“The stories were true,” answered the hoarse low voice. “I myself, by royal command, was a guest at the Schloss in the Bavarian Alps when it was known that he struck her repeatedly with a dog whip. She was going to have a child. One night I was wandering in the park in misery and I heard shrieks which sent me in mad search. I do not know what I should have done if I had succeeded, but I tried to force an entrance into the wing from which the shrieks came. I was met and stopped almost by open violence. The sounds ceased. She died a week later. But the most experienced lying could not hide some things. Even royal menials may have human blood in their veins. It was known that there were hideous marks on her little dead body.”
“We heard. We heard,” whispered the Duchess.
“He killed her. But she would have died of horror if he had not struck her a blow. She began to die from the hour the marriage was forced upon her. I saw that when she was with him at Windsor.”
“You were in attendance on him,” the Duchess said after a little silence. “That was when I first knew you.”
“Yes.” She had added the last sentence gravely and his reply was as grave though his voice was still hoarse. “You were sublime goodness and wisdom. When a woman through the sheer quality of her silence saves a man from slipping over the verge of madness he does not forget. While I was sane I dared scarcely utter her name. If I had gone mad I should have raved as madmen do. For that reason I was afraid.”
“I knew. Speech was the greatest danger,” she answered him. “She was a princess of a royal house—poor little angel—and she had a husband whose vileness and violence all Europe knew. How dared they give her to him?”
“For reasons of their own and because she was too humbly innocent and obedient to rebel.”
The Duchess did not ask questions. The sublime goodness of which he had spoken had revealed its perfection through the fact that in the long past days she had neither questioned nor commented. She had given her strong soul’s secret support to him and in his unbearable hours he had known that when he came to her for refuge, while she understood his need to the uttermost, she would speak no word even to himself.
But today though she asked no question her eyes waited upon him as it were. This was because she saw that for some unknown reason a heavy veil had rolled back from the past he had chosen to keep hidden even from himself, as it were, more than from others.
“Speech is always the most dangerous thing,” he said. “Only the silence of years piled one upon the other will bury unendurable things. Even thought must be silenced. I have lived a lifetime since—” his words began to come very slowly—as she listened she felt as if he were opening a grave and drawing from its depths long buried things, “—since the night when I met her alone in a wood in the park of the Schloss and—lost hold of myself—lost it utterly.”