When she first heard of di Rocco’s fate, and of the unspeakable treachery on which it had foreclosed, she came for the moment as near a fall from “grace” as Louis-Marie himself. That duty to a father must be held the paramount duty, his will the household law, his judgment the ruling wisdom, nature and religion in her had once held for the first principle of conduct. Honour, self-respect, sworn faith—these, pious recommendations in themselves, were, if pledged without a father’s sanction, vain credentials. His curse could blight them all—convert their virtues into sins. From God, the primal Word, had come, in straight succession, his power to bless or ban. She had believed in this his right so truly as to cede her whole heart to him for immolation on the altar he had raised, letting it break rather than incur his malediction.
But when, having sacrificed these virtues to duty, she saw her moral debasement argued from the act, saw herself claimed, by very virtue of it, to the vile company of the un-self-respecting, held its legitimate sport, her soul stood up, revolting from its creed. She felt like one who, self-destroyed to save her honour, wakes up in hell.
She shook; she shuddered; she went white as death. She felt her feet in snares of celestial sophistry. Heaven had laughed to lure her to a church, which, when she entered it, had proved a bagnio. Following God’s lead, she had foundered in a swamp, and cleared her eyes to find herself the scoff of uncleanness, to know herself valued at the common currency of the common road. That this dead beast could have conceived a hope of her argued how, in his eyes, in the world’s eyes, her soul’s dread sacrifice to duty had cheapened, not exalted, her. He would not have dared the thought in the days before she had bared her white bosom to the knife. Her soul for the first time rushed to pity of Isaac on his altar. The father’s tragedy was all in all for history. What of the harmless child—the hideous revelation to him of what love could sacrifice to faith? No after-kindness could blot out that memory.
She hated herself at last, not because she had hitherto been self-absorbed, worshipping her own whiteness; but because she had not considered herself at all until this moment. She hated her body, a shrine on which her mind had never dwelt, until it woke to see it foul, a thing defiled in thought, a prey of beastly dreams. A shadow had dethroned her maidenhood. Henceforth she was Yolande of the soiled hands.
No man, perhaps, could gauge her sense of shame, or understand it. She had suffered no wrong in act. A miss, in his blunt logic, is always as good as a mile. But that in the eyes of woman it is not. She, whose innocence has just shaved a scandal, feels a like grievance against fate with her who has solicited and been rebuffed. In each case it is the outrage upon the woman’s self-respect which barbs the sting.
Unworthy of her lover! But how unworthy she had never dreamt, until she saw herself this lure to low desire. She had not even been coveted for anything she had cherished in herself of moral sweetness. The moral of all sweetness was carnality.
She had walked with uplifted eyes praising God, and had trodden on an adder. For the future she would look down to guard her feet.
It was all a chimera, that figure of a beneficent Father meting out justice and mercy, protection and reward. The lamb in the fold was cherished to make good mutton, and the shepherd’s love watched and warded him to that end. No picture of Christ carrying home the strayed weanling could cover that flaw in its divine symbolism. So with the pious aphorisms which were thrown in the eyes of men by interested priestcrafts to blind them from the truth. God helped those who helped themselves? Yes; who helped themselves unscrupulously to the best and least they desired. A bold thief was always popular in heaven. The Lord was a lord of bandits.
She had but to run upon this blasphemy at last, to recoil, gasping and half-stunned, from the dead wall of it. Whither had her madness led her? into what dreadful wanderings from the fold? She had sped blindly in the mist, and struck her forehead against hell’s gate. O, Father, rescue Thy lost lamb, so bleating to the wolves of her betrayal! Didst Thou not make a pit-fall for the dog-wolf himself, so that her fleece might escape his soilure and her flesh his ravening? And her gratitude was this—to cry out upon Thee because Thou hadst let a beast’s thought expose her to herself for beast. Yet what else, indeed, were she or any other, save for the measure of Thy purifying spirit in her? I have disowned Him, she thought, and by that act alone become the beast His spirit once redeemed in me.
She believed, then, that she had committed the unpardonable sin, the sin against the Holy Ghost. For days she lay prostrated, tended only by the little aubergiste, poor Margot, who had meanwhile her own difficulties to contend with—gossips to face and baffle; little lungings of innuendo to counterfoil; a drunken parent to answer for. The world was restless about that refuge on the hills: great issues were at stake there: the Law, the Church, the Home were all deeply interested in the potentialities of those white hands. This unattached star of maidenhood had become, at a stroke of heaven, the centre of a system. The lesser bodies, enormously attracted to it, spun and circled round incessantly. But for the present it was obstinate in veiling itself in clouds from their worship.