And death responded, after his manner with those who impiously take his name. He saved her, as she prayed him to, but, inasmuch as her plea to him was conditional on a life, with a life he answered.
Early in December came the news that the Duchess Louise-Elizabeth had been seized with the smallpox at Versailles; and within a few days she was dead.
Isabella had her desire: the wedding was indefinitely postponed.
CHAPTER XX.
THE FACE IN THE CROWD
Isabella had loved her mother, truly if rather fearfully, and in return had been loved by her with as condescending a devotion as a spirit so incessantly restless and ambitious as that of Louis XV.’s eldest daughter could lavish on a child not born into the first order of creation. How the indomitable sick woman had rejoiced in that early fulfilment of her hopes, when the Austrian ambassador had come to put an end to her doubts and apprehensions, her communications to her husband show. She was jubilant; and so was impure old Bien-aimé, who wrote the most touching and beautiful letter to congratulate his son-in-law on the event, a letter full of sentiments “de les exprimer pourrait les diminuer.” And now, before she might see brought to ripeness any one of the countless schemes she was perpetually revolving in her feverish brain for her family’s aggrandisement, she had herself dropped in a moment from the tree like a rotten medlar.
The shock of her death did more to bring poor Isabel to her senses than the harshest tyranny could have done. It seemed a very retribution on her for her sins; and I doubt, if it had been possible to marry her then offhand, but she would have acquiesced in her fate—with despairing, perhaps, but without further revolt. The thought that during all this time, while her mother had been sojourning for her health’s sake at Versailles, she had been planning in her guilty soul an act which, if committed, would have struck the deadliest of blows at the pride and trusting affection, possibly at the life itself, of that beloved parent, filled her with inexpressible remorse. She went in these days with a face so pale and scared, that one might have believed her haunted by the thought of her own direct responsibility for the tragedy. The very memory of what had been seemed to her a profanation to the sainted dead. She strove to cleanse her conscience of all offence, even to the lingering shadow of a dream which now could never come to be realised. She told herself so: it was ended and finally; how, even if but one star from its firmament were allowed to twinkle on, could she kneel and pray, without blasphemy, for the repose of her mother’s soul?
To her father, in this emotional reaction, she wistfully and naturally turned. Their common sorrow brought them closer together than they had ever been as yet; and, while mothering his weakness and his distress, she bitterly reproached herself for all that past unfilial attitude of hers towards what she had considered his shallowness and vanity. Now she recognised, or believed that she recognised, how much more fondly wise than its chosen expression had been the purpose underlying that attempt of his upon her faith. She no longer blamed him for it, because his method had been simply characteristic.
It had been characteristic, indeed, as was no less the selfish quality of his present grief. He bewailed his loss, almost as if it implied some treachery to himself. Having grown resigned in submission to the stronger will, to which he had conceded the practical management of all his affairs of State and policy, he felt as if cruelly abandoned by it at that moment in the promised maturation of its schemes when its support was most needed. It was always his helplessness rather than his sorrow that came uppermost in the tale of woe; and perhaps to the heart of the woman and potential mother that made the surest appeal. In ministering to his despair Isabella forgot her own.
And yet it is not to be inferred that Don Philip had been other than devoted in his way to the vigorous soul who through such long years had been his spirited coadjutor and support. To do him justice, he had purposed on the first warning note of tragedy to set out for Versailles—an intention for which the king his father-in-law, when he came to hear of it, had gently rebuked him. And, indeed, the journey would have been in vain. Short shrift and shift was the order in all cases where that dreaded scourge proved mortal; and scarce was the breath out of the august body before it was being hurried away by night to the royal mausoleum of Saint Denis, where it was lowered with scant ceremony into the vault from which, thirty years later, the ghouls of the Revolution were to tear it, with fifty others, to scatter its still impregnated dust to the winds. It was from Marly—whither the Court, after its custom, had already fled the terror—that Louis wrote his mild reproof, ending it with the words “mes yeux baignent de larmes.”
So Don Philip, frustrated in his dutiful design, stayed on at home, and regarded and pitied himself with something of the stupefaction of the dreamer, who, thinking himself standing among company, discovers suddenly that he has forgotten to put on his clothes. Thus he felt as if delivered naked and aghast to a situation with which he was quite unable to cope. He had leaned so long on that imperious will that he seemed to have lost his capacity for standing alone.