The unselfish prayer of the dead girl touched her conscience and her heart as no rebuke would ever have done. She had the power to do so still; that she did not doubt. He was hers in every way if she chose to stretch her hand out to him.
A sense of the infinite patience, and fidelity, and devotion of the great love which he had always borne her from the first hour his eyes had met hers came to her with the force of a reproach from the grave itself. His submission to her caprices, his constancy under her neglect, his instant response to the faintest kindness from her, his unchangeable tenderness which outlived the many mortal wounds she dealt to it; all these came to her memory with a sense of her own debt to them, of their own sweetness and patience, and long suffering. In him she could if she chose find a friend, whom no fault of hers would alienate, and no passing of time make weary. She had had too much love given to her in her life; she saw that she had been too careless of this, the greatest gift life holds: and death had come too often where she passed.
The chill of its ghastly presence seemed with her as she moved through the silent house in the still small hours. This child had had force in her youth to seek death, but she feared it: she who had feared nothing on earth or in heaven.
When all the guests were gone to their chambers, and the great house was still, she did what she had never once done in the years of their marriage: she went to seek Othmar instead of sending her women to summon him. She had on her pale rose satin chamber-gown, and even in that moment, with an impulse of care for her person and its charms, a coquetry which would never cease in her whilst she had breath, she paused a moment before one of the mirrors, and glanced lingeringly at her own reflection, and put some fresh roses in her bosom. Had she been on her way to the scaffold she would have done the same: had the same remembrance of her own power to charm.
As she passed one of the great windows of the hall, she looked at the night without. The moon, which rose late, being on its decline, poured its whole light over the gardens and the forests beyond. A white owl flew through the clear air; the shadow of the great palace fell black over the silvered grass, distant bells for daybreak prayer were ringing very far away over the hushed country.
And the night before, 'as the moon rose,' Damaris Bérarde had died in her narrow chamber, in all her beauty and strength, in all the height of her dreams and hopes, in all the vigorous promise of life which had been as full and as fair in her as was now the promise of spring in the woods: and these were all gone for ever and for ever, the body laid in the earth to perish, and the tender and valiant soul passed away like a dew that dries up before the heats of the noonday.
'Heaven spare such death to you and yours!'
She remembered the words with the first sense of terror her nature had ever known. They seemed less like a prayer for good than like a menace of evil. She thought of the fair lives of her children: not fairer than had been this other young life which she had first seen under the starry orange flowers above the edge of the sea.
Why could she not have left her alone?
She passed through the length of the quiet building to her husband's rooms. He was writing at a writing-table with his back turned to her, and did not raise his head at the sound of the unclosing door.