“And damned, I hope,” she answered me in that same cold, emotionless voice. “He deserves no less for all the wrongs he did to me, the least of which was the great wrong of marrying me. For advancement he acquired me; for his advancement he bartered and used me and made of me a thing of shame.”
I was so overwhelmed with grief and love and pity that a groan escaped me almost before I was aware of it. She broke off short, and stared at me in haughtiness.
“You presume to pity me, I think,” she reproved me. “It is my own fault. I was wrong to talk. Women should suffer silently, that they may preserve at least a mask of dignity. Otherwise they incur pity—and pity is very near contempt.”
And then I lost my head.
“Not mine, not mine!” I cried, throwing out my arms; and though that was all I said, there was such a ring in my choking voice that she rose stiffly from her seat and stood tense and tall confronting me, almost eye to eye, reproof in every line of her.
“Princess, forgive me!” I cried. “It breaks my heart in pieces to hear you utter things that have been in my mind these many years, poisoning the devotion that I owed to the late Prince, poisoning the very loyalty I owe my King. You say I pity you. If that were so, none has the better right.”
“Who gave it you?” she asked me, breathless.
“Heaven itself, I think,” I answered recklessly. “What you have suffered, I have suffered for you. When I came to Court the infamy was a thing accomplished—all of it. But I gathered it, and gathering it, thanked Heaven I had been spared the pain and misery of witnessing it, which must have been more than ever I could have endured. Yet when I saw you, when I watched you—your wistful beauty, your incomparable grace—there was a time when the thought to murder stirred darkly in my mind that I might at least avenge you.”
She fell away before me, white to the very lips, her eyes dilating as they regarded me.
“In God's name, why?” she asked me in a strangled voice.