“Nothing, except you have nearly killed her, both of you. You have ridden the child to death; she is not accustomed to it, and she has overdone herself; but she will be all right I hope in the morning. There’s nothing the matter but fatigue, she assures me.”
Ponsonby rated himself soundly for being such a brute as to have let her tire herself; he ought to have remembered that she was done up the day before after a much shorter ride. He was awfully sorry. His remorse was no doubt quite genuine, but when they sat down to dinner he proved to demonstration that that feeling is compatible with an unimpaired appetite. Lady Anwyll left them before they had finished to see how Franceline was going on; she found her awake, but quite well, and going to sleep very soon, she assured the kind old lady.
“Then, my dear child, I will not have you disturbed again; if you wake and want anything, strike this gong, and Trinner will come at once. I will make her sleep in the room next yours to-night.”
Franceline protested, but the dowager silenced her with a kiss; put out the light, and left her.
She lay very still, but there was no chance of sleep for her. Sleep had fled from her eyes as peace had fled from her heart. She longed to get up, and find relief from the intolerable strain of immobility, but she dared not; her room was over a part of the drawing-room, and she might be heard. The evening seemed to drag on with preternatural slowness. She could hear the low hum of voices through the ceiling. Once there was a clatter of porcelain—probably Ponce overturning the tea-tray. At last the stable-clock struck eleven; there was opening and shutting of doors for a while, and then silence. Franceline sat up and listened until not a sound was anywhere to be heard. Every soul in the house had gone to bed. Trinner had come last of all to her room. The star made by her candle gleamed through the key-hole for a long time; at last it disappeared, and soon the loud, regular breathing told that she was fast asleep. Franceline rose, threw her dressing-wrapper round her, and drew back the curtain from the window. It was a relief to let the night-lights in upon her solitude; the glorious gaze of the moon seemed to chase away phantoms with the darkness. She felt awake now. All this time, lying there in the utter darkness, it seemed as if she were still in a swoon, or held in the grip of a nightmare; she shook herself free from the benumbing clutch, and sat down close by the window, and tried to collect her thoughts. There was one phantom which the moonlight could not dispel; it stood out now distinctly as she looked at it with revived consciousness. Clide de Winton was a married man. It was to the husband of another that she had given her heart with its first pure vintage of impassioned love. He who had looked at her with those ardent eyes, penetrating her soul like flame, had all along been another woman’s husband. There was no more room for hope, even for doubt; suspense was at an end; the period of dark conjecture was gone. It was clear enough, all that had been so inexplicable,—clear as when the lightning flashes out of a lurid sky, and illuminates the scene of an earthquake; a sea lashed to fury by winds that have lost their current, ships sinking in billows that break before they heave, the land gaping and groaning, trees uprooted, habitations falling with a crash of thunder, all live things clinging and flying in wild disorder. Franceline considered it all as she sat, still and white as a stone, without missing a single detail in the scene.
Violent demonstration was not in her nature. In pain or in joy it was her habit to be self-contained. She had as yet been called upon but for very slight trials of strength and self-control; but such as the experience was it had left behind it an innate though unconscious sense of power that rose instinctively to her aid now. She had fainted away under the first shock of the discovery; but that tribute of weakness paid to nature, she would yield no more. Tears might come later; but now she would not indulge in them. She must face the worst without flinching. What was the worst? Clide was a married man. That was bad enough in all conscience; yet there might be worse behind. Circumstances might cast a blacker dye even on this. Lord Roxham had spoken in a tone of sympathy: “Poor fellow! It’s tremendously hard on him.…” He would have spoken differently if there were any villany in question. But if Lord Roxham had not thus indirectly acquitted him, Franceline would have done so spontaneously. Yes, even in the first moment of despair, while the flood was sweeping over her, she acquitted him. He had dragged her down into unsounded depths of agony and shame, but he had not done it deliberately; he was neither a liar nor a traitor. Had he not been brought to the jaws of death himself only a month ago? There was an indescribable comfort in the pang those words had inflicted. He too, then, was suffering; they were both victims. Clide had never meant to deceive her; she would have sworn it on the altar of her unshaken faith in him; she wanted no stronger evidence than the promptings of her own heart. She was confident there would be some adequate explanation of whatever now seemed ambiguous, when she should have learned all. No; she need not separate the attribute of truth and honor from his image; she could no more do it than she could separate the idea of light from the pure maiden moon that was looking down on her from heaven; she would see darkness in light before she would believe Clide de Winton false.
