"It is terrible to be a woman!" cried Rénèe. "Too many, ah yes, too many!"
"But we are not useless," said the Countess gently.
The waiting-woman answered with passionate conviction—
"Not such women as you with five sons!—but women such as I! I am like a dead leaf before the breeze; if I am cast away and lost, no one will be the poorer. If I had been a man, however mean and humble, I could have followed—followed," she avoided the Prince's name, "the Protestant flag—I could have at least died. It is not even permitted to women to die nobly."
The Countess looked at her curiously and was silent. To Juliana also the enclosed life of a woman seemed at times terrible; there was something awful in this post in the background, always to be patient, always serving, always waiting—worst of all, the waiting.
At that moment the fate of the women seemed worse than that of the men; their piteous figures stood out mournfully against the red background of the persecutions and the war: Sabina of Egmont left starving with her children at the mercy of the man who had slain her husband; the Dowager Countess of Hoorne, having lost one son on the scaffold, moving heaven and earth to save the other from a similar fate; Hélène, Montigny's wife, widowed after a four month's marriage, and weeping a husband enclosed in the hopeless depths of a Spanish prison; the Countess of Hoogstraaten, ruined, thrice bereaved; the Countess of Aremberg suddenly widowed; and all those more obscure women who were orphaned, bereft of husband and child, spurned from their dismantled homes to beg or starve.
Perhaps it was better to be a man and face a swift death in the open field.
"But we have no choice," said the Countess, with a little smile that creased her fresh wrinkled face; "we must do what falls to our lot and not think of the difficulties."
"What falls to me?" asked Rénèe; "no one wants me, nor ever has since my mother died. The Princess always hated me. I made no friends; my home, my family, was swept away in a ruin that has pursued everything I have loved or cared for ever since—my country, my faith, my——"
She checked herself suddenly and went pale.