Chaste as Ice, Pure as Snow: A Novel

by C. Despard

It was pretty much as the landlord had conjectured. The proud lady who had put down her pride so woefully, trampling her own and her husband's honor in the dust, was one of the many to whom this man had vowed undying attachment. She had tired him, and he had abandoned her; and from the day of their parting years before in sunny Italy to this time, when L'Estrange and she found themselves strangely under the same roof, they had never met. The fair Austrian had been forgotten, relegated in his mind to the record of past absurdities, but she had never forgotten him.

Her life had been uneventful, lived out in a small German town, where petty gossip is the sole excitement. She had married a man for whom she cared little, simply because to marry had been rendered almost necessary by the exigencies of her position. She had had no children. What wonder, then, that her mind dwelt, ever more morbidly as the slow years passed by, on this one warm, passionate episode in her otherwise cold career?

In any case, so it was. She believed that the man who had loved her then—the man whose tender speeches rung ever in her ears—loved her still with the same passion, and that only necessity, biting poverty or unacknowledged ties, had forced him to leave her so cruelly. After all, it was only a very commonplace and every-day matter. To the woman this summer-day's love-making had been that one great epoch from which everything past and future should thenceforward be dated—the era of an awakening into life of feelings that had before lain dormant and unsuspected in her being. To the man it was nothing more than one sweet out of many—a sweet which, when it should cloy upon his fastidious taste, could be put away without a sigh to the memory of its sweetness.

With the idea in her mind of his continued faithfulness, the Austrian lady had persuaded her husband to travel, only that she might search for her lost lover through the length and breadth of Europe. But for the greater part of two years they had been wanderers, and still they had come upon no traces of him who had formerly seemed to be ubiquitous. She had begun to mourn for him as the dead, when suddenly, in this out-of-the-way corner, at this strange season, she saw his face once more.

It was seldom that this proud lady betrayed the emotions of her soul. It may be that her inner consciousness of want of rectitude of purpose had been one great agent in the formation of those barriers of steel with which she sought to surround herself. But this time there was no help for her. The pent-up torrent had grown in force and intensity, until no bounds could restrain its impetuous overflow. She was a woman, and the haggardness of the face of the man she loved, the stooping walk, the whitened hair, spoke so powerfully to her imagination that she could scarcely be calm. Was it for her he had been sorrowing? And yet in that flash of recognition at the dinner-table she had read nothing but cold indifference. She knew him to be a consummate actor: was this, then, put on? In her hungry desire to know the whole truth she prepared an interview for that evening; but before it her measures had been taken. There was a person in the house—one she had met before—who, her woman's instinct told her, would willingly lay down his life in her service. She would take him into her counsels; and if the presentiment which lay cold at her heart as she looked upon the well-known face that evening should turn out to be true—if she could never be consoled with this man's love—she would flee from the place, leave her husband, give up her position in society and hide her humiliation in a convent.

And so it had all happened. What could L'Estrange say when she spoke to him passionately of their former love, when she asked him plainly if there remained any vestige of it in his heart?

He thought to do what was best and wisest; he thought to kill the madness in her soul by letting her see at once that all which had passed between them was as though it had never been. For Laura's unconscious influence and those struggles through which he had passed had not been altogether in vain; L'Estrange was a better man than he had been in almost any period of his strange, wild career.

Deeply as he pitied the erring lady, he told her the truth—told her that in his heart all such feelings as she would have striven to awaken were for ever dead. It was painful to listen to her wild reproaches, to hear that it was he who had made her life a desolation—painful, with only the frail panels of a dividing door between them and the pure child, to bow his head beneath the torrent of her well-deserved anger. But it did not last long. In his dark eyes, made brilliant by fever, in the stern lines written by trouble on his strong face, in the determined tones of his voice, she read his resolve, and with the coming on of darkness she fled over the snows to a hamlet in the mountains, there to stay, under the roof of a poor herdsman, until the first hue-and-cry should be over. Those who helped her flight were faithful to her cause; their measures were well taken, and the drifting of the snow obliterated all marks of footsteps. In time she reached the distant convent, and the mystery of her disappearance was never solved.

But into L'Estrange's soul the iron entered. At the threshold of a new life past evil—evil irrevocable—was meeting him, and before the irrevocable the spirit of the strong man sank. That night he would not touch the beguiling potion. He almost hailed the bitter physical and mental pain which this abstaining entailed. It seemed like a kind of expiation for the follies of his life. He could not close his eyes. Throughout the long watches of the night he paced his room, body and soul racked with inconceivable anguish. The pain was beginning to tell on his strong frame.