He patted her hand with kindly affection, much relieved now, for she seemed quite calm and the colour even was coming back to her cheeks: all the afternoon he had been dreading this meeting with his daughter, for he had not seen her since he learned from Gaston that she had yielded to his entreaties, and given him the map and letter which would help the King of France to betray his friend: now he was glad to find that—save for an unusual hysterical outburst—she took the whole matter as coolly as he did himself.
There is no doubt that there are moments in life when a crisis is so acute, a catastrophe so overwhelming, that all our faculties become completely deadened: our individuality goes out of us, and we become mere dolls moving automatically by muscular action and quite independently of our brain.
Thus it was with Lydie.
Her father's words could not be misunderstood. They left her without that last faint shadow of doubt which, almost unbeknown to herself, had been her main support during the past few minutes of this intense agony. Now the tiny vestige of hope had vanished. Blank despair invaded her brain and she had the sensation as if sorrow had turned it into a pulpy mass, a great deal too bulky for her head, causing it to throb and to ache intolerably. Beyond that, the rest of herself as it were, became quite mechanical. She was glad that her father said nothing more about the scheme. She knew all that she wanted to know: Gaston's hideous, horrible treachery, the clumsy trap into which she had fallen, and above all the hopeless peril into which she had plunged the very man whom she had wished to save.
She had been the most perfidious traitor amongst them all, for the unfortunate prince had given her his friendship, and had trusted her more fully than he had others.
And then there was her husband!
Of him she would not think, for that way lay madness surely!
She managed to smile to her father, and to reassure him. Presently she would tell him all . . . to-morrow perhaps, but not just yet . . . She did not hate him somehow. She could not have hated him, for she knew him and had always loved him. But he was weak and easily misguided.
Heavens above! had anyone been more culpably weak, more misguided than she herself?
Monsieur le Duc, fully satisfied in his mind now by her outward calm, and the steady brilliance of her eyes, recalled her to her official duties.