“I am glad that you do not think so now,” she said.
He ground his heel into the carpet, for all his self-control had gone, and an empty vanity compelled him more and more to think of the shame which would fall upon him personally when the story of these things was known.
“Your confession is unnecessary,” he exclaimed. “I was a fool to ask you to explain. Your father left your mother because she was a Frenchwoman; you have betrayed my country because I am a Frenchman. It is useless to lie to me. You are judged out of your own mouth. My country means nothing to you. The sufferings of my country give you pleasure. You are the friend of those who have brought this suffering upon us. I do not want to hear more. Henceforth I will forget your name—I will forget, when this man is dead, that you ever came to Strasburg to dishonour me in the eyes of those who have loved me. You shall hear my name no more—never again, as God is my witness, will I enter the house which shelters you. Do not seek to turn from that; do not seek to find me out. The past is irrevocable; I will begin a new page, and your name shall not be written upon it. If they say of me, ‘He was a coward,’ they shall say it no more when your lover is dead. Do not make any mistake, Beatrix. I will not sleep until I have found him out. I will watch his house night and day until he has answered with the only answer a liar can give—his life. That is my farewell to you—oh, my God, that I should be here in Strasburg to utter it!”
He paused suddenly and looked at her. She stood white-faced and mute against the wall by the door. Her eyes were as stars in the dim light. Her hands were locked together, and she tapped the boards nervously with her little foot. And she was still standing so when he left the room and passed out to the darkness of the terrible city.
But at dawn Guillaumette found her senseless upon the floor, and hours passed before it was known whether she were alive or dead.
CHAPTER XXVIII
“IF STRASBURG FALLS”
There followed upon her illness a week of dreams, which were the delirium of a brain overwrought, and of the burden she had carried for so many days. She knew not where she was or whose were the voices which spoke to her, but seemed to be living in a world apart—in a dreadful valley of shadows and of constant turmoil. Faces came to her fitfully in her dreams, the faces she had known in childhood—her mother’s face and the face of Edmond bending over her while she slept. To him she stretched out her arms, but could not touch his hand before the vision passed. No finality even of the dream was permitted to that burning brain. As in a whirlpool of the mind she was tossed hither and thither in thought; now battling with the flames, which gave a golden radiance to the city of doom; now living through the night of Wörth again; now at her husband’s feet imploring him, for love of her, to save the life of their friend. A thousand voices spoke to her, but she could recognize none of them. She did not know that Strasburg, minute by minute, crumbled to the dust. Sleep gave her nought but this prompting to labour unceasing of the mind, to this unending battle of the flame and smoke and faces of her visions.
Reason came back to her at last; but ten days had passed, and she was in the Place Kleber no longer. When she opened her heavy eyes and sought to raise herself upon her bed, she saw that they had carried her to a strange house and laid her in a strange room. So bare and gloomy and vault-like was that chamber that she might well have been in the tombs. Even the pillars which carried the arches of the vaulted ceiling suggested an abiding place of the dead. The candles burning at her bedside were as watch-lights to her eyes. She heard no sound of any voice, but only the thunder of the cannon rolling distantly over the city above. Her weakness was beyond expression. She could not lift a hand from the coverlet of the bed. She thought that she was dying, and the rest of death seemed to come upon her as the sweetest gift of God.