Lady Sybil was sobbing.
"Then she is not dead?" I said, in a low voice.
"I do not know!" she replied. "No one knows. She is dead to us. Oh, why, why does holy Church permit such terrible things?—What am I saying? May the good Lord pardon me if I speak against Him!—But I cannot understand why it must be. They had been wedded nearly ten years, Helena,—I mean my parents,—when it was discovered that they were within the prohibited degrees. Why cannot dispensations be given when such things occur? They knew nothing of it. Why must they be parted, and she be driven into loneliness and obscurity, and I—— Well, it was done. A decree of holy Church parted them, and she went back to her people. We have never heard another word about her. But those who saw her depart from Jerusalem said she seemed like one whose very heart was broken."
"And she never came back?" I said pityingly.
"Is it much wonder?" answered Lady Sybil, in a low voice, rocking the child gently in her arms. "It would have been much, I think, for the crowned and anointed Queen of Jerusalem to steal into her capital as Damoiselle de Courtenay. But it would have been far more for the wife and mother to come suing to her supplanter for a sight of her own children. No, I cannot wonder that she never, never came back."
I was silent for a little while, then I said—
"Was the Lord King as grieved as she? I cannot understand, if so, why they should not have obtained a dispensation, and have been married over again."
Lady Sybil shook her head, and I saw another tear drop on the baby's robe.
"No, Helena," she said, hardly above a whisper: "I do not think he was. He had the opportunity of allying himself with the Cæsars. And there are men to whom a woman is a woman, and one woman is just as good as another, or very nearly so. Do men selling a horse stop to consider whether it will be as happy with the new master as the old? They do not care. And, very often, they cannot understand."
Ay, Amaury is one of that sort.