What a strange irony, that just by her effort to escape this Law she had brought down on herself the full weight of its action! To avoid its punishment of her amour-propre she had pretended to be in love with Jacques, thereby entangling herself in a mass of contradictions, deceit, and nervous terrors from which the only means of extricating herself was by breaking the law anew and spurning love. Verily, it was a fine example of Até—the blindness sent by the gods on those they mean to destroy.
Well, now the end had come, and of the many possibilities and realities life had held for her, nothing was left but the adamant of desire which neither the tools of earth can break, nor the chemistry of Hell resolve.
CHAPTER XXXIV
OUT INTO THE VOID
So it was all over.
Had she been the dupe of malicious gods? Yes, if within that malign pantheon there was a throne for her old enemy, Amour-Propre. For it was Amour-Propre that had played her this scurvy trick and had upset her poor little boat ‘drifting oarless on a full sea’—not of Grace but of Chance. After all, Jansenism, Cartesianism, her mother’s philosophy of indifference, had all the same aim—to give a touch of sea-craft to the poor human sailor, and to flatter him with the belief that some harbour lies before him. But they lie, they lie! There is no port, no rudder, no stars, and the frail fleet of human souls is at the mercy of every wind that blows.
She laughed bitterly when she remembered her certainty of her own election, her anger against the mighty hands slowly, surely, torturing her life into salvation. She laughed still more at her faith in a kind, heavenly Father, a rock in a weary land, a certain caterer of lovely gifts. How had she ever been fool enough to believe in this? Had she no eyes for the countless proofs all round her that any awful thing might happen to any one? People, just as real and alive as she was herself, were disfigured by smallpox, or died of plague, or starved in the streets, or loved without being loved in return; and yet, she had wrapped herself round in an imaginary ghostly tenderness, certain in her foolish heart that it was against the order of the universe that such things should happen to her.
And as to Mademoiselle de Scudéry, she knew that the whole business had been a foolish vision, a little seed growing to grotesque dimensions in a sick brain, and yet this knowledge was powerless to stem the mad impetus of her misery.
How she longed for Jacques during these days, for his comforting hands, his allégresse, his half-mocking patience. She saw him, pale and chestnut-haired with his light, mysterious, beckoning eyes—so strangely like the picture by Da Vinci in the Louvre of Saint John the Baptist—marching head erect to his bright destiny down the long white roads of France, and he would never come back.
And yet, she had hinted to Madame Pilou that the fable of the dog and the shadow is the epitome of all tragedy. Somewhere inside her had she always known what must happen?