If Ada Merling had seen Dunoisse at that moment, shorn of his strength, willfully blind to his degradation, lying in the arms that had already bound and delivered him to the Philistine, she would have blessed the hour that brought her disillusion; instead of looking back upon it sorrowfully, and writing, in the locked journal of her thoughts and impressions, that was kept in a secret of her writing-table:
“There is no teacher like Experience. By suffering and humiliation we gain sympathy for the sore and despised; and acquire insight through our own short-sightedness. How often in the old home-days at Wraye, when one of the village women has wound up some sorrowful story of human passion and human error with: ‘She fell in love wi’ him at sight, d’ye see? have I not interjected, quite seriously and sincerely: ‘Oh! but why?’ And found myself smiling when the answer would be: ‘Nay, now, Miss Ada, however can I tell, when her didn’t know herself, poor soul?’”
“Oh me!... I shall never laugh again over such stories. Is that my gain or my loss?”
A space, a blotted line, and then came, in the flowing, finely-pointed handwriting:
“It must be to my gain.... That I, who am habitually reserved, who have been reared in refinement and exclusiveness, should have known a weakness such as this, shall be of use to me and for the help of others. When I am tempted to approve my own judgment as sounder, esteem my own standards of morality and conduct as purer and loftier than those of my sister-women, let me for my soul’s health—let me remember that the man to whom, in the first moment of our meeting, my heart went out—and whose name, indifferent to me as he must have been, I could never, for long afterwards, hear without emotion—is worldly, cynical, sensual, and dishonorable; deeply entangled in a shameful intrigue; bound to the interests of the Power that is the plague-sore and the curse and the ruin of his adopted country; perhaps involved in its plots—stained with its guilt of treachery and bloodshed....”
At the bottom of the page came:
“Perhaps I wrong him?... It may be that I judge him unjustly, that he has been shamefully slandered—and that he is—really is—what once he seemed. Grant it, Thou God! Who hast the knowledge of all hearts, and by Thy grace canst purify the unclean and make the evil good, and change base things to noble! And if it be Thy Will that I am never to know the sweetness of earthly love, give me to know what love may be in Heaven!”
LVI
The Marshal, having plumped out with golden blood the depleted veins of Hector’s account at Rothschild’s, exacted his pound of flesh in the matter of the Claim of Succession. Köhler and von Steyregg, those birds of ill omen, shortly presented themselves at the Rue du Bac, bearing the elder Dunoisse’s letter of introduction, addressed to “His Serene Highness the Hereditary Prince of Widinitz,” and bearing three immense splashes of scarlet sealing-wax, impressed with the writer’s own pretentious coat of arms....