And now that she knew Anne's sordid and shameful secret, she had a power, an influence over her such as none other possessed, and could restrain her and bring her to some reason when all else had failed. The Prince might entreat his wife to appear on some state occasion, and she would rudely refuse; but when Rénèe insisted, she would suffer herself to be attired and go.
So with a sigh Rénèe relinquished her fleeting dreams of freedom and a sane, wholesome life among her own people.
As she moved further into the city she felt with overmastering pain how lonely she was, how unutterably lonely; all the companies she passed—women together, families, men with their wives and sisters—emphasized the terrible feeling of her loneliness.
If it had not been for Philip and the Holy Inquisition, her life would not have been broken, her heart seared; she would have been as one of these; she would have had parents, money, position, friends, probably a lover—in a word, happiness.
Then she remembered that she was only one of thousands left desolate—perhaps more desolate than she was; fifty thousand, she had heard, had died under the Inquisition and the Edicts, and how many aching, maddened hearts had each of these deaths left behind? Rénèe felt rebuked in her complaint of her loneliness; she shuddered as she went down the hill to the church of Ste Gudule—shuddered though the spring breezes were soft and the spring sun warm.
On the steps of the church she paused and looked down at the city lying in the hollow of the hills, all the spires and vanes of the Town Hall and the palace, of the various guilds in the market-place rising delicate and erect into the pale and pure sky, while on all the irregular tumbled-looking roofs and gables the sun changed lead to gold and casement glass to diamonds.
She turned, lifted the heavy curtain at the low door in the greater door, and entered the church whose twin towers she had watched so constantly that they had come to mean to her the Papist power which dominated the land.
She had not been in a Romish church since she was a child and had crept into the great church of St. Baron at Ghent. She had not meant to enter this now, but a fascinated sense of horror drew her on—horror because she could not regard this faith with toleration; it stood to her for an epitome of idolatry, cruelty, wickedness, oppression, and uncharitableness.
She was not a Protestant by chance; her whole nature detested the Church of Rome. She stepped forward into the gloom, pulling her hood further over her eyes.
At first she could distinguish nothing but the seven thick wax candles burning on the altar and the red lamps flickering their eternal light before the shrines.