“Very well,” said Camille, with a malicious smile. “I am in her way. I see what she wants; she shall have it.”
Rose carried these words to Josephine. They went through her like a sword.
Rose pitied her. Rose had a moment’s weakness.
“Let us go to him,” she said; “anything is better than this.”
“Rose, I dare not,” was the wise reply.
But the next day early, Josephine took Rose to a door outside the house, a door that had long been disused. Nettles grew before it. She produced a key and with great difficulty opened this door. It led to the tapestried chamber, and years ago they used to steal up it and peep into the room.
Rose scarcely needed to be told that she was to watch Camille, and report to her. In truth, it was a mysterious, vague protection against a danger equally mysterious. Yet it made Josephine easier. But so unflinching was her prudence that she never once could be prevailed on to mount those stairs, and peep at Camille herself. “I must starve my heart, not feed it,” said she. And she grew paler and more hollow-eyed day by day.
Yet this was the same woman who showed such feebleness and irresolution when Raynal pressed her to marry him. But then dwarfs feebly drew her this way and that. Now giants fought for her. Between a feeble inclination and a feeble disinclination her dead heart had drifted to and fro. Now honor, duty, gratitude,—which last with her was a passion,—dragged her one way: love, pity, and remorse another.
Not one of these giants would relax his grasp, and nothing yielded except her vital powers. Yes; her temper, one of the loveliest Heaven ever gave a human creature, was soured at times.
Was it a wonder? There lay the man she loved pining for her; cursing her for her cruelty, and alternately praying Heaven to forgive him and to bless her: sighing, at intervals, all the day long, so loud, so deep, so piteously, as if his heart broke with each sigh; and sometimes, for he little knew, poor soul, that any human eye was upon him, casting aside his manhood in his despair, and flinging himself on the very floor, and muffling his head, and sobbing; he a hero.