And her memory went once more back to the hour in which the dead body of Napraxine had been before her sight, the tea-rose held close in his stiffened hand, and darkly red with the blood of his lungs.
‘If he were living’—she thought.
If he had been living, he could have avenged Yseulte and himself.
But he was dead, a thing of bones and ashes—powerless, senseless, defenceless. Something in that dishonour which would be done to a dead man and to a helpless child seemed to her courage cowardice, to her generosity meanness, to her dignity unworthiness.
‘Neither could ever hurt us,’ she thought, ‘neither could ever avenge it on us.’
Her sense of the utter impotency of those two, when she remembered it, disarmed her where opposition or the struggle of forces equal to her own would have made her obstinate and pitiless. They were so helpless! the girl, in her pathetic, ignorant, unloved humiliation and ineptitude; the man, dead in his strength, who had left only a memory behind him. It would be as easy to sweep the one out of her path as to forget and deride the other; so easy that it seemed not worth the while; so easy that it seemed almost base.
She would have used her blade of steel without mercy to cleave through bone and flesh of any who should have ventured to oppose her; but to cut down a garden lily already dying of drought, to strike a pale shadow from the tomb—it seemed poor, unworthy.
Othmar was hers if she would.
Had there been any doubt of it, her nature would have urged her on in unsparing resolution until he should have yielded. But he was hers when she chose, body and soul, peace and honour, present and future. Her perfect sense of empire and security of dominion left her serene and gentle; she could listen to the voice of pity, the impulse of what men, in their stupidity, called conscience. It was with the disdainful generosity with which the Great Katherine might have loosed one of her lovers from the chains which bound him to her throne, that she renounced her power to take him from his wife.
‘If it were only a crime,’ she thought, in the mystical complex subtleties and intricacies of her brain, ‘if it were only a crime, the darkness would heighten the dawn, the danger would sweeten the pleasure, the courage of it would strengthen the self-indulgence; but when it is mean, when one is sure that there is no one living who can avenge it, only a poor meek fool who will weep——!’