“Why, I will. Let him go free, for me, to beggary. I swear it, there.”
“Remember that.”
She dropped the curtain, and was gone.
CHAPTER VI
He had done this thing for her—had stained his hands with blood to keep hers clean—had darkened his own soul that her soul might shine the purer for that shadow. What was her debt to him for this great self-sacrifice? How could she pay it, and not condone his sin?
So we pass to Yolande and her mortal problem.
Poor child so straight in candour as she was, no compromise with facts seemed possible to her nature. She must tell him all or nothing.
And if she told him all—revealed her knowledge of his crime—made herself its accessory thereby? He’d answer, would he not, “That leaves me no alternative. Sweet love, for sweet love’s sake, I must acquit you of this shadow of complicity—give myself up, and vindicate your spotless fame before the world”?
Would he not? She told herself he would; deafened her ears to her own heart’s whispered treason; would admit no justification for it in the evidences of a slandered character. Could one so un-self-reliant, so irresolute, so much the whimpering prey to circumstance as circumstance had seemed to paint her Louis, have braced himself to do that deed? The deed was there to answer her—to answer, triumphantly too, that by very reason of itself that saintly soul was convict of a heroism of which its meek patience had once seemed incapable, and which, in its revelation, had found the woman in her secretly exultant over the angel. Was that so indeed? Had his fall from grace made him dearer to her than ever his perfection could?
A dreadful thought, for which she paid to herself and God with anguishes of penance. But she could not control it, nor lay its unrighteous shadow. How could she, when father to it was the wish that what it implied of manly strength in him would answer to her confession of that dark knowledge, were she to make it, by an instant surrender to the law?