Page:Man Who Laughs (Estes and Lauriat 1869) v2.djvu/94

74 And Ursus said aside, "By heaven, they are plain-spoken people!"

How blissful to lovers are their moments of silence! In them they gather, as it were, masses of love, which afterwards explode into sweet fragments.

Then came a pause, and afterwards Dea cried,—

"Do you know, in the evening, when we are playing our parts, at the moment when my hand touches your forehead,—oh, what a noble head yours is, Gwynplaine!—at the moment when I feel your hair beneath my fingers, I shiver; a heavenly joy comes over me, and I say to myself, 'In all this world of darkness which encompasses me, in this universe of solitude, in this great obscurity in which I live, in this quaking fear of myself and of everything, I have one prop; and he is here. It is he.' It is you."

"Oh, you love me!" said Gwynplaine. "I, too, have no one but you on earth. You are everything to me. Dea, what would you have me do? What do you desire? What do you want?"

Dea answered, "I do not know. I am happy."

"Yes," replied Gwynplaine, "we are happy indeed!"

Ursus raised his voice severely: "So you are happy. are you? That's a crime. I have warned you before. You are happy! Then take care you are not seen. Take up as little room as you can. Happiness ought to hide itself in a hole. Make yourselves still less than you are, if that be possible. God measures the greatness of happiness by the insignificance of the happy. The happy should conceal themselves like malefactors. Shine out like the wretched glow-worms that you are, and you'll be trodden on; and serve you right too! What do you mean by all that love-making nonsense? I'm no duenna, whose business it is to watch lovers billing and cooing. I'm tired of it all, I tell you; and you may both go to the devil."