“He wished you, if you wished it too, to marry Louis.”
It was done! Why did Lucienne not speak? And she was shaking all over. A wave of pity went over the Marquise, and she bent forward and put her arms about her shoulders.
“There . . . there . . . we will not speak of it again. I should not have told you yet, my dear. Of course it seems strange to you—poor, poor child!”
But the quivering body drew away from her embrace. “Don’t touch me, Madame!” cried Lucienne wildly, dropping her hands and almost pushing the Marquise away. “I am not fit for you to touch—I should never have been fit to be Gilbert’s wife. . . .”
But Madame de Château-Foix, seeing her profound agitation, did not take these self-accusations very seriously. “Tell me, child,” she said tenderly, “what is wrong. Tell me—Gilbert would have wished it.”
And Lucienne, too overwrought to soften the blow, gasped out: “I knew Gilbert’s wish. He gave me up last March.”
The Marquise fell back in her chair as though she had been shot through the heart. Her face changed till it was an old woman’s. Then there issued from her lips, in an inhuman voice, the single word: “Why?”
At the look on her face Lucienne’s rapidly mounting hysteria was stayed for a moment, and, not for her own sake, but for this stricken mother’s, she tried to put the thing less nakedly. But there was no way.
“Because he knew that Louis loved me, and that I loved Louis,” she said.
There was an awful silence, while the two women faced each other, with a chasm like a grave sprung open between them. Then the Marquise said, half choking: “That black dress . . . it is all part of a lie, then. . . .”