Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 131.djvu/792

786 Florimel drew close to his side, laid her hand on his arm and looked in his face with a witching entreaty. "We have the present, Raoul," she said.

"So has the butterfly," answered Lenorme; "but I had rather be the caterpillar with a future. Why don't you put a stop to the man's lovemaking? He can't love you or any woman. He does not know what love means. It makes me ill to hear him when he thinks he is paying you irresistible compliments. They are so silly! so mawkish! Good heavens, Florimel! can you imagine that smile every day and always? Like the rest of his class, he seems to think himself perfectly justified in making fools of women. I want to help you to grow as beautiful as God meant you to be when he thought of you first. I want you to be my embodied vision of life, that I may forever worship at your feet — live in you, die with you: such bliss, even were there nothing beyond, would be enough for the heart of a God to bestow."

"Stop, stop, Raoul! I'm not worthy of such love," said Florimel, again laying her hand on his arm. "I do wish for your sake I had been born a village girl."

"If you had been, then I might have wished for your sake that I had been born a marquis. As it is, I would rather be a painter than any nobleman in Europe; that is, with you to love me. Your love is my patent of nobility. But I may glorify what you love, and tell you that I can confer something on you also — what none of your noble admirers can. God forgive me! you will make me hate them all."

"Raoul, this won't do at all," said Florimel with the authority that should belong only to the one in the right. And indeed for the moment she felt the dignity of restraining a too impetuous passion. "You will spoil everything. I dare not come to your studio if you are going to behave like this. It would be very wrong of me. And if I am never to come and see you, I shall die: I know I shall."

The girl was so full of the delight of the secret love between them that she cared only to live in the present as if there were no future beyond: Lenorme wanted to make that future like, but better than, the present. The word "marriage" put Florimel in a rage. She thought herself superior to Lenorme, because he, in the dread of losing her, would have her marry him at once, while she was more than content with the bliss of seeing him now and then. Often and often her foolish talk stung him with bitter pain — worst of all when it compelled him to doubt whether there was that in her to be loved as he was capable of loving. Yet always the conviction that there was a deep root of nobleness in her nature again got uppermost: and, had it not been so, I fear he would nevertheless have continued to prove her irresistible as often as she chose to exercise upon him the full might of her witcheries. At one moment she would, reveal herself in such a sudden rush of tenderness as seemed possible only to one ready to become his altogether and forever: the next she would start away as if she had never meant anything, and talk as if not a thought were in her mind beyond the cultivation of a pleasant acquaintance doomed to pass with the season, if not with the final touches to her portrait. Or she would fall to singing some song he had taught her, more likely a certain one he had written in a passionate mood of bitter tenderness with the hope of stinging her love to some show of deeper life, but would, while she sang, look with merry defiance in his face, as if she adopted in seriousness what he had written in loving and sorrowful satire.

They rode in silence for some hundred yards. At length he spoke, replying to her last asseveration. "Then what can you gain, child ——" he said.

"Will you dare to call me child? — a marchioness in my own right! " she cried, playfully threatening him with uplifted whip, in the handle of which the little jewels sparkled.

"What, then, can you gain, my lady marchioness," he resumed, with soft seriousness and a sad smile, "by marrying one of your own rank? I should lay new honor and consideration at your feet. I am young: I have done fairly well already. But I have done nothing to what I could do now if only my heart lay safe in the port of peace. You know where alone that is for me, my lady marchioness. And you know, too, that the names of great painters go down with honor from generation to generation, when my Lord This or my Lord That is remembered only as a label to the picture that makes the painter famous. I am not a great painter yet, but I will be one if you will be good to me. And men shall say, when they look on your portrait in ages to come, 'No wonder he was such a painter when he had such a woman to paint!'"

He spoke the words with a certain tone of dignified playfulness.