Why should it intrude itself upon that thought of a less exacting worship? Answer, her heart’s alarum, answering to a look, a breath, the first shadow of a truth. Or answer, truth itself. She knew she had conquered where she loathed to conquer.
Such things must be, and be endured, because they cannot be cured, even in the tiny wound of self-consciousness they inflict, and which will continue to irritate, occasionally, when analogies are in the air. Thus, during these moods, the thought would come—and be hated, duly, for its persecution—that there might even be certain qualities in wickedness worth virtue’s acquiring—independence, resolution, force of character, to wit. Not that, for that, she held herself the less insulted in a base regard. But the thought would recur.
And then there came the day when, pale, suffering, reproachful as she fancied it, the face of her love stood out between her and a tumultuous crowd; and in that sorrowful vision all other visions were instantly absorbed and lost.
The shock of it, patent in her stunned manner, had affected anyone less self-centred than the Chevalier. He thought she was frightened by the surge of things, and lent his high arrogance to reassure her. She hardly heard or saw him. He was in Turin.
From that moment the desire for the footsteps grew intense. She had hoped, or had told herself she hoped, that he had forgotten her; and, lo! in every line printed on that lonely face she recognised the indelible scoring of her sin. He loved her still, and by every token of his love, stood forth a conscious shame.
She was in deep waters then, and cried to heaven to save her.
It answered with the offer of Cartouche’s hand.
We know how that suit sped. But it bore some fruit of tenderness towards a hopeless passion—as how could Yolande be woman and not feel it? And it brought more—a recrudescence in her of those thoughts which touched on the comparative qualities of good and evil. This man—he must have the seed of virtue in him, so to have promised self-redemption by way of a bitter loss. That was strength. Perhaps he had had his excuses, after all. She prayed for him—prayed heaven, moreover, to accredit her with her share in his reformation. He was her Louis’s friend—had spoken probably in ignorance of his friend’s presence in the city. And he had promised her—
What had he promised? O, love! thou crown and symbol to all time of specious egotism! He had promised, on the virtue of that very suffering she had caused in him, that it should all come right. His strength was in the phrase—the strength of ungodliness; and—she built upon it. While she abhorred his character—had not scrupled to insult and misread it to the vilest conclusions—she built upon its characteristic qualities. Built? What? No consciousness of any building in her, she would have declared. But—“It will all come right!” Nay, had it not been, “It shall all come right”? O! how she sighed over her own impotence to stem the masterfulness of these sinful wills! Was she for ever to be their helpless shuttlecock? No hope for her but the cloister.
So, she and Louis-Marie, saintly casuists turning to face one another across a tragic interval, pictured Cartouche, the friend, the lover, for the scapegoat of their love’s reparations. Some men would make burnt-offerings of themselves. It was not for them, ingenuous in the ways of worldliness, to question the methods of their atonement.