LITMIR.BIZ

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in when the girl’s condition seemed serious; but this doctor knew nothing of Esther’s previous life, and could not guess it; he found every organ sound, the pain could not be localized. The invalid’s replies were such as to upset every hypothesis. There remained one way of clearing up the learned man’s doubts, which now lighted on a frightful suggestion; but Esther obstinately refused to submit to a medical examination.

      In this difficulty the Superior appealed to the Abbe Herrera. The Spaniard came, saw that Esther’s condition was desperate, and took the physician aside for a moment. After this confidential interview, the man of science told the man of faith that the only cure lay in a journey to Italy. The Abbe would not hear of such a journey before Esther’s baptism and first Communion.

      “How long will it be till then?” asked the doctor.

      “A month,” replied the Superior.

      “She will be dead,” said the doctor.

      “Yes, but in a state of grace and salvation,” said the Abbe.

      In Spain the religious question is supreme, above all political, civil, or vital considerations; so the physician did not answer the Spaniard. He turned to the Mother Superior, but the terrible Abbe took him by the arm and stopped him.

      “Not a word, monsieur!” said he.

      The doctor, though a religious man and a Monarchist, looked at Esther with an expression of tender pity. The girl was as lovely as a lily drooping on its stem.

      “God help her, then!” he exclaimed as he went away.

      On the very day of this consultation, Esther was taken by her protector to the Rocher de Cancale, a famous restaurant, for his wish to save her had suggested strange expedients to the priest. He tried the effect of two excesses – an excellent dinner, which might remind the poor child of past orgies; and the opera, which would give her mind some images of worldliness. His despotic authority was needed to tempt the young saint to such profanation. Herrera disguised himself so effectually as a military man, that Esther hardly recognized him; he took care to make his companion wear a veil, and put her in a box where she was hidden from all eyes.

      This palliative, which had no risks for innocence so sincerely regained, soon lost its effect. The convent-boarder viewed her protector’s dinners with disgust, had a religious aversion for the theatre, and relapsed into melancholy.

      “She is dying of love for Lucien,” said Herrera to himself; he had wanted to sound the depths of this soul, and know how much could be exacted from it.

      So the moment came when the poor child was no longer upheld by moral force, and the body was about to break down. The priest calculated the time with the hideous practical sagacity formerly shown by executioners in the art of torture. He found his protegee in the garden, sitting on a bench under a trellis on which the April sun fell gently; she seemed to be cold and trying to warm herself; her companions looked with interest at her pallor as of a folded plant, her eyes like those of a dying gazelle, her drooping attitude. Esther rose and went to meet the Spaniard with a lassitude that showed how little life there was in her, and, it may be added, how little care to live. This hapless outcast, this wild and wounded swallow, moved Carlos Herrera to compassion for the second time. The gloomy minister, whom God should have employed only to carry out His revenges, received the sick girl with a smile, which expressed, indeed, as much bitterness as sweetness, as much vengeance as charity. Esther, practised in meditation, and used to revulsions of feeling since she had led this almost monastic life, felt on her part, for the second time, distrust of her protector; but, as on the former occasion, his speech reassured her.

      “Well, my dear child,” said he, “and why have you never spoken to me of Lucien?”

      “I promised you,” she said, shuddering convulsively from head to foot; “I swore to you that I would never breathe his name.”

      “And yet you have not ceased to think of him.”

      “That, monsieur, is the only fault I have committed. I think of him always; and just as you came, I was saying his name to myself.”

      “Absence is killing you?”

      Esther’s only answer was to hang her head as the sick do who already scent the breath of the grave.

      “If you could see him – ?” said he.

      “It would be life!” she cried.

      “And do you think of him only spiritually?”

      “Ah, monsieur, love cannot be dissected!”

      “Child of an accursed race! I have done everything to save you; I send you back to your fate. – You shall see him again.”

      “Why insult my happiness? Can I not love Lucien and be virtuous? Am I not ready to die here for virtue, as I should be ready to die for him? Am I not dying for these two fanaticisms – for virtue, which was to make me worthy of him, and for him who flung me into the embrace of virtue? Yes, and ready to die without seeing him or to live by seeing him. God is my Judge.”

      The color had mounted to her face, her whiteness had recovered its amber warmth. Esther looked beautiful again.

      “The day after that on which you are washed in the waters of baptism you shall see Lucien once more; and if you think you can live in virtue by living for him, you shall part no more.”

      The priest was obliged to lift up Esther, whose knees failed her; the poor child dropped as if the ground had slipped from under her feet. The Abbe seated her on a bench; and when she could speak again she asked him:

      “Why not to-day?”

      “Do you want to rob Monseigneur of the triumph of your baptism and conversion? You are too close to Lucien not to be far from God.”

      “Yes, I was not thinking – ”

      “You will never be of any religion,” said the priest, with a touch of the deepest irony.

      “God is good,” said she; “He can read my heart.”

      Conquered by the exquisite artlessness and gestures, Herrera kissed her on the forehead for the first time.

      “Your libertine friends named you well; you would bewitch God the Father. – A few days more must pass, and then you will both be free.”

      “Both!” she echoed in an ecstasy of joy.

      This scene, observed from a distance, struck pupils and superiors alike; they fancied they had looked on at a miracle as they compared Esther with herself. She was completely changed; she was alive. She reappeared her natural self, all love, sweet, coquettish, playful, and gay; in short, it was a resurrection.

      Herrera lived in the Rue Cassette, near Saint-Sulpice, the church to which he was attached. This building, hard and stern in style, suited this Spaniard, whose discipline was that of the Dominicans. A lost son of Ferdinand VII.‘s astute policy, he devoted himself to the cause of the constitution, knowing that this devotion could never be rewarded till the restoration of the Rey netto. Carlos Herrera had thrown himself body and soul into the Camarilla at the moment when the Cortes seemed likely to stand and hold their own. To the world this conduct seemed to proclaim a superior soul. The Duc d’Angouleme’s expedition had been carried out, King Ferdinand was on the throne, and Carlos Herrera did not go to claim the reward of his services at Madrid. Fortified against curiosity by his diplomatic taciturnity, he assigned as his reason for remaining in Paris his strong affection for Lucien de Rubempre, to which the young man already owed the King’s patent relating to his change of name.

      Herrera lived very obscurely, as priests employed on secret missions traditionally live. He fulfilled his religious duties at Saint-Sulpice, never went out but on business, and then after dark, and in a hackney cab. His day was filled up with a siesta in the Spanish fashion, which arranges for sleep between the two chief meals, and so occupies the hours when Paris is in a busy turmoil. The Spanish cigar also played its part, and consumed time as well as tobacco. Laziness is a mask as gravity is, and that again is laziness.

      Herrera lived on the second floor in one wing of the house, and Lucien occupied the other wing. The two apartments

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