by George Sand
‘Sitting on this rock, I would wring my hands in a frenzy as I listened to all the sounds of spring and love concealed in the mountains, as I looked at the sunbirds* chasing and teasing each other, at the insects sleeping in a voluptuous embrace in the calyxes of flowers, as I breathed in the burning dust the palm trees send to each other,—ethereal transports, subtle pleasures, for which the soft, summer breeze serves as a resting place. At such times, I was crazy, I was beside myself. I would ask the flowers, the birds, the voice of the torrent, for love. I would summon wildly that unknown happiness, of which the mere idea sent me out of my mind. I would see you, playful and laughing, running towards me on the path over there, so tiny in the distance and so clumsy at climbing over the rocks that, with your brown hair and white dress, you might have been taken for a penguin from the southern hemisphere. Then my blood would calm down, my lips would stop burning. In the presence of the seven-year-old Indiana, I would forget the fifteen-year-old Indiana of whom I’d just been dreaming. I would open my arms to you with a pure joy; your caresses would cool my brow. I was happy; I was a father.
‘How many free, peaceful days have we passed in this ravine! How many times have I bathed your little feet in the pure water of this lake! How many times have I watched you sleeping among these reeds with a palm leaf for a sunshade! Sometimes, then, my tortures would begin again. I would grieve that you were so small; I would wonder if, suffering as I did, I could live till the day when you would be able to understand me and respond to me. I would gently lift up your fine, silky hair and kiss it lovingly. I would compare it with other locks that I had cut from your brow in previous years and that I used to keep in my wallet. I would be happy to confirm that, every spring, your hair was a darker shade. Then I would look at various marks on the trunk of a nearby date-palm, which I had carved to indicate the progressive increase in your height over four or five years. The tree still bears those scars, Indiana; I found them again the last time I came and suffered here. Alas! You grew in vain; in vain did your beauty keep its promises; in vain did your hair become black as ebony! You didn’t grow for me; it wasn’t for me that your charms developed; it was for another that, for the first time, your heart beat faster.
‘Do you remember how, light as two turtle-doves, we would slip along by the wild rose-bushes? Do you remember, too, that sometimes we would get lost in the savannas that lie above us. Once we decided to climb to the mist-covered peaks of the Salazes but had not foreseen that, as we climbed higher, fruit became more scarce, the waterfalls less approachable, the wind colder and more devastating.
‘When we saw we were leaving the vegetation behind us, you wanted to go back. But when we had crossed the belt where maidenhair fern grows, we found lots of strawberry plants, and you were so busy filling your basket with their fruit that you no longer thought of leaving the place. We had to give up the idea of going further. We were now walking only on volcanic rock speckled with brown marks like biscuits and strewn with fleecy plants. Those miserable wind-beaten weeds made us think of the goodness of God, who seems to have given them a warm garment to enable them to resist the violence of the climate. And then the mist became so thick that we could no longer see where we were going, and we had to go down again. I carried you back in my arms. I carefully went down the steep mountain slopes. Darkness overtook us as we entered the first wood in the third vegetation belt. There, I picked pomegranates for you but was content to quench my own thirst with creeper, which, when its branches are crushed, provides a cold, pure water. Then we recalled the adventures of our favourite heroes* when they were lost in the woods of the Red River.* But we had no loving mothers, no solicitous servants, no faithful dog, to search for us. Well, I was happy and proud; I alone had the task of watching over you and I thought myself happier than Paul.
‘Yes, it was a pure love, a deep, sincere love, that you were already inspiring in me. At the age of ten, Noun was a whole head taller than you. A Creole in the fullest meaning of the term, she was already developed; her glistening eyes were already quickening with a strange expression; her face and her character were those of an adolescent girl. But I didn’t care for Noun, or rather, I cared for her only because of you, whose games she shared. It never occurred to me to wonder if she was beautiful already, or whether some day she would be more so. I never looked at her. In my eyes, she was more of a child than you. It was you I loved. I counted on you; you were my life’s companion, the dream of my youth . . .
