Chapter XXXVIII Of Long Felicity, Brief Word

“How many years, dear heart, since we made that winter journey, thou and I, from Jemseg to Quebec, through the illimitable snows?”

“Ten!” answers Yvonne; and the great eyes which she lifts from her writing and flashes gayly upon me grow tender with sweet remembrance. During those ten years the destinies of thrones have shifted strangely in the kaleidoscope of fate. Empires have changed hands. New France has been erased from the New World. Louisbourg has been levelled to a sheep pasture. Quebec has proved no more impregnable. The flag of England flies over Canada. My uncle, the Sieur de Briart, sleeps in a glorious grave, having fallen with Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham. My cousin Marc and I, having fought and bled for France in all the last battles, and lain for months in an English hospital, have accepted the new masters of our country and been confirmed in our little estates beside the Ottawa.

286Redeeming my promise to Gr?l, I have aided him in his vengeance on the Black Abbé—a strange, dark tale which I may one day set down, if ever time makes it less painful to my memory.

Much, then, have I endured in these ten years. But the remembrance of it appears to me but as a tinted glass, through which I am enabled to contemplate the full sun of my happiness.

Yvonne in these ten years has changed but to grow more beautiful. Bodily, there was, I think, no room for that change; but growth is the law of such a spirit as hers, and so into her perfect eyes, wells of light as of old, has come a deeper and more immeasurable wisdom. As to this perennial potency of her beauty, I know that I am not deluded by my passion; for I perceive the homage it compels from all who come within its beneficent influence. Even her mother, a laughingly malicious critic, tells me that my eyes see true in this—(for Giles de Lamourie, having sold his ample acres in Nova Scotia, and forgiven ancient grudges, has come here to live with Yvonne). Father Fafard, when he visits us from his Bonaventure parish, says the same; but his eyes are blind with loving prejudice. When we go into Montreal for the months of December and January, exchanging for a little the quiet of our country home for the glitter of rout and function, no other 287court so choice, so loyal, and so revering as that which Yvonne gathers about her. The wise, drawn by her wit, are held fast by her beauty; while the gay, drawn by her beauty, rise to a worship of her wit and worth.

Yvonne’s small hands are white and alive and restless as on that day in the Grand Pré orchard when, prying into the heart of the apple-blossom, they pried into and set fast hold upon the strings of my heart also. But this life of mine, given into the keeping of their sweet restlessness, has found the secret of rest.

One thing more of her, and I have done with this narrative; for they who live blest have little need or power to depict their happiness. It seems to me, in looking back and forward, that my wife delights particularly in setting at naught the cheap wisdom of the maxim-mongers. How continually are men heard to declare, with the tongue of Sir Oracle: “We don’t woo what is well won”!

But Yvonne, well won these ten years back, I woo again continually, and our daily life together is never without the spur of fresh interest and further possibilities.

“The familiar is held cheap,” say the disappointed; and “Use dulls the edge of passion,” say they whose passion has never known the edge which finely tempered spirits take on.

288But familiarity, the crucial intimacy of day by day companionship, only reveals to me in Yvonne the richer reasons for my reverence; while passion grows but the more poignant as it realizes the exhaustless depths of the nature which responds to it.

The mean poverty of these maxims I had half suspected even before I knew Yvonne. But one, more universally accepted, to the effect that “Anticipation beggars reality,” had ever caused me a certain fear, lest it might prove true. The husband of my dear love has fathomed its falsehood, and anticipation, in my case, was little moderate in its demands. If there be any germ of truth under that long-triumphant lie, then the reason we two have not discovered it must be sought in another life than this. This life cannot be the full reality. Even so, my confident faith is that the lying adage will but seem to lie the more shamelessly under a fuller revelation. Many times have I told Yvonne that to me one life seemed not enough for love of her.

As I conclude, I look across the room to where the beautiful, dark, proud head bends over her desk; for she has outstripped me in my own art of letters, and only my old achievements with the sword enable me to maintain that dominance which the husband, even of Yvonne, ought to have.

289She will not approve these last few pages. She will demand their erasure, declaring them extravagant and an offence against the reticence of true art.

But not one line will I expunge, for they are true.

The End