She smiled at him, then, and spoke, a little faintly:
“Si, mio padre. It shall remain there.”
No mention of the letter: none of the crisis that had produced it. The act and the look were sufficient in themselves to cover the whole of the situation—regret for a stern necessity, forgiveness for an unspeakable offence, assurance that thenceforth all would be overlooked and forgotten in the promise of reparation. He might have gone then, satisfied; but in some redeeming impulse of emotion he put the little fingers to his lips before he replaced them gently on the coverlet. And, as he went, Isabella turned her face to the wall, and wept. She felt no resentment towards him for what he had done, or caused to be done, but only an infinite pity. He did not know; he could never know. Her reparation was only nominal; for what had she to give at last other than the mere mechanism of a being which his own act had deprived of its essential meaning, and which must soon perish for lack of that vitalising principle? Her soul was already with her love; only her body remained for insensible submission to those brief mortal uses which men might desire of it.
She came downstairs after that, and resumed her formal existence. There was something gone from her, but it was of too subtle an essence to affect the common mind with a sense of definite loss. What suspicion of the truth was abroad she did not know or care to know. She was like one regarding in herself the unfamiliar antics of a stranger. They did not much concern or interest her, either introspectively or in their visible relations to their surroundings. But she was very sweet and gentle with all; for the habit of kindness remained to the desolated heart, the scent of the roses still clung round the broken vase. Only the old spirit of merriment seemed to have deserted her for ever. No laugh was once again heard on her lips.
Regarding so little of the past, it was not strange that she never referred to her vanished chief femme de confiance, or appeared to notice that she was deprived of her services. It is even possible that Fanchette might have resumed her place at her side without exciting any repulsion in her. She seemed to bear no one a grudge for what had been, or to discriminate between this and the other in the ruin which had befallen her. She may have surmised who were the chief instruments in that tragedy; she never betrayed by word or look her knowledge of them. It was not their guilt which was the poignant thing; it was the irreparable loss it had entailed on humanity. One did not condemn a viper because it achieved its nature as much in biting the heel of a saint as of a sinner. That all-sweet absence of the spirit of revenge; that utter absorption in the effects of the deed and noble contempt for its perpetrators, should have been felt by base minds as more crushing than any retaliation. Perhaps it was. Neither la Coque nor Mademoiselle Becquet was to be found at Colorno in these days.
And the mortal body of her tragedy? She never learnt or tried to learn where they had laid it. What did it signify? That poor broken prison was no more concerned now with the ideals which had once made it animate and beautiful than was her own body with the little mortal lusts and policies which contended over its brief possession. To all that its life-tribute meant to her at last the basil contained the clue.
It was there alone her real being centred and became volitional. Alone with it, her soul seemed to return into her from the spaces where it had hung aloof, and to become articulate with a remembered ecstasy. She would dream with the green thing, and talk softly with it, as if it were he himself, recalling a hundred little secrets of love and loving converse. “She had no knowledge when the day was done,” but only that the darkness meant the joyful nearing of her basil-time. And always and for ever she prayed it wooingly to flower, growing more pathetic in her sweet entreaties as the third month from that night drew to its close. But still the stubborn sprays showed no sign of breaking—not for all her tender plaints and bedewing tears.
Alas, it was not to be yet!
CHAPTER XXIX.
AT REST
“Sound mournfully upon the winds and low;