After the departure and the promises of the marquise, Fleur-de-Marie should have been transported with joy on thinking of her friends at Bouqueval, of Rodolph whom she was again about to see. But she was not. Her heart was painfully distressed, and to her memory occurred incessantly the severe language, the haughty scrutiny, the angry looks, of Madame d'Harville, as the poor prisoner had been excited to enthusiasm when alluding to her benefactor. By singular intuition La Goualeuse had thus detected a portion of Madame d'Harville's secret.
"The excess of my gratitude to M. Rodolph offended this young lady, so handsome and of such high rank," thought Fleur-de-Marie; "now I comprehend the severity of her words, they expressed a jealous disdain. She jealous of me! Then she must love him, and I must love, too--him? Yes, and my love must have betrayed itself in spite of me! Love him,--I--I--a creature fallen for ever, ungrateful and wretched as I am! Oh, if it were so, death were a hundred times preferable!"
Let us hasten to say that the unhappy girl, thus a martyr to her feelings, greatly exaggerated what she called her love.
To her profound gratitude towards Rodolph was united involuntary admiration of the gracefulness, strength, and manly beauty which distinguished him from other men. Nothing could be less gross, more pure, than this admiration; but it existed in full and active force, because physical beauty is always attractive. And then the voice of blood, so often denied, mute, unknown, or misinterpreted, is sometimes in full force, and these throbs of passionate tenderness which attracted Fleur-de-Marie towards Rodolph, and which so greatly startled her, because in her ignorance she misinterpreted their tendency, these feelings resulted from mysterious sympathies, as palpable, but as inexplicable, as the resemblance of features. In a word, Fleur-de-Marie, on learning that she was Rodolph's daughter, could have accounted to herself for the strong affection she had for him, and thus, completely enlightened on the point, she would have admired without a scruple her father's manly beauty.
Thus do we explain Fleur-de-Marie's dejection. Although she was every instant awaiting, according to Madame d'Harville's promise, her release from St. Lazare, Fleur-de-Marie, melancholy and pensive, was seated on her bench near the basin, looking with a kind of mechanical interest at the sports of some bold little birds who came to play on the margin of the stone-work. She had ceased for an instant to work at a baby's nightgown, which she had just finished hemming. Need we say that this nightgown belonged to the lying-in clothes so generously offered to Mont Saint-Jean by the prisoners, through the kind intervention of Fleur-de-Marie? The poor misshapen protégée of La Goualeuse was sitting at her feet, working at a small cap, and, from time to time, casting at her benefactress a look at once grateful, timid, and confiding, such a look as a dog throws at his master. The beauty, attraction, and delicious sweetness of Fleur-de-Marie had inspired this fallen creature with sentiments of the most profound respect.