His prostration was even abject while it lasted; but the true quality of grief is to be measured more by endurance than collapse. Those who succumb easily revive easily, and it was not to be supposed but that that volatile brain would quickly rally from its depression under the stimulus of such local distractions as offered.
Those were necessarily at first of a mortuary complexion, touching such matters as the depth and period of the court mourning, the fasts to be observed and the masses to be sung. The opportunities presented by obsequies are only fully appreciated by two classes—those standing at the opposite social extremes. A funeral is the poor man’s chance, and the prince’s, since each in his way borrows a relative distinction from the Majesty of Death. In the one case it is a brief affair, in the other a protracted; but at the bottom of both there is the same sentiment of reflected glory. Whether it be a lying-in-state, or a hearse with one poor coach to follow, it is the corpse which ennobles the relatives, and makes them greater than themselves by reason of their kinship with it.
Now the widower awoke to the exciting potentialities of his position as chief mourner, and to the realisation that a living ass might command more attention than a dead lioness. As executor to the mighty departed, it was his to rule, and thereby to take the credit for, the quality of the honours to be accorded her. He extracted, at least, some revivifying comfort from the process, some soothing flattery from the profuse condolences of his subjects. When the dead was declared great and unforgettable—and, indeed, whatever the personal trend of Louise Elizabeth’s ambition, her forceful character had left its stamp upon her times—he inhaled the incense as proffered to his own nostrils. His vanity swallowed the innumerable eulogies, monodies and elegiacs, extolling the deceased’s virtues, and, waxing fat upon them, like Jeshurun kicked. “Where, then,” ended one passionate encomiast, Frugoni, an abbé, “O, where, then, Death, is thy sting!” It is certain that, if it lay rankling in that bereaved heart, there was also much solace of honey to alleviate the pain it caused.
In short the duke only took means according to his lights to forget his trouble; and what should we all do, under like circumstances, but so study to fight the brooding demon of morbidity? Did he find a wholesome diversion in discussing with la Coque the details of a mourning coat, the braided sorrow of its cuffs, the sad expressive disposition of its buttons, why grudge him that comfort simply because we ourselves could see none in it? If a man can find solace for his grief in cat’s-cradle, by all means let him play with strings. The two played with strings in another sense, composing between them a touching threnody, thick with the most harassing sobs and wails, to which their own tears responded plentifully. They enjoyed it all immensely in a sort of smug lugubrious way. His Highness looked double the man he had been after a week or two’s enjoyment of these softly melancholy preoccupations.
To Isabella, standing wistful and sorrowful in the background, the improvement in her father’s spirits brought, with a greater ease on his account, some vague feeling of distress. She was glad to see him shed his despair for a healthier sentiment; yet she could not but marvel over the choice of the means he could adopt, and find sufficient, for the medicining of a sick soul. She tried to blind herself to the essential shallowness of the nature which could thus console its tragedy with sweetmeats; she tried to make allowances, to be steadfastly loyal to her own converted sense of duty; yet the conscious truth in her would not be so hoodwinked, or wholly justify to her the self-sacrifice of which she had been so lavish.
Still she would have remained faithful to its ideals, if only he had continued to cling to her; but, as she felt herself, her sympathy and loving support, needed by him less and less—even at last, as he developed these other healing resources, impatiently rejected—a sense of such loneliness settled upon her as brought her own soul near the verge of despair. She shrank back, like one who has put out a confident hand to caress a dog, and has been savagely torn for one’s trust. Thenceforth she seemed to realise, as she had never done yet, the complete misery of her state. She had thrown away the substance to grasp at the shadow, and her reward was in the righteousness of utter desolation.
One day Fanchette alluded before her, with a disdainful lip, to a poor little neglected herb, which had stood long untended on its table in a sunless corner.
“Shall I throw it away, your Highness?” she said. “I think it is dead.”
“Dead!” The word brought a shock of colour to the girl’s cheek, which fled as quickly, leaving it ashy white. She seemed to have awakened in an instant as from a distressed dream to the reality of something left beside her when she fell asleep. So a mother, irresistibly overcome, might startle to reconsciousness of her baby weakling, and sit up aghast, with panic ears strained for reassurance of the soft-drawn breaths. Her baby—theirs! and dying or dead! She looked, with wide eyes glazed, staring at the pretty piteous thing, which her heart, in its stupefaction, had forgotten. And then a rush of anger swept her, coming from what source the power that made the feminine must answer.
“Why do you refer to it like that?” she said. “Am I to submit for ever to your insults and innuendoes? You should have made it your duty to water it without consulting me. What has it done, poor thing, to be so cruelly treated? Please to attend to it at once.”