"There was cause, then, to weep. For two years, they tell me, my mother wept Then she died. She gave me, a baby, to her friend, a woman of her village—Threlka Mazoff. You have seen her. She has been my mother ever since. She has been the sole guardian I have known all my life. She has not been able to do with me as she would have liked."
"You did not live at your own home with your father?" I asked.
"For a time. I grew up. But my father, I think, was permanently shocked by the loss of the woman he had loved and whom he had brought into all this cruelty. She had been so lovable, so beautiful—she was so beautiful, my mother! So they sent me away to France, to the schools. I grew up, I presume, proof in part of the excellence of my father's theory. They told me that I was a beautiful animal!"
The contempt, the scorn, the pathos—the whole tragedy of her voice and bearing—were such as I can not set down on paper, and such as I scarce could endure to hear. Never in my life before have I felt such pity for a human being, never so much desire to do what I might in sheer compassion.
But now, how clear it all became to me! I could understand many strange things about the character of this singular woman, her whims, her unaccountable moods, her seeming carelessness, yet, withal, her dignity and sweetness and air of breeding—above all her mysteriousness. Let others judge her for themselves. There was only longing in my heart that I might find some word of comfort. What could comfort her? Was not life, indeed, for her to remain a perpetual tragedy?
"But, Madam," said I, at length, "you must not wrong your father and your mother and yourself. These two loved each other devotedly. Well, what more? You are the result of a happy marriage. You are beautiful, you are splendid, by that reason."
"Perhaps. Even when I was sixteen, I was beautiful," she mused. "I have heard rumors of that. But I say to you that then I was only a beautiful animal. Also, I was a vicious animal I had in my heart all the malice which my mother never spoke. I felt in my soul the wish to injure women, to punish men, to torment them, to make them pay! To set even those balances of torture!—ah, that was my ambition! I had not forgotten that, when I first met you, when I first heard of—her, the woman whom you love, whom already in your savage strong way you have wedded—the woman whose vows I spoke with her—I—I, Helena von Ritz, with history such as mine!
"Father, father,"—she turned to him swiftly; "rise—go! I can not now speak before you. Leave us alone until I call!"
Obedient as though he had been the child and she the parent, the old man rose and tottered feebly from the room.
"There are things a woman can not say in the presence of a parent," she said, turning to me. Her face twitched. "It takes all my bravery to talk to you."