Have you ever thought about what fiction is? Probably, such a question may seem surprising: and so everything is clear. Every person throughout his life has to repeatedly create the works he needs for specific purposes - statements, autobiographies, dictations - using not gypsum or clay, not musical notes, not paints, but just a word. At the same time, almost every person will be very surprised if he is told that he thereby created a work of fiction, which is very different from visual art, music and sculpture making. However, everyone understands that a student's essay or dictation is fundamentally different from novels, short stories, news that are created by professional writers. In the works of professionals there is the most important difference - excogitation. But, oddly enough, in a school literature course, you don’t realize the full power of fiction. So using our website in your free time discover fiction for yourself. The Parisians — Complete by Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton (beautiful books to read TXT) 📖
Book online «The Parisians — Complete by Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton (beautiful books to read TXT) 📖». Author Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton
CHAPTER XIV.
When they were alone, Madame Rameau took Isaura’s hand in both her own, and, gazing wistfully into her face, said, “No wonder you are so loved—yours is the beauty that sinks into the hearts and rests there. I prize my boy more, now that I have seen you. But, oh, Mademoiselle! pardon me—do not withdraw your hand—pardon the mother who comes from the sick-bed of her only son and asks if you will assist to save him! A word from you is life or death to him!”
“Nay, nay, do not speak thus, Madame; your son knows how much I value, how sincerely I return, his friendship; but—but,” she paused a moment, and continued sadly and with tearful eyes—“I have no heart to give to him-to any one.”
“I do not—I would not if I dared—ask what it would be violence to yourself to promise. I do not ask you to bid me return to my son and say, ‘Hope and recover,’ but let me take some healing message from your lips. If I understand your words rightly, I at least may say that you do not give to another the hopes you, deny to him?”
“So far you understand me rightly, Madame. It has been said, that romance-writers give away so much of their hearts to heroes or heroines of their own creation, that they leave nothing worth the giving to human beings like themselves. Perhaps it is so; yet, Madame,” added Isaura, with a smile of exquisite sweetness in its melancholy, “I have heart enough left to feel for you.”
Madame Rameau was touched. “Ah, Mademoiselle, I do not believe in the saying you have quoted. But I must not abuse your goodness by pressing further upon you subjects from which you shrink. Only one word more: you know that my husband and I are but quiet tradesfolks, not in the society, nor aspiring to it, to which my son’s talents have raised himself; yet dare I ask that you will not close here the acquaintance that I have obtruded on you?—dare I ask, that I may, now and then, call on you—that now and then I may see you at my own home? Believe that I would not here ask anything which your own mother would disapprove if she overlooked disparities of station. Humble as our home is, slander never passed its threshold.”
“Ah, Madame, I and the Signora Venosta, whom in our Italian tongue I call mother, can but feel honoured and grateful whenever it pleases you to receive visits from us.”
“It would be a base return for such gracious compliance with my request if I concealed from you the reason why I pray Heaven to bless you for that answer. The physician says that it may be long before my son is sufficiently convalescent to dispense with a mother’s care, and resume his former life and occupation in the great world. It is everything for us if we can coax him into coming under our own roof-tree. This is difficult to do. It is natural for a young man launched into the world to like his own chez lui. Then what will happen to Gustave? He, lonely and heart-stricken, will ask friends, young as himself, but far stronger, to come and cheer him; or he will seek to distract his thoughts by the overwork of his brain; in either case he is doomed. But I have stronger motives yet to fix him a while at our hearth. This is just the moment, once lost never to be regained, when soothing companionship, gentle reproachless advice, can fix him lastingly in the habits and modes of life which will banish all fears of his future from the hearts of his parents. You at least honour him with friendship, with kindly interest—you at least would desire to wean him from all that a friend may disapprove or lament—a creature whom Providence meant to be good, and perhaps great. If I say to him, ‘It will be long before you can go out and see your friends, but at my house your friends shall come and see you—among them Signora Venosta and Mademoiselle Cicogna will now and then drop in’—my victory is gained, and my son is saved.”
“Madame,” said Isaura, half sobbing, “what a blessing to have a mother like you! Love so noble ennobles those who hear its voice. Tell your son how ardently I wish him to be well, and to fulfil more than the promise of his genius; tell him also this—how I envy him his mother.”
CHAPTER XV.
It needs no length of words to inform thee, my intelligent reader, be thou man or woman—but more especially woman—of the consequences following each other, as wave follows wave in a tide, that resulted from the interview with which my last chapter closed. Gustave is removed to his parents’ house; he remains for weeks confined within doors, or, on sunny days, takes an hour or so in his own carriage, drawn by the horse bought from Rochebriant, into by-roads remote from the fashionable world; Isaura visits his mother, liking, respecting, influenced by her more and more; in those visits she sits beside the sofa on which Rameau reclines. Gradually, gently—more and more by his mother’s lips—is impressed on her the belief that it is in her power to save a human life, and to animate its career towards those goals which are never based wholly upon earth in the earnest eyes of genius, or perhaps in the yet more upward vision of pure-souled believing woman.
And Gustave himself, as he passes through the slow stages of convalescence, seems so gratefully to ascribe to her every step in his progress—seems so gently softened in character—seems so refined from the old affectations, so ennobled above the old cynicism—and, above all, so needing her presence, so sunless without it, that—well, need I finish the sentence?—the reader will complete what I leave unsaid.
Enough, that one day Isaura returned home from a visit at Madame Rameau’s with the knowledge that her hand was pledged—her future life disposed of; and that, escaping from the Venosta, whom she so fondly, and in her hunger for a mother’s love, called Madre, the girl shut herself up in her own room with locked doors.
Ah, poor child! ah, sweet-voiced Isaura! whose delicate image I feel myself too rude and too hard to transfer to this page in the purity of its outlines, and the blended softnesses of its hues—thou who, when saying things serious in the words men use, saidst them with a seriousness so charming, and with looks so feminine—thou, of whom no man I ever knew was quite worthy—ah, poor, simple, miserable girl, as I see thee now in the solitude of that white-curtained virginal room; hast thou, then, merged at last thy peculiar star into the cluster of all these commonplace girls whose lips have said “Ay,” when their hearts said “No”?—thou, O brilliant Isaura! thou, O motherless child!
She had sunk into her chair—her own favourite chair, the covering of it had been embroidered by Madame de Grantmesnil, and bestowed on her as a birthday
Comments (0)