With all the pressure and the distraction of society upon her she was endlessly pursued by the self-accusation which had been brought to her by those simple lines traced by a dying child.
A consciousness of the supreme good fortune with which fate had always lightened her own life, came to her, for the first time, with a sense of unworthiness and ingratitude in herself. A consciousness of the greatness of the gifts she had received, and of the little she had given in return, smote her heart with a vague repentance and a vague fear. What had she done with all those lives which had been put into her hands, with all the loyalty and the devotion which had been spent on her oftentimes, without receiving from her even a passing pity in recognition of it? Would not life tire one day of blessing her, when she gave no benediction in return?
She had always cared so little, she had been always so indifferent and so dissatisfied. Would fate not strike her with a rough, wild justice, if it took from her her children, her husband, her intellect, her fortune, her beauty? Would not destiny be only fair and honest if it forced her on her knees beside some death-bed of some creature well-beloved, and said to her:—
'You have never been content in happiness; henceforward you shall dwell with sorrow.'
Fear touched her for the sole time in her victorious and indifferent life; she was afraid lest one day she should stand alone with only the graves of what had been once dear to her as her companions and her friends: one day when youth and power and beauty and wit would all be gone from her:——like the great sovereigns of the world, she shuddered to remember that she was mortal.
With all her philosophy and epigram, she had discoursed full many a time of the only cruel certainty life holds: the certainty that tout lasse, tout casse, tout passe. She had played with the dread problems which Time, the merciless master of the highest, sets before all his scholars with no solution to them possible to the clearest brains. And whilst she had toyed with their subtleties, this child had had the courage to cut the knot and pass away for ever to the eternal night of nothingness!
Some perception of the utter selfishness of her whole existence smote her as she sat alone in the stillness of the after-midnight hours.
These children dwarfed her in her own sight. They had been mere children, both of them, foolish, romantic, unwise, exaggerated: but they had been in a way sublime. And he had loved neither of them. He had only loved her who had left his heart empty, his affections cold, his life dissatisfied and solitary.
For the first time since she had thought at all, a passionate repentance and regret came on her; a sense of her own cruelty weighed heavily upon her. Why had she not been more tolerant, more merciful, more willing to acknowledge that innocence and generosity of which she had been so unwillingly conscious all the while that Damaris Bérarde had stood before her? Why had she not been guided by that serenity and tolerance of judgment on which she had so long prided herself; why had she crushed to the earth with the weight of her scorn, and her rank, and her place as his wife, this lonely creature who had loved him so humbly, so silently, so perfectly?
There was a greatness in her own nature, obscured as it was by the languors of self-love and the vanities of the world, which forced her to recognise the greatness of the simple words sent to her. She herself, in her anger, in her incredulity, in her cruelty, seemed to her own eyes very poor beside them. She had judged as the common herd always judged: coarsely, superficially, brutally. No better.