So passed the happiest month of Trimousette’s life. Her pale cheek grew rosy and rounded like a child’s. Her black eyes lost their tragic and melancholy expression and now shone with a soft splendor of deep peace and even joy. Trimousette, Duchess of Belgarde, had come into her own at last. She received from her husband the constant tribute of his adoring and admiring love. When she glanced up from her sewing, it was to find the duke’s eyes lifted from his book or his writing and fixed upon her. If she moved across the narrow little cell, he watched her, noting the grace of her movements. He told her twenty times a day that she had the most beautiful, dainty feet in the world. When she sang her little songs to him in a small pretty voice, the duke thought it the most exquisite melody he had ever heard. They were as far removed from the world as if they were upon another planet, and standing on the lonely peak of existence between the two abysms from which man emerges and into which he descends, it was as if they contained in themselves the universe.
It was now April; the days were long and bright, and the nights short and brilliant with moonlight and star shine. One day—it was the twenty-first of April—the air was so warm and Maylike that Trimousette laid aside her heavy black gown and put on the only other one she possessed—her white one, which she had saved for her bridal with death. Her husband had not seen her in a white gown for a long, long time, and paid her such loverlike compliments that Trimousette blushed with delight. When the time came for them to go into the gardens for their one hour of fresh air many of the prisoners remarked upon Trimousette’s white gown, and the little Vicomte d’Aronda, coming up, said gallantly:
“Madame, I beg to present you with a bouquet I gathered for you this morning,” and handed her five puny dandelions and some milkweed, tied together with a bit of grass.
Trimousette was charmed, and thanked the boy so prettily that he blushed redder than ever, and the duke declared the vicomte was a dangerous fellow with the ladies—at which the lad answered saucily:
“Ah, monsieur, if I could live until I am grown up! Then I should indeed be devoted to the ladies.”
The duke turned away his head. The boy was but sixteen years old and he would not live to be much older.
That day was illuminated for Trimousette; it was so softly bright. As the afternoon wore on, its languid beauty, its sad sweetness entered into the soul of Trimousette. She did not busy herself as usual with the little tasks she had devised for herself, but sat and moved in a soft and composed reverie. Then, for a long time she watched the rude sundial, studying the motto, and, almost involuntarily, she wrote upon the table with her pen the old motto about the passing of the shadows called man. She was serious, but not sad, and when the duke, taking her hand, said to her:
“My little Trimousette, does your heart ache because we, shadows that we are, shall no more pass this way?” Trimousette replied:
“I tell you truly, my heart has not once ached for myself since I have been in this prison.”
And with a lovely sidelong glance from her black eyes, now no longer sad, she continued, smiling: