces, "I have not tumbled down a precipice and broken my leg. Doubtless one looks | | 346 at life differently under those circumstances. For my part I should say Monsieur do Valtour will find it a trifle dull. Still, Adrienne will be too good a wife not to sacrifice her own inclinations if need be. I expect to see them in Paris yet."

But she was wrong. The world saw no more of the Count and Countess de Valtour. They were too happy to seek again its fake excitements--its meretricious splendours, its allurements or triumphs.

"We are happier here." That is Armand de Valtour's answer to any persuasion of his friends of old.

But to his wife he says that to be in touch with aught that makes lift nobler, purer, loftier is worth all that the world can offer.

THE END.
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