‘But I had counted without the future. My brother’s death condemned me to marry his fiancée. I won’t say anything about that period of my life. There was worse to come, Indiana, and yet I was the husband of a woman who hated me and whom I couldn’t love. I was a father, but I lost my son. I was widowed, but I heard that you were married!
‘I won’t tell you about those days of exile in England, that painful period. If I had wronged anyone, it wasn’t you; and if anyone wronged me, I don’t want to complain. In England I became more selfish, that is to say, more depressed and distrustful, than ever. By having no confidence in me, people had forced me to become proud and to rely only on myself. So, in those trials, I had only the testimony of my heart to support me. People turned it into a crime that I didn’t love a woman who married me only because she was forced to, and who treated me only with contempt. Since then people have noticed my apparent aversion for children and regarded that as one of the principal characteristics of my egoism. Raymon teased me cruelly about that tendency, remarking that the care required for the education of children didn’t fit in with the rigidly methodical habits of an old bachelor. I don’t think he knew I’d been a father and that it was I who brought you up. But none of you could understand that, after many years, the memory of my son was as painful to me as on the day he died, and that my wounded heart swelled with emotion at the sight of blonde heads that reminded me of him. When a man is unhappy, people are afraid of not finding him blameworthy enough, because they are afraid of being obliged to pity him.
‘But what no one will ever be able to understand, is the deep indignation, the grim despair, which gripped me, when I, a poor child of the desert at whom no one had ever deigned to cast a pitying glance, was dragged away from this land to undertake the obligations of society; when I was forced to occupy a vacant place in the world that had spurned me, when they wanted me to realize that I had duties towards men who had not recognized theirs towards me. And what’s more, not one of my own family had been willing to help me, and now they all summoned me to the defence of their interests! They weren’t even willing to let me enjoy in peace what they don’t deny to pariahs—solitude! I had only one thing I valued, one hope, one thought in life, that of your belonging to me for ever. They took that away from me; they told me you weren’t rich enough for me. What bitter mockery! I, whom the mountains had nourished and who had been rejected by my father’s house! I, who had never been allowed to learn how to use wealth and on whom they now imposed the task of managing profitably the wealth of others!
‘Yet I submitted. I hadn’t the right to ask that my fragile happiness should be spared. I was despised enough; to resist would have made them hate me. Inconsolable for the death of her other son, my mother threatened to die herself if I didn’t give in to my destiny. My father, who accused me of not knowing how to comfort him, as if it were my fault that he loved me so little, was ready to curse me if I tried to escape from his yoke. I bowed to my fate, but even you, who have also been very unhappy, wouldn’t be able to understand what I suffered. If, persecuted, wounded, and oppressed as I have been, I have not rendered to mankind evil for evil, it should perhaps be inferred that I have not the cold heart I am reproached with.
‘When I came back here and saw the man you had been married to . . . forgive me, Indiana; it was then I was really selfish. There is always egoism in love, since there was some even in mine. I experienced a kind of cruel joy at the thought that this legal sham gave you a master and not a husband. You were surprised at my showing
a kind of affection for him; that was because I didn’t regard him as a rival. I knew quite well that this old man could neither inspire nor feel love and your heart would emerge intact from your marriage. I was grateful to him for your coldness and your sadness. If he had stayed here, perhaps I should have become very guilty, but you left me alone and it wasn’t in my power to live without you. I tried to conquer the uncontrollable love, which had revived as violent as ever when I found you again, beautiful and melancholy as I had dreamed of you in your childhood. But solitude only increased my suffering, and I gave in to my need of seeing you, of living under the same roof, of breathing the same air, of being enraptured at every moment by the harmonious sound of your voice. You know what obstacles I was to encounter, what suspicions I had to fight against. I realized then what duties I was imposing on myself; I couldn’t link my life to yours without reassuring your husband by a sacred promise, and I’ve never known what it was to make light of my word. So I pledged myself with mind and heart never to forget my role of brother, and tell me, Indiana, have I been false to my oath?
