“It’s such a long, long story,” she quiveringly sighed, while again the hysterical sobs shook her violently.
He felt her misery across the dark.
After a time she grew a little coherent. “I had to come here, Jerome—I had to. My husband....” The words faltered, though he heard her still thickly murmuring, like one in a fever.
Then he remembered. “I know,” he said softly. “They spoke of that, too, Stella....”
Yes, they had spoken of that. But they did not know (except Tsuda) how in one of his frenzies King had attacked her with a knife; and not even Tsuda knew that the knife had actually entered her body. But Tsuda had seized upon King’s madness as an admirable and timely pretext for insisting upon the hospitality of the gods.
Through one of the little high windows Jerome could see the moon, mounting in sublime unconcern. There is something always so utterly calm and unhurried about the moonlight.
Stella’s face was brimming with anguish, and she seemed ever in motion: her fingers kept lacing and fumbling—sometimes she would fold her hands and bow her head over them in an attitude of helpless submission. But only for a moment. Her head would be raised with a start, and she would run a hand through her hair, or make an aimless gesture, if she chanced to be speaking. Her voice, too, had an unresting quality. It sounded a note of suffering, and of an immense sadness deeper still, which had certainly never been there in the old days when she had rebelled against her destiny. It was a new note, vibrating, as it were, across the tissue of her very being.
She inclined her head. “No one will ever know, Jerome, what I’ve gone through.”
He grasped at it with unconscious avidity. Had he realized, in a perfectly bald way, how he felt, he would no doubt have been a little horrified. But in the very depths of his heart—that is to say, in the very depths of his ego—Jerome found curious, sweet comfort in the knowledge that her marriage with this other man, this prince (as Elsa called him, with drooping eyes) had at length proved a thing of reproach and bitterness.
“And Tsuda....”