She paused a moment, to assure herself that she held the attention of the Queen and of every one there present, then she fixed her dark eyes straight on Lydie and said loudly, so that her clear, somewhat shrill young voice rang out triumphantly through the room:
"My husband was made a tool of by Madame la Marquise d'Eglinton, for the purpose of selling the Stuart prince to England."
Once more there was dead silence in the vast reception hall, a few seconds during which the loudly accusing voice died away in an almost imperceptible echo, but in one heart at least those seconds might have been a hundred hours, for the wealth of misery they contained.
Lydie stood as if turned to stone. Though she had realized Gaston's treachery she had not thought that it would mean all this. The utter infamy of it left her paralyzed and helpless. She had delivered her soul, her mind, her honour, her integrity to the vilest traitor that ever darkened the face of the earth. If a year ago she had humiliated him, if to-day she had tried to thwart all his future ambitions, he was fully revenged now.
She did not hear even the loyal Queen's protest:
"It is false!" for Marie Leszcynska, sickened and horrified, was loth to believe the truth of this terrible indictment against the one woman she had always singled out for royal trust and royal friendship.
"It is true, your Majesty," said Irène firmly, as she once more rose to her feet. "Deign to ask Madame la Marquise d'Eglinton if to-day in the loneliness of the Park of Versailles, she did not place in the hands of Monsieur le Comte de Stainville the secret of the Stuart prince's hiding place so that he might be delivered over to the English for a large sum of money. Madame is beautiful and rich and influential, Monsieur de Stainville being a man, dared not refuse to obey her orders, but Monsieur de Stainville is also handsome and young, Madame honoured him with her regard, and I the wife was to be publicly ostracised and swept aside, for I was in the way, and might have an indiscreet tongue in my mouth. That, your Majesty, is the truth," concluded Irène now with triumphant calm; "deign to look into her face and mine and see which is the paler, she or I."
Marie Leszcynska had listened in silence at the awful accusation thus hurled by one woman against the other. At Irène's final words she turned and looked at Lydie, saw the marble-like hue of the face, the rigidity of the young form, the hopeless despair expressed in the half-closed eyes. It is but fair to say that the Queen even now did not altogether believe Madame de Stainville's story: she instinctively was still drawing a comparison between the gaudily apparelled doll with the shrill voice, and the impudently bared shoulders, and the proud, graceful woman in robes of virginal white, of whom, during all these years of public life, unkind tongues were only able to say that she was cold, rigid, dull, uninteresting perhaps, but whose vestal robes the breath of evil scandal had never dared to pollute.
The Queen did not feel that guilt was written now on that straight, pure brow, but she had a perfectly morbid horror of any esclandre occurring in her presence or at one of her Courts. Moreover, Irène had certainly struck one chord, which jarred horribly on the puritanical Queen's nerves, and unfortunately at the very moment when Madame de Stainville made this final poisoned suggestion, Marie Lesczynska's eyes happened to be resting on the King's face. In Louis' expression she caught the leer, the smile, half-mocking, half indulgent which was habitual to him when woman's frailty was discussed, and her whole pride rose in revolt at contact with these perpetual scandals, which disgraced the Court of Versailles, and which she was striving so hard to banish from her own entourage.
Because of this she felt angered now with every one quite indiscriminately. A few years ago her sense of justice would have caused her to sift this matter through, to test for herself the rights or wrongs of an obviously bitter quarrel; but lately this sense of justice had become blunted, through many affronts to her personal dignity as a Queen and as a wife. It had left her with a morbid egotistical regard for the majesty of her Court: this she felt had been attainted; and now she only longed to get away, and leave behind her all this vulgarity, these passions, these petty quarrels, which she so cordially abhorred.