‘I realized, too, that it would be difficult, perhaps impossible, for me to carry out this demanding task if I abandoned the disguise which forbade me any intimate relationship, any deep feeling. I realized that I mustn’t play with danger, for my passion was too fervent to emerge victorious from a struggle. I felt I must erect a triple wall of ice around myself, so as to alienate your interest in me, so as to rob me of your compassion which would have destroyed me. I told myself that the day you pitied me, I’d already be guilty, and I was willing to live under the weight of the frightful accusation of hard-heartedness and selfishness which, thanks to heaven, you didn’t spare me. The success of my pretence surpassed my hopes. You lavished on me a kind of insulting pity, like the kind one has for eunuchs. You denied me a heart and senses. You trampled me underfoot and I hadn’t the right to show even the energy inspired by anger and the desire for revenge, for that would have been to betray myself and tell you I was a man.
‘I complain of mankind and not of you, Indiana. You were always kind and merciful. You put up with me under the contemptible disguise I had assumed so as to be near you. You never made me blush for my role; you compensated me for everything and sometimes I thought with pride that, if you looked on me kindly in the guise I’d assumed in order to be misunderstood, perhaps you’d love me if, one day, you could really know me. Alas! What woman other than you would not have spurned me? What other woman would have stretched out her hand to that unintelligent, dumb idiot? Except for you, everyone turned their backs on the egoist with disgust. Oh, the fact is that there was only one creature in the world generous enough not to be put off by that futile association. There was only one heart large enough to spread the sacred fire which animated it on to the narrow, icy heart of the poor abandoned one. It required a heart that was overflowing with what I hadn’t enough of. There was on earth only one Indiana capable of loving a Ralph.
‘After you, the person who showed me the most consideration was M. Delmare. You accused me of preferring him to you, of sacrificing your comfort to my own in refusing to intervene in your domestic quarrels. Unjust, blind woman! You didn’t see that I was of as much use to you as I could be, and above all, you didn’t realize that I couldn’t raise my voice in your favour without betraying myself. What would have become of you if Delmare had turned me out of his house? Who would have protected you, patiently and silently, but with the firm perseverance of an undying love? Not Raymon. And then, I admit that out of gratitude, I was fond of the rough, coarse creature who had the power to deprive me of my one remaining happiness and who didn’t do so. His un-happiness was because you didn’t love him and his misfortune had a secret affinity with mine. I was fond of him too for the very reason that he had never made me suffer the tortures of jealousy . . .
‘But now, I’ve reached the point of telling you about the most terrible sorrow of my life, of the fatal period when your love, which I’d so long dreamed of, belonged to another. It was then that I fully realized the nature of the feeling I had been suppressing for so many years. It was then that hatred poured poison into my heart and jealousy consumed the rest of my strength. Until then, you had remained pure in my imagination; my respect for you surrounded you with a veil that not even the innocent boldness of dreams dared to lift. But when I had the horrible thought that another was involving you in his life, was snatching you from my control, and was being intoxicated with long draughts of happiness that I didn’t even dare dream of, I became mad with rage. I’d have liked to see that detested man at the bottom of this abyss so that I could smash his head with stones.
‘But your woes were so great that I forgot my own. I didn’t want to kill him, because you would have mourned him. Twenty times I even wanted—may heaven forgive me—to be odious and despicable, to betray Delmare and serve my enemy. Yes, Indiana, I was so out of my mind, so miserable at seeing you suffer, that I was sorry I had tried to enlighten you, and would have given my life to be able to leave my heart to Raymon. Oh, the scoundrel! May God forgive him the harm he’s done me; may He punish him for the sorrows he has heaped on your head! It’s for those that I hate him, for as far as I’m concerned, I don’t bother about my own life any more when I see what he’s done to yours. It’s he on whose forehead society should have put a stigma from the day of his birth! It’s he whom society should have cursed and rejected as the most hard-hearted and depraved of men. But, on the contrary, he was carried in triumph. Oh, I recognize mankind in that and I ought not to be indignant, for in adoring the deformed creature who virtually destroys the happiness and reputation of others, man only obeys his own nature.
