For two nights Montriveau, wrapped in his cloak, lay out on the
rock platform. The singing at vespers and matins filled him with
unutterable joy. He stood under the wall to hear the music of
the organ, listening intently for one voice among the rest. But
in spite of the silence, the confused effect of music was all
that reached his ears. In those sweet harmonies defects of
execution are lost; the pure spirit of art comes into direct
communication with the spirit of the hearer, making no demand on
the attention, no strain on the power of listening. Intolerable
memories awoke. All the love within him seemed to break into
blossom again at the breath of that music; he tried to find
auguries of happiness in the air. During the last night he sat
with his eyes fixed upon an ungrated window, for bars were not
needed on the side of the precipice. A light shone there all
through the hours; and that instinct of the heart, which is
sometimes true, and as often false, cried within him, "She is
there!"
"She is certainly there! Tomorrow she will be mine," he said
to himself, and joy blended with the slow tinkling of a bell that
began to ring.
Strange unaccountable workings of the heart! The nun, wasted by
yearning love, worn out with tears and fasting, prayer and
vigils; the woman of nine-and-twenty, who had passed through
heavy trials, was loved more passionately than the lighthearted
girl, the woman of four-and-twenty, the sylphide, had ever been.
But is there not, for men of vigorous character, something
attractive in the sublime expression engraven on women's faces by
the impetuous stirrings of thought and misfortunes of no ignoble
kind? Is there not a beauty of suffering which is the most
interesting of all beauty to those men who feel that within them
there is an inexhaustible wealth of tenderness and consoling pity
for a creature so gracious in weakness, so strong with love? It
is the ordinary nature that is attracted by young, smooth,
pink-and-white beauty, or, in one word, by prettiness.
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