CHAPTER VI
He had done this thing for her—had stained his hands with blood to keep hers clean—had darkened his own soul that her soul might shine the purer for that shadow. What was her debt to him for this great self-sacrifice? How could she pay it, and not condone his sin?
So we pass to Yolande and her mortal problem.
Poor child so straight in candour as she was, no compromise with facts seemed possible to her nature. She must tell him all or nothing.
And if she told him all—revealed her knowledge of his crime—made herself its accessory thereby? He’d answer, would he not, “That leaves me no alternative. Sweet love, for sweet love’s sake, I must acquit you of this shadow of complicity—give myself up, and vindicate your spotless fame before the world”?
Would he not? She told herself he would; deafened her ears to her own heart’s whispered treason; would admit no justification for it in the evidences of a slandered character. Could one so un-self-reliant, so irresolute, so much the whimpering prey to circumstance as circumstance had seemed to paint her Louis, have braced himself to do that deed? The deed was there to answer her—to answer, triumphantly too, that by very reason of itself that saintly soul was convict of a heroism of which its meek patience had once seemed incapable, and which, in its revelation, had found the woman in her secretly exultant over the angel. Was that so indeed? Had his fall from grace made him dearer to her than ever his perfection could?
A dreadful thought, for which she paid to herself and God with anguishes of penance. But she could not control it, nor lay its unrighteous shadow. How could she, when father to it was the wish that what it implied of manly strength in him would answer to her confession of that dark knowledge, were she to make it, by an instant surrender to the law?
She could not tell him, then; and, so, what other course? No mid-way steering for this whole-hearted heroine—no hints, no tell-tale sighs, no tearful looks askance to haunt him with half-truths; no lagging partner snivelling unspoken resentment of her burden. She’d bear it all and bravely, the weight, the heat and pressure of the day, and cheer him, smiling, on to self-redemption. That be her mission—by ways of healing grace to guide him to that summit he would never attain alone. Man’s responsibility might be to the civil laws; but woman’s was to love. For love he’d saved her; love should save him. The rest was for his confessor.
Conceive this poor soul, then, with her monstrous self-imposed burden—never to be put down—facing the steeps of life! If her feet would sometimes falter, her eyes grow strained with agony beneath it, her heart never admitted by one false beat a sense of disproportion in their loads. To fend him from the truth, while hiding from him that she knew it; to pay his debts to vile extortion, and suffer the stigma of a parsimony which appeared to grudge him the means to realise their compact of a boundless charity; worse, to suspect sometimes that he guessed her knowledge of the truth, and was content to build upon her loving hypocrisy his house of later peace, was content to let her live the lie while he enjoyed its fruits—these things were the hardest of her task.
Another grief she suffered; but that, she told herself, was in heaven’s withholding of a greater. She was thankful for it—thankful as a martyr, whom great pain has numbed from further feeling—thankful that in all these years no child was born to them to bear the heritage of its father’s sin. And while she praised heaven for its mercy, the starved woman in her hungered for the milk of motherhood, and, fading on that deprivation, made her task of youth a burden. Yet she must bear that too, or pay the penalty to love estranged, since only the gifts of motherhood could compensate for youth and beauty bartered against them.
So she must be young and sweet in spite of ageing conscience; must sing about her duties; must smile away those shadows in her husband’s eyes which she sickened to think were the reflections of her own enforced avarice, her waning beauty, her barrenness.
A sordid destiny for this child of lovely purity; this Yolande of the white hands; this lily light of truth.
And to work out in what unnatural atmosphere—transplanted into what lifeless soil?
She was the mistress of a Golgotha, an old dark windy necropolis, whose massive gates her husband’s hands had closed for ever, shutting her in to consort with its ghosts. In di Rocco had perished the last of his name; in him, the old blotched trunk, his house’s life, slow withering to its roots, had sunk for ever. The branches long were leafless. To her, a stranger, had befallen the heritage of death.
She could have administered it, have justified heaven’s severe choice of her as receiver in that estate such ages bankrupt in charity, have wrung a sombre joy even from dispersing its evil accumulations, had not Fate thus imposed upon her this awful seclusion, paralysing her hands. As antique graveyards are sometimes made the sporting-grounds for little feet, so had she once pictured to herself the joy of budding life at play in these stony corridors and empty gardens, redeeming them from the melancholy of great wrong. It was not to be; and for the withholding of that lovely mercy she could only give heaven praise—give it with weeping eyes in solitude, and, elsewhere, with a bright countenance turned to her husband.
Did he find that inscrutable, nevertheless? Was he so far from sharing her thankfulness for that grace denied as that he could visit upon her—in those shades of altered intimacy, those reserves in confidence, those nuances of alienation which only love can detect—his secret disappointment? She prayed that it was not so; prayed, also, that, in the enforced restraints she must put upon his charities, his sweet and reasonable nature would look for no baser motive than necessity. She was always frank with him as to the extent of what she could command (exclusive of Bonito’s periodic drains upon her, and those of her father, a creature scarcely less abominable), and held all within those limits at his pleasure. Rather she should be whispered for parsimony than that his generosity should suffer in its name. He was so good, so bounteous, so utterly improvident for himself. Though he would not claim one penny that was hers, there was no question of his acting as her almoner. Indeed the money was no more hers than his, but in trust to both of them for God’s good business. She was, by heaven’s grace, but the acting paymaster; and so long as she might bear the whole burden of that duty, she was content that he should enjoy its credit. The question was one between her and love alone; its very exclusiveness made its bliss.
Yet sometimes in her moods of desolation, when, for all her prayers and self-reassurances, that sense of their estrangement would glow a more definite gloom, and the problem of her double life smite sickly on her heart, a dread doubt would arise in her as to the sureness of her guidance of this afflicted soul. The physically blind are apt to become the morally blind, intent only on their self-interests, some people say, because of the consideration with which pity hedges them—of the licence which it allows them for their infirmity. What, then, if love in pity had so rallied this stricken life as to lead it to regard itself as a persecuted thing—a thing privileged, through its own helplessness, to presume on the self-sacrifices of others for its sake? Louis’s apparent obtuseness to the meaning of the atonements her sweet example exacted of him, his apparent ignorance of any provocation to them caused by himself, filled her, when in these moods, with amazement. Had he lost all sense of responsibility to his own deed, in her voluntary acceptance of its consequences? That were to assume that he guessed her part, and could justify it to himself on the score of his own infirmity—an obliquity which surely could not be held to vindicate her self-sacrifice before heaven. Yet sometimes the assumption would arise, to hurt her cruelly—even to sting her to a momentary revolt. He could not be really ignorant of her burden—must have surmised some coincidence between Bonito’s visit and the instant restrictions she had been forced to put upon their expenditure. His terror of the man’s presence on that day; his slow and shaken convalescence from the date of it—these were evidences of his knowledge hard to be discredited. And that, in the face of it, he could expect of her a pledge of their full confidence; could imply a reproach of her for her barrenness!—O, that were an addition to her load beyond her human endurance. The mere shadow of its oppression killed her heart—drove her in her agony to blow cold upon the little chill which already spoke their differences. And then the reaction would come.
He had done this thing for her; and she had accepted the burden of its consequences. She had prayed, prayed that even as he had saved her out of silence, so might she save him. And this was her heroism—to deprecate his blindness as a wilful vileness.
