Cartouche was no Joseph to his poor Thais. She did not expect him to be. She expected only his recognition of her eternal bond to him. The thought, justified or not, that he was seeking to repudiate his sole title to her, smote her like a madness. The thing was abnormal, horrible, beyond reason. Yet it struck and bit into her brain. Out of it, its torture and its haunting, this meek and pretty song-bird threatened to grow a harpy.
Louis-Marie, lying exhausted on his bed, like one lately released from some rending possession by devils—accepting with shamefaced gratitude the gentle ministrations of his nurse—never guessed how mechanic had grown the touch which soothed his pillows; what bitter scorn of him was expressed in the averted glances of those Saxon blue eyes. For indeed Molly could hardly look at him with safety to her patient reason. This the thing destined to her love’s succession! She felt like one, fairy-struck, who has gone to sleep under a hay-cock, and wakes to find herself in a strange place, the sport of goblin company. Where had her lines fallen! she thought amazed, the sleep, as it were, yet in her eyes—among what poor counterfeits of manhood? Her lines? She had no lines. There was the woeful thing—the lack of the talisman, wilfully foregone, which would have rendered these wiles innocuous.
Reuben had howled when whipped, like a too-forward hound lashed to heel—a natural cry of pain. But his boldness it was that had brought him his chastisement. He would have been at the throat of his mistress’s enemy; and his grief had been that his mistress disowned him. Had she once given his stubborn constancy (a pathetic quality she was now for the first time appreciating at its value) the right to protect her, she believed fully he would have answered, hard and ugly, in confidence of the law, the outrage to his honour. His tears? Tears shed by an honest lad, helpless and writhing under the heel of tyranny triumphant. What pure water they had been compared with the hysteric weepings of this saintly milksop—of these amateur heroics—of this tragedy, to her protestant mind, of a deposed churchwarden!
And so her thoughts recoiled as if from a sudden adder. What was Reuben to her, any more than was this other—a dull, thick-witted clown? To resent his just whipping? Strike back? Hurt her dear lord? “O, Cherry, Cherry! I never meant it! Him to presume and dare! You were merciful not to kill him.”
Ah! her own love—her dark young tyrant. “Come back to me, Cherry! Give up the bad white witch! My heart is bursting in its wild great longing!”
Yet, while she hated to look on Louis-Marie, one aspect of him could not but hold her curious observation. “He’s better: I think he will recover.” Those had been her master’s words. Recover? from this death-blow to his hopes? Take on new lease of life from the withdrawal of what had served for that life’s one frail support? Yet, it appeared, Cartouche had judged aright. The invalid grew better from that day—more calm, more self-possessed; had ceased to chafe and writhe. What did it mean, if not again that she was offered, the potential salve to a damaged conscience?
A hectic convalescence only, could she but have known it. The wound was there, and angry; only the festering fragment, which had made its intolerable fret, had been withdrawn. Ease had come with confession, and hope from the strong scornful self-assurance of the confessor. It was the interval marking the sevenfold rally of the exorcised demon; but, while it obtained, Louis-Marie knew almost the exaltation of a saint uplifted by a consciousness of heroic self-sacrifice.
Yet pallid throes would take him in the night. Gaston was fearless, Gaston was bold-seeing; but was Gaston quite the man to resolve nice ethical problems? Would Yolande (lost to him: he told himself so, lingering on guilty dreams of her) accept the ruling of such a spiritual director?
The thought was father of many—a week-knee’d generation. He would never dare to put her to that test—not for his own sake; not for hers. For her sake, indeed, to keep sacred her mind’s peace, he would be content for ever to bear his burden solitary. An idle resolve, since she was lost to him. Lost, of course—but what if God should hold that self-conscious burden atonement enough? Superfluous macerations were not holy, but distasteful to heaven. Was it not his duty, rather, to give himself to restore her faith in heaven’s dispensations? Likely enough she had come to think herself unworthy of him—of him, Louis, who had stood for her belief in Providence. Did he not owe it to her, to God, at the cost of whatever self-renunciation, to reassure her in the ways of faith? Her faith might decline on heterodoxy otherwise.
He had so relieved his own conscience, with the shifting of its burden into that stronger grasp, as almost to have lured himself into the belief that not he, but Gaston, was the one responsible to its past. It needed however but the rematerialising of a certain spectre, grown hazy for a little in that charmed atmosphere of casuistry, to bring about in him a sharp and instant relapse.