If she had shrieked, it would have pierced the heart less than her immobile and rigorous quiescence. Yet her trembling could not be controlled by any act of will. Between the visitor who stood upon one side of the double grille, and the brown-robed, black-veiled figure seated upon the other, a current of hot air might have been rising, the shape so quivered and vibrated and shuddered before his eyes.
Ah! could he have realized the wild conflict of emotions surging under the white guimpe and the coarse brown habit.... But if the weak body of Sister Térèse de Saint François was shaken as a reed, her determination was immovable; her word was not to be gainsaid.
Never, never!—though the Plenum of the Federative Council should throw all its “Ayes!” into the scale that confirmed the females of the house of Widinitz and their heirs in the dynastic succession, would the nun-Princess consent to her son’s occupying the throne.
Saying the word so softly in her threadlike, feeble voice, her “Never!” reared between Hector and the hereditary dignities a Titanic wall of rock, that no tempered tool might pierce, no fulminate shatter and blast.
So it was quashed and ended, the vexed question of the Claim of Succession. And Dunoisse drew breath with almost a sensation of relief. Of reproach there was not a shadow in her voice or expression. She had not heard—possibly she had not heard?—that her son had not lacked a companion on his journey. Those scathing reproaches of the Archbishop’s were not to be voiced again by Sister Térèse. She spoke of the Marshal—asked of his health? Their son felt himself flushing guiltily in the sheer inability to reply with authority. Who knew less of Achille Dunoisse, well or ill, jaundiced or jovial, gouty or in good fettle, than the son he had begotten? Tardy Conscience, waking from a nodding sleep in the saddle, dug both spurs rowel-deep in Dunoisse’s smart sides. His eyes shunned the sunken eyes that questioned with such desperate eagerness, belying the sparse, meager utterance, the carefully colorless tone. He stammered a conventional reply.
“You will give him a message from me, when you return to him,” she said, and dropped the faded curtains of her eyelids between them.... “Tell him that I who know him to be infinitely generous and noble at heart”—Dunoisse barely restrained a start of incredulous surprise at the new idea of nobility in connection with the Marshal—“tell him that I was never led by any act of his to doubt the disinterestedness of his regard. And say to him, that what he wildly dreams may one day be brought about, cannot and will not! That in the parched and dried-up skeleton you have seen here at the Convent there is no beauty left to covet. Entreat of him to think of his wife and your mother as one who has passed forever beyond the gates of this world.... For I have chosen to be dead whilst living,” said the thread-thin, trembling voice, “that by the Divine Mercy not only I, but others—may not taste of the Death that is eternal.” She added, almost inaudibly: “My strength is not great, Hector. I have suffered much lately.... Take my blessing now, and go.”
She rose from what was now revealed as a wooden stool, and as her son knelt down before the inexorable grating, she thrust a slender, wasted finger between the iron wires of the lattice, and lightly traced the Sign of the Cross upon his brow. How its touch thrilled him—the withered little finger that Achille Dunoisse had kissed with such exuberant rapture! Her son would have pressed his lips to it, but that she drew it quickly away. He said in a tone of bitter sadness, for the slight involuntary recoil had wounded:
“Ah!—you do well to shrink from me, my mother!—could you know all!...”
She put up her little shaking hand, and swiftly pulled her close black veil down, and breathed from behind its screen:
“I do know all.... It is not for me to judge you—whose veins were filled from mine....”