All her life long she had woven the most ingenious and elaborate theories as to the failure of men and women to secure fidelity and peace; she had reasoned with perfect philosophy on the causes of that failure, and turned to ridicule that childish passion and that fretful inaptitude with which the great majority meet those inevitable changes of the affections and the character which time brings to all. But now, she herself, having been met with such changes, had done no better, and been no wiser than they all. She had suffered like them, she had made reproaches like them, she had allowed indignation and offence to hasten her into anger which could only gratify her enemies and all the gaping world.
'Any fool could have done what I have done!' she thought, with bitter impatience against herself: any fool could have reproached him, and denounced him, and placed him in such a position that out of sheer manliness he had no choice left but to reiterate the untruth once told, and go on in the path once taken.
Yet she knew that were it to be done again, again she would do the same. When she thought of him as the lover of this child, she was only conscious of the mere foolish, irrational, personal, bitterness of emotion which any other feebler woman would have felt.
Had she not said under the oaktrees yonder in her Court of Love, that inconstancy, being only involuntary, should be blamed by none: had she not again and again said and thought that what a woman or a lover cannot keep, they well deserve to lose: had she not quoted from the poets and the philosophers of a thousand years, to prove by a thousand lines of wisdom that it is 'not under our control to love or not to love:' and was this not most supreme truth?
Why then in face of the first faithlessness which she had ever known, had she had no better or wiser impulse in her than that of anger?—such stupid, witless, unwise anger, as Jeanne in the kitchens would feel against Jeannot in the stables. What use were the most subtle intellect, the most delicate and penetrating perception, the most intimate and accurate knowledge of human nature, if all these only resulted in producing, under trial, such primitive instincts, and such simple emotions, as would exist in the untutored brain and the rude breast of any peasant woman passing under the trees of the park yonder with her herd of milch cows, or her flock of sheep? If the higher intelligence could not reach a nirvaña of perfect tolerance, of perfect comprehension, of perfect indifference, of what avail were its culture and its pride?
All men were inconstant; she knew that. It was not their fault; they were made so. She believed that, had he told her frankly of his frailties, she would have been perfectly indifferent and indulgent to them. It was the long deception and concealment which had seemed to her so contemptible. 'Such a coward—such a coward!' she thought bitterly. Cowardice was to her the one unpardonable sin.
As she and Béthune walked on the seventh evening before dinner through the outer gardens, where these joined the woods, they chanced to see in the distance the same Lubin and Lisette, whom they had seen as lovers two years before, and who had been wedded with many gifts and much gaiety in the August weather a week or two after the sitting of the Court of Love. The man was walking far ahead this time; the woman lagged behind; the cows were the same happy creatures, serene and mild, going through the sun and shadow, pausing to crop a mouthful of sweet grass between the beechen banks; but the lovers were only now a lout who whistled and smoked, a scold who fumed and wept.
'Let us ask how the idyl ends,' said the Lady of Amyôt. 'It is easy to see that it is ended.'
'Ah, Madame,' said the woman being interrogated, 'voilà qu'il regarde déjà la petite Flore!'
Her châtelaine laughed with a certain bitter tone in her laughter.