To the haughty, frank innocent soul of the child it was such unspeakable degradation that it seemed to stop the very pulses of life in her.
She could have torn the clothes off her body because they had been bought with this money she had ignorantly accepted as her own.
Not for one moment did she do him the wrong that his wife had done him; she never doubted his motives, or thought that any intention save that of the kindest and most chivalrous compassion had been at the root of his generosity to her. Her mind was too intrinsically noble, her instincts were too pure and untainted by suspicion, for any baser supposition to attach itself to him in her thoughts, even in the moment of her greatest suffering.
Only she wished—ah, God! how she wished—that he had left her to die on the bridge in that summer night.
Intense pride had always been existent beneath her ardent and careless temperament; the stubborn self-will of the peasant united to the finer, more impersonal, pride derived from a great race. She had been always taught to suffice for herself, to repel assistance as indignity, to hold herself the equal of all living creatures; and now what was she?—only what Jean Bérarde, had he been living, would have driven out of his presence as a beggar, only what all the labourers in the fields of the vale of Chevreuse would have the right to hoot after as she passed them. Her imagination distorted and her sensitiveness exaggerated all the debt she owed to Othmar; to herself she seemed nothing better than any one of those wretched paupers who stretched their hands out to him as he passed. The shame of it made all the devotion she bore to him seem a horror, a disgrace, a thing cankered and corrupt, which he must despise utterly if he knew aught of it. And what should he know? What should he care? What could she be in his sight except a friendless, lonely thing, whom he had saved from want, as he might save any ragged, homeless, child who asked for a sou from him in the streets.
She loved him with the passion of Juliet, of Francesca, of Mignon, and she found herself so disgraced in her own sight that nothing she could ever do, it seemed to her, would make any utterance from her, even of gratitude, worth the breath spent in speaking it. To him and to his wife she would be for ever, all their lives long, only a peasant who had not had strength or courage to earn her own daily bread.
The cold scorn which had gazed at her from the eyes of his wife seemed to pierce through and through the very core and centre of her life. She had dreamed of being great in this woman's sight, of compelling her admiration, her applause, even her envy!—and all the while she had been nothing more than any dog which lived on the food thrown from their table.
The train went on through the descending darkness of the night, and the scent of the wind blowing over grass-lands and wheat-fields came to her in her trance, and filled her with a strange dumb longing to be put away for ever in silence under the cool and kindly earth, the budding leaves, the sprouting corn. The aged hate the thought of death, and fear and shun it; but for the young it has no terrors, and in their pain it always beckons, with a smile, to them to rest in the arms of the great Madre Natura. Death seemed to her the only stream which could wash her soul white again from the indignity it had, all unconsciously, accepted. A passion which was hopeless and cruel, and ashamed of its own force, burned up her young heart like fire. Dead, only, it seemed to him that she might keep some place in his compassion and his remembrance without indignity.
She descended at the familiar road-side of Trappes, and passed through the wicket, and took her way through the country paths she knew so well. It was not yet a year since they had first brought her there, and she had laughed with joy to see the country sights and hear the country sounds once more. Now they only hurt her with an intolerable pain.