She said nothing more, but she could not altogether repress a heartbroken moan, which rose from the intensity of her mental agony.
Then she turned and with head thrown back, with silent, trembling lips and half-closed eyes she walked slowly out of the room.
CHAPTER XXIX
THE FATE OF THE STUART PRINCE
Lydie hardly knew how she reached her apartments. Earlier in the day she had thought once or twice that she had reached the deepest abyss of sorrow and humiliation into which it was possible for a woman of pride to descend. When her husband first asked an explanation from her, and taxed her with lending an ear to the King's base proposals; when she found that her own father, whom she respected and loved, had himself delved deeply in the mire of treachery; when she stood face to face with Gaston de Stainville and realized that he was an infamous liar and she a weak, confiding fool; when Irène had accused her publicly of scheming that which she would have given her life's blood to avert, all these were moments when she felt that the shame of them was more than she could bear.
Yet how simple and childish, how paltry seemed the agony of those mental tortures in comparison with that she endured now.
She felt as if she had received a blow in the face, a blow which had left a hideous, disfiguring mark on her which everyone henceforth would see: the scarlet letter of ignominy with which in the New World beyond the seas a puritanic inquisition branded the shameless outcasts. By her husband's silence rather than by his words she had been branded with a mark of infamy.
Ye saints and angels above, how terribly it hurt!
Yet why did she suffer so? Was it only because she had failed to obtain that which she almost begged for on her knees? Lydie, proud, dictatorial, domineering Lydie, felt that she had humiliated herself beyond what she would have thought possible less than twelve hours ago, and she had been refused.
Was it that, that made her heart, her head, her very limbs ache with almost unendurable agony?