“Charles!” madame spoke with angry impetuosity. “Think you I am to be treated as a child?”
“There are times when all of us are children, Eleanore,—times when we need the Father-hand, the Father-guidance. I would not be harsh with thee were there another way; nevertheless, thou must do my bidding.”
She led him in silence to her own room, and they entered it together, St. Nazaire closing the door behind him. Madame seated herself at once in a broad chair near a window, and the Bishop paced up and down before her. The room was warm, for the night air was soft, and a half-dead fire gleamed upon the stone hearth. A torch upon the wall had been lighted, and two candles burned on the table near by. By this light St. Nazaire could watch Eleanore’s face as he walked. It was some moments before he spoke, and when he began, his voice had changed again, and was as gentle as a woman’s,—
“This birth of a girl child hath been a grievous disappointment to thee, dear friend?”
Eleanore replied only by a look; but what words could have expressed half so much?
“Art thou angry with me, Eleanore! Am I to blame for it? Is there fault in any one for what is come? Sex is no matter of choice with the world. Were it so, methinks thou hadst not now been grieving.”
“Thou sayest truly, it is no matter of choice with the world. But hast not ever taught that there is One who may choose always as He will? There is a fault, and it is the fault of God! God of God, Charles, have I not had enough to bear? Could I not, now that the end cannot be far away, have known a little content in mine old age? What hath there been for me, these thirty years, save sorrow? With the death of Gerault, I believed that the world held no further woe for me; but in the following months hope, which I had thought forever gone, came on me again, combat its coming as I would. Yet the thought that an heir might be born to Crépuscule, the thought that the line might yet be carried on to something better than this eternal sadness, came to be so strong with me that I gave way, fool that I was, to joy. And now, by the merciless wrath of God, Fate makes sport of me again. God alone would have been so pitiless. And am I, a mortal, to forgive the Almighty for all the woes that He recklessly putteth on me?”
In this speech Eleanore’s low voice had risen above its usual pitch, and rang out in tones of deep-seated, passionate anger. St. Nazaire paused in his walk to look at her as she spoke; and never had he felt himself in a more difficult position. Sincere as was his belief, there were, indeed, things in the divine order that his creed could not explain away. He dreaded to take the only orthodox stand,—resignation and continued praise of the Lord, for in Eleanore’s present state of mind this would be worse than mockery; and yet in this he was obliged at length to take his refuge.
“Eleanore, when Laure, the infant, was first put into thy arms, wast thou grieved that she was not a man child?”
“I had Gerault—”