Yesterday at one o'clock, when Griffith was going to bed, I said to
her: "Take your shawl, dear, and come out with me. I want to go to the
bottom of the garden without anyone knowing."
Without a word, she followed me. Oh! my Renee, what an awful moment
when, after a little pause full of delicious thrills of agony, I saw
him gliding along like a shadow. When he had reached the garden
safely, I said to Griffith:
"Don't be astonished, but the Baron de Macumer is here, and, indeed,
it is on that account I brought you with me."
No reply from Griffith. "What would you have with me?" said Felipe, in a tone of such
agitation that it was easy to see he was driven beside himself by the
noise, slight as it was, of our dresses in the silence of the night
and of our steps upon the gravel.
"I want to say to you what I could not write," I replied.
Griffith withdrew a few steps. It was one of those mild nights, when
the air is heavy with the scent of flowers. My head swam with the
intoxicating delight of finding myself all but alone with him in the
friendly shade of the lime-trees, beyond which lay the garden, shining
all the more brightly because the white facade of the house reflected
the moonlight. The contrast seemed, as it were, an emblem of our
clandestine love leading up to the glaring publicity of a wedding.
Neither of us could do more at first than drink in silently the
ecstasy of a moment, as new and marvelous for him as for me. At last I
found tongue to say, pointing to the elm-tree:
"Although I am not afraid of scandal, you shall not climb that tree
again. We have long enough played schoolboy and schoolgirl, let us
rise now to the height of our destiny. Had that fall killed you, I
should have died disgraced . . ."
I looked at him. Every scrap of color had left his face.
"And if you had been found there, suspicion would have attached either
to my mother or to me . . ."
"Forgive me," he murmured. "If you walk along the boulevard, I shall hear your step; and when I
want to see you, I will open my window. But I would not run such a
risk unless some emergency arose. Why have you forced me by your rash
act to commit another, and one which may lower me in your eyes?"
The tears which I saw in his eyes were to me the most eloquent of
answers. "What I have done to-night," I went on with a smile, "must seem to you
the height of madness . . ." After we had walked up and down in silence more than once, he
recovered composure enough to say: