The Duchess’ withered hands caught each other in a clasp which was almost like a passionate exclamation.
“There was such a night. And I was young—young—not an iron bound vieillard then. When one is young one’s anguish is the Deluge which ends the world forever. I had lain down and risen up and spent every hour in growing torture for months. I had been forced to bind myself down with bands of iron. When I found myself, without warning, face to face with her, alone in the night stillness of the wood, the bands broke. She had dared to creep out in secret to hide herself and her heartbroken terror in the silence and darkness alone. I knew it without being told. I knew and I went quite mad for the time. I was only a boy. I threw myself face downward on the earth and sobbed, embracing her young feet.”
Both of them were quite silent for a few moments before he went on.
“She was not afraid,” he said, even with something which was like a curious smile of tender pity at the memory. “Afterwards—when I stood near her, trembling—she even took my hand and held it. Once she kissed it humbly like a little child while her tears rained down. Never before was there anything as innocently heartbreaking. She was so piteously grateful for love of any kind and so heart wrung by my misery.”
He paused again and looked down at the carpet, thinking. Then he looked up at her directly.
“I need not explain to you. You will know. I was twenty-five. My heart was pounding in my side, my blood thudded through my veins. Every atom of natural generous manhood in my being was wild with fury at the brutal wrong done her exquisiteness. And she—”
“She was a young novice fresh from a convent and very pious,” the Duchess’ quiet voice put in.
“You understand,” he answered. “She knelt down and prayed for her own soul as well as mine. She thanked God that I was kind and would forgive her and go away—and only remember her in my prayers. She believed it was possible. It was not, but I kissed the hem of her white dress and left her standing alone—a little saint in a woodland shrine. That was what I thought deliriously as I staggered off. It was the next night that I heard her shrieks. Then she died.”
The Duchess knew what else had died—the high adventure of youth and joy of life in him, the brilliant spirit which had been himself and whose utter withdrawal from his being had left him as she had seen him on his return to London in those days which now seemed a memory of a past life in a world which had passed also. He had appeared before her late one afternoon and she had for a moment been afraid to look at him because she was struck to the depths of her being by a sense of seeing before her a body which had broken the link holding it to life and walked the earth, the crowded streets, the ordinary rooms where people gathered, a dead thing. Even while it moved it gazed out of dead eyes. And the years had passed and though they had been friends he had never spoken until now.
“Such a thing must be buried in a tomb covered with a heavy stone and with a seal set upon it. I am unsealing a tomb,” he said. Then after a silence he added, “I have, of cause, a reason.” She bent her head because she had known this must be the case.