“Come quickly! Madame Rosset is dying.”
Bertha appeared at her door, and with trembling lips
replied:
“Go back to her alone; she does not need me.”
He looked at her stupidly, dazed with grief, and repeated:
“Come at once! She’s dying, I tell
you!”
Bertha answered:
“You would rather it were I.”
Then at last he understood, and returned alone to
the dying woman’s bedside.
He mourned her openly, shamelessly, indifferent to
the sorrow of the wife who no longer spoke to him,
no longer looked at him; who passed her life in solitude,
hedged round with disgust, with indignant anger, and
praying night and day to God.
They still lived in the same house, however, and sat
opposite each other at table, in silence and despair.
Gradually his sorrow grew less acute; but she did
not forgive him.
And so their life went on, hard and bitter for them
both.
For a whole year they remained as complete strangers
to each other as if they had never met. Bertha
nearly lost her reason.
At last one morning she went out very early, and returned
about eight o’clock bearing in her hands an
enormous bouquet of white roses. And she sent
word to her husband that she wanted to speak to him.
He came-anxious and uneasy.
“We are going out together,” she said.
“Please carry these flowers; they are too heavy
for me.”
A carriage took them to the gate of the cemetery,
where they alighted. Then, her eyes filling with
tears, she said to George:
“Take me to her grave.”
He trembled, and could not understand her motive;
but he led the way, still carrying the flowers.
At last he stopped before a white marble slab, to
which he pointed without a word.
She took the bouquet from him, and, kneeling down,
placed it on the grave. Then she offered up a
silent, heartfelt prayer.
Behind her stood her husband, overcome by recollections
of the past.
She rose, and held out her hands to him.
“If you wish it, we will be friends,”
she said.
With the first day of spring, when the awakening earth
puts on its garment of green, and the warm, fragrant
air fans our faces and fills our lungs and appears
even to penetrate to our hearts, we experience a vague,
undefined longing for freedom, for happiness, a desire
to run, to wander aimlessly, to breathe in the spring.
The previous winter having been unusually severe,
this spring feeling was like a form of intoxication
in May, as if there were an overabundant supply of
sap.
