THE MEMOIRS OF A PHYSICIAN (Complete Edition: Volumes 1-5). Alexandre Dumas
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But he recoiled swiftly, and the arms came together ere falling folded on her bosom.
"Would you like to speak with your friend?" he asked.
"Yes, speak to me often. I like to hear your voice."
"You have often told me, dearest, that you would be very happy if we could dwell together afar from the world."
"That would indeed be bliss."
"Well, I have realized your wish, darling. We are by ourselves in this parlor, where none can hear and none intrude."
"I am glad to hear it."
"Tell me how you like the place."
"Order me to see it."
"Does it please you?" asked the count, after a pause.
"Yes; here are my favorite flowers. Thank you, my kind Joseph. How good you are!"
"I do all I can to please you."
"Oh, you are a hundred times kinder to me than I deserve."
"You confess that you have been wicked?"
"Very badly so, but you will overlook that?"
"After you explain the enigma which I have struggled against ever since I knew you."
"Hearken, Balsamo. In me are two Lorenzas, quite distinct. One loves you and the other detests you, as if I lived two existences. One during which I enjoy the delights of paradise, the other when I suffer the opposite."
"These two existences are your waking mood and your magnetic sleep?"
"Yes."
"Why do you hate me when in your waking senses and love me when in the charmed sleep?"
"Because Lorenza is the superstitious Italian girl who believes that science is a crime and love a sin. Then she is afraid of the sage Balsamo and the loving Joseph. She has been told that to love would destroy her soul; and so she flees from the lover to the confines of the earth."
"But when Lorenza sleeps?"
"It is another matter. She is no longer a Roman girl and superstitious, but a woman. She sees that the genius of Balsamo dreams of sublime themes. She understands how petty an object she is compared with him. She longs to live by him and die at his side, in order that the future shall breathe her name while it trumpets the glory of—Cagliostro."
"Is that the name I am to be celebrated under?"
"The name."
"Dear Lorenza! so you like our new home?"
"It is richer than any you have found for me; but that is not why I like it more—but because you say you will be oftener with me here."
"So, when you sleep, you know how fondly I adore you?"
"Yes," she said with a faint smile, "I see that passion, then, and yet there is something you love above Lorenza," she sighed. "Your dream."
"Rather say, my task."
"Well, your ambition!"
"Say, my glory."
"Oh, heaven!" and her heart was laboring; her closed lids allowed tears to struggle out.
"What is it you see?" inquired Balsamo, astounded at the lucidity which frightened even him.
"I see phantoms gliding about among the shadows. Some hold in their own hands their severed crowned heads, like St. Denis in that Abbey; and you stand in the heart of the battle like a general in command. You seem to rule, and you are obeyed."
"Does that not make you proud of me?" inquired the other joyfully.
"You are good enough not to care to be great. Besides, in looking for myself in this scene, I see nothing of me. Oh, I shall not be there," she sighed. "I shall be in the grave."
"You dead, my dearest Lorenza!" said Balsamo, frowning. "No, we shall live and love together."
"No, you love me no more, or not enough," crowding upon his forehead, held between her hands, a multitude of glowing kisses. "I have to reproach you for your coldness. Look now how you draw away from me as though you fled my fondlings. Oh, restore to me my maiden quietude, in my nunnery of Subiaco—when the night was so calm in my cell. Return me those kisses which you sent on the wings of the wind coming to me in my solitude like golden-pinioned sylph, which melted on me in delight. Do not retreat from me. Give me your hand, that I may press it; let me kiss your dear eyes—let me be your wife, in short."
"Lorenza, sweetest, you are my well-beloved wife."
"Yet you pass by the chaste and solitary flower and scorn the perfume? I am sure that I am nothing to you."
"On the contrary, you are everything—my Lorenza. For it is you who give me strength, power and genius—without you I should be nothing. Cease, then, to love me with this insensate fever which wrecks the nights of your people, and love me as I love you. Thus I am happy."
"You call that happiness?" scornfully said the Italian.
"Yes, for to be great is happiness."
She heaved a long sigh.
"Oh, if you only knew the gladness in being able to read the hearts of man and manipulate them with the strings of their own dominant passions."
"Yes, I know that in this I serve your purpose."
"It is not all. Your eyes read the sealed book of the future. You, sweet dove, pure and guideless, you have taught me what I could not ascertain in twenty years' application. You enlighten my steps, before which my enemies multiply traps and snares; on my mind depend my life, fortune and liberty—you dilate it like the lynx's eye which sees in the dark. As your lovely orbs close on this world, they open in superhuman clarity. They watch for me. It is you who make me rich, free and powerful."
"And in return, you make me unhappy," replied Lorenza, wrapped up in her frenzy.
More fiery than ever, she enfolded him in her arms, so that he was impregnated with a flame which he feebly resisted. But he made such an effort that he broke the living bondage.
"Have pity, Lorenza!" he sued.
"Was it to pity you that I left my native land, my name, my family, my faith!" she said, almost threatening with her lovely arms, rising white and yet muscular amid the waves of her long black tresses coming down. "Why have you laid on me this absolute empire, so that if I am your slave and have to give you my life and breath? Was it to mock me ever with the name of the virgin Lorenza?"
Balsamo sighed, himself crushed by the weight of her immense despair.
"Alas, is it your fault, or that of the Creator. Why were you made the angel with the infallible gaze, by whose aid I should make the universe submit? Why is it that you are the one to read a soul through its bodily envelope as one may read a book through a glass! Because you are an angel of purity, Lorenza, and nothing throws a shadow upon your soul. In your radiant and immaculate bosom the divine spark may be enshrined, a place without sullying where it may fitly nestle. You are a seer because you are blameless, Lorenza; as a woman, you would be but so much substance."
"And you prefer this to my love," continued the Italian, clapping her hands with such rage that they became impurpled; "you set my love beneath these whims that you pursue and fables that you invent? You snatch me out of the cold cloister, but, in the bustling, ardent world you condemn me to the conventional chastity? Joseph, you commit a crime, I tell you."
"Do not blaspheme," said Balsamo, "for I suffer, too. Read in my heart, and never again say that I love you not. I resist you because I want to raise you on the throne of the world."
"Ugh, your ambition!" sneered the young Roman; "will your ambition ever give you what you might have in my love?"
He yielded to her and his head rested in her arms.
"Ah, yes," she cried, "I