Free Valentine by George Sand Page A

of the worst in the farm-house ; but as she was supposed to be a poor relation from Poitou whom the Lhérys had been helping for a long while, she insisted that the farmer should not disabuse his servants of the error into which they had fallen by receiving her with undue honor. She had voluntarily chosen a sort of little loft with a round window looking on a most fascinating landscape of fields and islets, intersected by the innumerable windings of the Indre, and covered with the most beautiful trees. A reasonably good bed had been hastily made up for her on a wretched pallet; peas were drying on a hurdle, bunches of golden onions hung from the ceiling, skeins of double thread slumbered on a disabled reel. Louise, who had been brought up in opulence, found a charm in these accessories of country life. To Madame Lhéry’s great surprise, she had insisted upon allowing her little room to retain that rustic air of disorder and crowding which reminded her of the Flemish paintings of Van Ostade and Gerard Dow. But the things she liked best in that modest retreat were an old chintz curtain covered with faded flowers, and two old-fashioned arm-chairs, the woodwork of which had long ago been gilded. By the merest chance in the worldthose things had been relieved from duty at the château about ten years before, and Louise recognized them as having been familiar to her in her childhood. She wept and almost embraced them as old friends, as she remembered how many times in those happy days of peace and ignorance, gone by forever, she had crouched, a laughing, fair-haired girl, between the broad arms of those old chairs.
    That night she had fallen asleep with her eyes fixed mechanically on the flowers in the curtain ; and, as she gazed, her memory reviewed her past life to its most trivial details. After a long period of exile, the keen sensation of her former sorrows and her former joys awoke with great force. She fancied that it was only the day after the events which she had atoned for and bewailed during a heart-broken pilgrimage of fifteen years. She fancied that she could see behind that curtain, which the wind blew back and forth across the window, the whole brilliant, fairy-like scene of her younger years, the tower of the old manor-house, the venerable oaks in the great park, the white goat she had loved, the field in which she had plucked corn-flowers. Sometimes the image of her grandmother, a selfish, easy-going creature, rose before her with tears in her eyes, as on the day of her banishment. But that heart, which only half knew how to love, was closed against her, and that consoling apparition vanished with airy indifference.
    The only pure and always refreshing image in that imaginary picture was that of Valentine, the lovely child of four, with the long golden hair and rosy cheeks, whom Louise had known. She saw her once more running through the fields of grain taller than herself, like a partridge in a furrow; jumping into her arms with the frank and caressing laughter of childhood which bringstears to the eyes of the loved one ; passing her plump white hands over her sister’s neck, and chattering to her of the thousand artless trifles which make up the life of a child, in that primitive, sensible, sprightly language which always charms and surprises us. From that time Louise had been a mother; she had loved childhood no longer as a source of entertainment but as a sentiment. That love of long ago for her little sister had awakened, more intense and more motherly than before, with the love she bore her own son. She imagined her just as she was when she left her; and when she was told that she was a tall and beautiful woman now, stronger and straighter than herself, Louise could not succeed in believing it for more than an instant; her imagination soon recurred to little Valentine, and she longed to hold her on her knee.
    That fresh and smiling apparition played a part in all her dreams since she had passed