'You cannot be sure of that.'
'Bah! I am perfectly sure. He has never even understood that she did die for him. He thought it was an accident!'
'Hush!' said Friedrich Othmar harshly, but with great emotion. 'She wished that he should think it so; what right have you or have I or has anyone in the wide world to betray her last secret if we guess it? It has gone to the grave with her, like her dead children.'
'I betray it no more than you!' she replied with asperity. 'I have given no hint of it to any living soul; when Toinon said it was a suicide I struck her, I made her hold her peace. I was a child then, and all these years since I have never said a word; but you, you know; you know as well as I.'
'It was not a suicide, it was a heroism. If there were a God, a great God, He would have honoured it.'
'But there are only priests!' said Blanchette, with her bitterest smile.
They turned away together from the mausoleum, where the marble figure of Yseulte seemed to lie in the peace of a dreamless sleep beneath the shadowing wings of the two angels. Gates of metal scroll-work let in the sunlight to this house of death; there was no darkness in it, no terror, no melancholy; white doves flew around its roof, and white roses blossomed at its portals.
'Madame la Princesse de Laon,' said Friedrich Othmar gravely, as they passed across the turf, 'whenever the fly begins that little wound in the skin that you talked of, forbear to widen it for the sake of your cousin who sleeps there; do not make her sacrifice wholly useless. What is done is done. We cannot bring her back to life, and if we could she would not be happy in it. There are souls too delicate and too spiritual for earth. Hers was so.'
Blanche de Laon gave him no promise. She walked on over the smooth sward through the labyrinths of blossom, and crossed the gardens where her courtiers met her, with outcries of welcome and of homage.
She was at the supreme height of coquetry and triumph and fashion. She was not beautiful in feature, but she was dazzling fair, had a marvellously perfect figure, une crânerie inouie, and the advantage and fascination conferred by an absolute indifference to all laws, hesitations and principles. She was hard as her own diamonds, plundered her lovers with a greed and ruthlessness which rivalled any cocotte's, kept her splendid position by sheer force of audacity as high above the world as though she were the most pure of women, and before she had completed her twenty-first year knew all that was to be known of the refinements of vice, the exaggerations of self-indulgence, and the eccentricities of unbridled levity. She had supreme scorn for her sister Toinon, who had espoused the Duc de Yprès, a hunting-noble of the Ardennes, and who spent most of her time in the provinces chasing wolves, bears, and wild deer, and could give the death-blow with her knife to an old tusked monarch of the woods or a king-stag of eleven points, as surely as any huntsman in French Flanders or the Luxembourg.