“Not of body, child, but of mind, perhaps,” and she sighed. “It is ill to lag on and on, a weary dreary nuisance to all around you. There comes a time when it is good to die.”
“You are morbid. Something has distressed you. Tell me,” and Gabrielle sat on the bedside and took her friend’s hand.
“I have been a failure, child. I see it now; and see how the people under the Duke’s rule have suffered in consequence. The Duke himself has shown me this.”
“The Duke?” exclaimed Gabrielle in surprise.
“The influence of a woman’s hand in his governing has been sadly missed. He loved me once, child, and then I could sway him, hard though he now seems. But when I bore him no children and my helplessness fell on me, an estrangement grew between us and from that followed, oh, so many evils.” She sighed deeply, and paused before she added: “Yet he has shown me it is not too late, even now.”
“I cannot follow you now, dear,” said Gabrielle.
“A noble without a son to succeed him lacks one of the great incentives to do right, Gabrielle. He turns his thoughts inwards, broods, thinks only of himself, and grows the harder for the galling grief and disappointment. It has been so with the Duke. If I had but died years ago, when first my calamity struck me down, he would have taken another wife who would have borne him children. Would God indeed that I had died!”
Gabrielle said nothing. Deep down in her mind the thought began to take shape that there was some purpose behind her friend’s words—some new cause to bring this side of her sufferings to the light just now.
“I used to pray so earnestly for a son,” the Duchess continued, after a painful pause; “but none came; and I was thus so unneeded, so less than useless; a clog, a drag, a dead weight in his life. I could not wonder he grew cold, and that in time the coldness hardened into cruelty. I stood for no more than the disappointment in his life.” She spoke in a slow, leaden, hopeless, melancholy tone, infinitely touching to Gabrielle. “It is a dreary fate for a wife, child, to stir no other feeling in her husband’s heart than that of disappointment and to see it hardening slowly into hate. Had I but dared at that time I would have taken my life. But I was a coward. I dared not find freedom in that way.”
“Did the Duke know of these thoughts?” asked Gabrielle, keeping her face averted.