But Juana,patient and without pride,gentle and without that bitterness which women know so well how to cast into their submission,left Diard no chance for planned ill-humor.Besides,she was one of those noble creatures to whom it is impossible to speak disrespectfully;her glance,in which her life,saintly and pure,shone out,had the weight of a fascination.Diard,embarrassed at first,then annoyed,ended by feeling that such high virtue was a yoke upon him.The goodness of his wife gave him no violent emotions,and violent emotions were what he wanted.What myriads of scenes are played in the depths of his souls,beneath the cold exterior of lives that are,apparently,commonplace!Among these dramas,lasting each but a short time,though they influence life so powerfully and are frequently the forerunners of the great misfortune doomed to fall on so many marriages,it is difficult to choose an example.There was a scene,however,which particularly marked the moment when in the life of this husband and wife estrangement began.Perhaps it may also serve to explain the finale of this narrative.
Juana had two children,happily for her,two sons.The first was born seven months after her marriage.He was called Juan,and he strongly resembled his mother.The second was born about two years after her arrival in Paris.The latter resembled both Diard and Juana,but more particularly Diard.His name was Francisque.For the last five years Francisque had been the object of Juana's most tender and watchful care.The mother was constantly occupied with that child;to him her prettiest caresses;to him the toys,but to him,especially,the penetrating mother-looks.Juana had watched him from his cradle;she had studied his cries,his motions;she endeavored to discern his nature that she might educate him wisely.It seemed at times as if she had but that one child.Diard,seeing that the eldest,Juan,was in a way neglected,took him under his own protection;and without inquiring even of himself whether the boy was the fruit of that ephemeral love to which he owed his wife,he made him his Benjamin.
Of all the sentiments transmitted to her through the blood of her grandmothers which consumed her,Madame Diard accepted one alone,--maternal love.But she loved her children doubly:first with the noble violence of which her mother the Marana had given her the example;secondly,with grace and purity,in the spirit of those social virtues the practice of which was the glory of her life and her inward recompense.The secret thought,the conscience of her motherhood,which gave to the Marana's life its stamp of untaught poesy,was to Juana an acknowledged life,an open consolation at all hours.Her mother had been virtuous as other women are criminal,--in secret;she had stolen a fancied happiness,she had never really tasted it.But Juana,unhappy in her virtue as her mother was unhappy in her vice,could enjoy at all moments the ineffable delights which her mother had so craved and could not have.To her,as to her mother,maternity comprised all earthly sentiments.Each,from differing causes,had no other comfort in their misery.Juana's maternal love may have been the strongest because,deprived of all other affections,she put the joys she lacked into the one joy of her children;and there are noble passions that resemble vice;the more they are satisfied the more they increase.Mothers and gamblers are alike insatiable.
When Juana saw the generous pardon laid silently on the head of Juan by Diard's fatherly affection,she was much moved,and from the day when the husband and wife changed parts she felt for him the true and deep interest she had hitherto shown to him as a matter of duty only.
If that man had been more consistent in his life;if he had not destroyed by fitful inconstancy and restlessness the forces of a true though excitable sensibility,Juana would doubtless have loved him in the end.Unfortunately,he was a type of those southern natures which are keen in perceptions they cannot follow out;capable of great things over-night,and incapable the next morning;often the victim of their own virtues,and often lucky through their worst passions;admirable men in some respects,when their good qualities are kept to a steady energy by some outward bond.For two years after his retreat from active life Diard was held captive in his home by the softest chains.He lived,almost in spite of himself,under the influence of his wife,who made herself gay and amusing to cheer him,who used the resources of feminine genius to attract and seduce him to a love of virtue,but whose ability and cleverness did not go so far as to simulate love.
At this time all Paris was talking of the affair of a captain in the army who in a paroxysm of libertine jealousy had killed a woman.
Diard,on coming home to dinner,told his wife that the officer was dead.He had killed himself to avoid the dishonor of a trial and the shame of death upon the scaffold.Juana did not see at first the logic of such conduct,and her husband was obliged to explain to her the fine jurisprudence of French law,which does not prosecute the dead.
"But,papa,didn't you tell us the other day that the king could pardon?"asked Francisque.
"The king can give nothing but life,"said Juan,half scornfully.