Then, poor child, she would call herself a wicked traitor to her lord, blame her own foul suspicions, and seek by loving demonstrations to atone. Her wistful guiles to win his favour, her rehearsals for his sake of that old forgotten part of tranquil innocence, her gratitude for only half-thawed acknowledgments, were moving things to witness. How could she dream her Louis guilty of this monstrous meanness—the man who had dipped his hand in blood to keep hers white? His first terror of that apparition had been real; he had afterwards accepted her word for its being an illusion. He always trusted others’ assurances: that very weakness it was which made him so lovable. So lovable, so lovable; and she had let her wicked heart condemn him! Could he have recovered from the shock of that visitation so utterly as he had, if he had seen in her the ever-present hostage for his immunity from deadlier hauntings? Her whole protecting knowledge of him was to answer; and it answered piercingly remorseful. No dear soul, it said, had ever less power than Louis-Marie for affecting to ignore the influences of a present depression. Yet Louis-Marie, the terror once laid, had rallied—had even come to recover something of the serenity of his earlier innocence. Why should he not, indeed? She thought, with heart-felt joy, it spoke his peace made with God; and, so justified of her burden, was more frenziedly determined than ever to hide her bearing of it from him, while she smiled and smiled under its load, impersonating out of torture her own untroubled youth. Alas! blind Love—who yet perhaps deserves scant pity! For did he not put out his own eyes!
Now she saw, and was rejoiced to see, as the months drew into years, his soul relax upon an ancient sweet security; the spectre of his fear grew less and less; his natural goodness mature into the full fruitage of its blossoms’ promise. So peaceful did he grow, so seemingly unvexed by apprehensions, so confident in his demands upon her charity for others’ sake, she was sometimes moved to wonder if, after all, she were not being made the victim of a hellish conspiracy—if he had really committed the crime with which villainy had charged him. But as often she recalled Bonito’s words—“Ask him, if you doubt me”—and that she dared not do. The answer might destroy at a blow the whole structure of his soul’s redemption, which her self-obliterating love had patiently built up for him year by year. Fruitless all her devotion then; useless that cementing of its bricks with her own heart’s blood. He had come to be nearer heaven now than she, raised on the altar of her sacrifice. She had lied to save him. Should she risk his soul at the last to save her own?
Divinely steadfast to her purpose, she kept her way. Her sweet eyes shone inspired to it. Though she were lost by holding to it, he should win to harbour. What greater love could woman show? If God would forgive her for that—concede her the mercy to creep into heaven, lost in her dear saint’s shadow! For he was her saint again—twice beatified through his fault. He had been guilty of his one worldly lapse for her—had done outrage to his nature that hers might suffer none. Was not such sin the prerogative of consecration?
So, with an unfading resolution, through days of exaltation and depression, through drear heart-burnings and the agonies of misunderstandings not to be explained, through poignant ecstasies and thorns of non-fulfilment, she strove unfaltering—until, lo! there came a time when all her struggles seemed in vain; when, bursting from the thicket, her bleeding feet stood halted in an instant, not before the dear meadows they had hoped, but at the base of a monstrous God-veiling cliff.
That year, the heavens themselves had seemed to speak the omens of disaster. From its opening they had poured down incessantly from sooty reservoirs a torrent like the deluge. The season was an abnormally mild one, if any such term could be applied to tempests of wind and water, overwhelming, inexplicable. The ice in the mountains, cracking and answering under the assault, boomed an unceasing cannonade; the land slid down in continents; trees were tossed in flood-water, like sprouts boiling in a saucepan. And to all this descending hubbub the rising of a human tide seemed to leap sympathetic. The waters of unrest were gathering force and volume; the dark hour of Savoy was drawing near; the Prefect had hard ado to keep his feet.
Then at last came a period of respite, when the powers of darkness seemed to sleep exhausted; and the sun came out, and the waters sounded peaceably on the hills, and Spring opened its drowned eyes and preened its draggled plumes.
One day, when all the land was glowing in a noontide rest, a servant came to inform Madame Saint-Péray that his excellency the Prefect of Faissigny craved the honour of a word with her alone. She opened her eyes in amazement.
The Prefect! Impossible! The man could not have heard aright.
But the man was not mistaken. M. le Préfet, it would appear, had foreseen this reluctance on Madama’s part to grant him that honour, inasmuch as he had impressed very earnestly upon the messenger the importance of an occasion which could thus excuse his presumption in calling upon one with whom he was unacquainted.
Madama’s cheek flamed as she rose; her lips set tightly; she looked an inch taller than her wont.
“Thank you, Benoît,” she said. “I will go down to him.”