‘Forgive me, Indiana, forgive me! Perhaps it’s cruel to complain in your presence, but it’s the first and last time. Let me curse the heartless creature who is driving you to the grave. You needed this terrible lesson to open your eyes. A voice was raised in vain from Delmare’s death-bed and from Noun’s to cry out to you: “Beware of him; he will destroy you!” You were deaf. Your evil genius swept you along and, with your reputation tarnished, public opinion condemns you but absolves him. He has done all kinds of harm and no one bothered about it. He killed Noun but you forgot that; he ruined you but you forgave him. It’s because he could dazzle people’s eyes and deceive their minds; it’s because his skilful, deceitful language made its way into people’s hearts; it’s because his viper’s glance was fascinating; it’s because nature would have made him complete if it had given him my wooden features and my sluggish intellect.
‘Oh, yes, may God punish him, for he behaved savagely towards you; or rather may God forgive him, for perhaps he was more stupid than wicked. He didn’t understand you; he didn’t appreciate the happiness he could enjoy. Oh, you loved him so much! He could have made your life so beautiful. In his place I wouldn’t have been virtuous; I would have fled with you into the furthest depths of the wild mountains; I would have snatched you away from society to have you all to myself and I would have had only one fear, that of not seeing you sufficiently accursed and abandoned that I could be everything to you. I’d have been jealous of your reputation but not in the way he was; I’d have wanted to destroy it so as to replace it with my love. I’d have suffered at seeing another man give you a scrap of happiness; that would have been to rob me, for your happiness would have been my responsibility, my property, my life, my honour. Oh, how this wild ravine for our only dwelling and these mountain trees for all our fortune would have made me proud and wealthy, if heaven had given them to me with your love! . . . Let me weep, Indiana; I’m weeping for the first time in my life. God has willed that I shouldn’t die without experiencing that sad pleasure.’
Ralph was weeping like a child. It was, indeed, the first time that stoical heart had indulged in self-pity. Yet in those tears there was more grief for Indiana’s fate than for his own.
‘Don’t weep for me,’ he said, when he saw that she too was in tears. ‘Don’t pity me. Your pity wi
pes out all the past, and the present is no longer bitter. Why should I suffer now? You no longer love him.’
‘If I’d really known you, Ralph, I’d never have loved him,’ cried Madame Delmare. ‘It was your virtue that ruined me.’
‘And then,’ said Ralph, looking at her with a melancholy smile, ‘I’ve many other reasons for joy. Without realizing it, you confided something to me when we opened our hearts to each other during the crossing. You told me that Raymon was never as fortunate as he impudently claimed to be and so you relieved me of some of my torture. You freed me from the remorse of having protected you so badly, for I had the presumption to want to protect you from his seductive charms, and in that, I insulted you, Indiana. I didn’t have faith in your strength. That’s another of my crimes you must forgive me.’
‘Alas!’ said Indiana. ‘You ask that I should forgive you, I who caused the unhappiness of your life, I who requited such a pure, generous love with incredible blindness and fierce ingratitude! It is I who should go on my knees to you and ask for forgiveness.’
‘So my love doesn’t arouse your aversion or your anger, Indiana! Oh, thank you, God! I’ll die happy! Listen to me Indiana. Don’t reproach yourself any more for my sufferings. At this moment I’m not sorry I’ve had none of Raymon’s joys, and I think he ought to envy my fate if he had a man’s heart. Now it is I who am your brother, your husband, your lover for all eternity. Since the day you swore to depart this life with me, I cherished the happy thought that you belonged to me, that you’d been given back to me never to leave me again; I began again to call you my fiancée under my breath. It would have been too great a happiness, or perhaps not enough, to possess you on earth. In God’s bosom the joys of my childhood’s dreams await me. It’s there you will love me, Indiana; it’s there your divine understanding, stripped of all the deceptive falsehoods of this life, will make up to me for a whole life of suffering, sacrifice, and self-denial; it’s there you will be mine, my Indiana, for heaven is you, and I’ve deserved to be saved, I’ve deserved to possess you. It was with these thoughts in mind that I asked you to put on this white dress; it’s your wedding-dress, and that rock jutting out over the lake is the altar that awaits us.’