She was staring at him, quite bloodless. But her lips whispered mechanically: “I cannot—I cannot come to you.”
“How can you pray or think aright,” he said, “or keep your health or reason, with that horror hidden, perhaps, but a stone’s-throw below you there? Its spirit rises, like an evil emanation; its—”
She stopped him, staggering to her feet. What fearful picture was he conjuring? In all her stunned misery, her mind had never once turned to the appalling thought of her close neighbourhood to that baffled evil. It had dwelt and dwelt, in mad iteration, on an earlier figure, on the tragedy of a fruitless sacrifice, on death, as it might find her in the hills.
But now!—to find her, perhaps—trip her on the thought, and entomb her! Was there, in all that vast cemetery of ice, a corner remote enough from him to keep their souls divorced? Horrors thronged into her brain once breached. What if her clinging to this spot were construed into devotion to his memory? What if he were not dead, after all, but were slowly toiling upwards to the light from some pit into which he had fallen? She had heard of things as strange. What—wilder terror! if he had never even suffered such a catastrophe, but were hiding somewhere out of knowledge, to descend presently upon his traducers and blight them with his mockery? It had always seemed inconsistent with his character, as resourceful as it was wicked, to let itself astray in the little confusion of a storm, instead of crouching while that passed.
She thought no more—tried to shut out all thought, shuddering with her hands against her eyes. The doctor saw his advantage.
“We have an empty room,” he said, “endeared to us by a memory. Come down, madama, and take possession of that memory. He would have wished it.”
She went with him. That marked the first step in her surrender.
The next was inevitable, fruit of a royal commission. It was not to be supposed that a wealthy and powerful noble of the State, new reconciled with its Government, too, could be allowed to disappear thus mysteriously and no inquiry held. Turin sent its juges d’instruction and officers of probate and verification to look into the affair. They examined innumerable witnesses, and into as many as possible motives. Cartouche they would have liked to question; but he was gone, none knew whither. So also was Louis-Marie; so also was Bonito. The thing might have taken an ugly turn, so far as any of the three was concerned, had not Nicholas Target been opportunely “pinched” at the psychologic moment. He focussed the mystery for them, brought it into form and coherence. It appeared, after all, to be one to be hushed up rather than ventilated. The matter ended for the widow with official sympathy and congratulations.
And she? how had she stood the long ordeal? They said her bearing was the very majesty of pathos—like Dorothea before her judges again. One can keep one’s countenance under torture, as the statistics of martyrdom prove. But every allusion to her assumed acquiescence in her own tragedy had been a white-hot rake to her side. They imagined her stately fortitude was a pose, a compromise between decency and the exaltation her heart could not but feel over the thought of what she had escaped and the prospect before her. That she must not undeceive them, must suffer the onus of coveting a position which her whole soul loathed and rejected, was not the least part of her anguish. Even if she had ventured to assert herself, to call them to witness to her renunciation of all which they held so covetable, her father was there to stultify her protests. She saw him daily—spoke to him, even. But there was a gulf between them. The atmosphere it exhaled was felt by the commissioners, and felt to be inexplicable. Some commiseration was shown for the victim of so unnatural a misunderstanding. His noble candour in giving evidence, his dignified endurance of that implied slander on his disinterestedness, excited a measure of sympathy—even of sympathetic indignation. Yet, for all his public vindication as a father, the triumph of his child’s cause seemed only to deepen the abyss which separated him from her.
Well, a thing grown past bearing is a thing ended. The torture consummated itself at last in anti-climax—in the official citation of Augias, Marchese di Rocco, to the Court of Inquiry, there to answer and show cause why Yolande di Rocco, née de France, should not enter into possession of his estates as his widow and sole inheritrix. Which summons the appellee having failed to answer, the Will was declared proved, the lawyers returned to Turin, and the lady to the privacy of her lodgings at Dr Paccard’s. And so the matter ended.