This irrepressible need of her heart once satisfied—Clide judged and acquitted—what then? Granted that he was innocent as yonder stars, how did it affect her? What did it signify to her henceforth whether he was innocent or guilty, true or false? He was the husband of another woman; as good as dead to Franceline de la Bourbonais; parted from her by a more impassable barrier than death. If he were only dead she might love him still, hold him enshrined in her heart’s core with a clasp that death could not sever—only strengthen. But he was worse than dead; he was married. She must banish him even from her thoughts; his memory must henceforth be as far from her as the thought of murder, or any other crime that her crystal conscience shuddered even to name. She might acquit him, crown him with the noblest attributes of manhood; but that done, she must dismiss him from her remembrance, and forget him as if he had never lived.
Franceline had remained seated, her hands locked passively in her lap, while these thoughts shaped themselves in her mind. When they reached the climax, expressed in these words: “I must forget him as if he had never lived!” she rose to her feet, clasped her forehead in both hands, and an inarticulate cry broke from her: “It would be easier to die!… If I had anything to forgive, that would help me! But I have nothing to forgive!” It would not have helped her, though she fancied so; it would have turned the bitterness of the cup into poison. But she could not realize this now. It seemed harder to renounce what was good and beautiful than to cast away what was unworthy. If the idol had uttered one false oracle, demanded anything base, betrayed itself before betraying her, it would have been easier, she thought, to overturn it. Indignation would have nerved her to the deed, and she would have dealt the blow without compunction. But it had done nothing to forfeit her love and trust, and nevertheless she must dash it down and cast the fragments into the fire, and not preserve even the dust as a precious thing. What a merciful doom his death would have been compared to this!
How was she to do it? Who would help her to so ruthless a demolition? Did any one speak in the silence, or was it only the unspoken cry of her own soul that answered? She had fancied herself alone; she had forgotten that a Presence was close to her, waiting to be invoked, patient, faithful, and protecting even while forgotten. The voice sounded sweet in its warning solemnity, and filled the lonely chamber with a more benign ray than ever shone from midnight sky or blazing noon. Franceline stretched out her arms to meet it, and with a loud sob fell upon her knees. “O my God! forgive me! Forgive me, and help me! I have sinned, but my punishment is greater than I can bear!” The floodgates were thrown back; the tears fell in hot showers, the sobs shook her as the storm shakes the sapling. She knelt there crouching in the darkness, her head leaning on her folded arms, and gave herself up to the passionate outburst, like a child weeping itself to sleep on its mother’s breast. But this could not last. It was only a truce. The real battle, the decisive one, had only now begun; what had gone before were but the preliminaries. Hitherto she had thought only of her grief and humiliation; she was now brought face to face with her sin—the sin of idolatry. She had made unto herself an idol of clay, and placed it on the altar of her heart, and burned incense before it with every breath she drew; the smoke had made a mist before her eyes, but it was dissolving. She looked into the desecrated sanctuary, and struck her breast with humility and self-abasement. Her tears were flowing copiously, but they were not all brine; she was drawing strength from their bitterness. Victory was not for “the days of peace,” but for such an hour as this. She had been trained from childhood in the hope of heaven, in the firm belief that this life was but the transitory passage to the true home; that its sorrows and joys were too evanescent, too unreal to be counted of more importance than the rain and wind that scatter the sunshine of a summer’s day; she had been taught, too, that the bliss of that immortal home is purchased by suffering—a thing to be taken by violence, a crown to be grasped through thorns. Hitherto her adherence to this creed had been entirely theoretical; she accepted it, but in some vague way felt that she, personally, was beyond its action. Her father had suffered; her mother, too, cut off in her happy bloom, had won the crown by a lingering illness and an early death; but she, Franceline, enjoyed, it would seem, some privileged immunity from the stern law. Such had unawares been her reasoning. But now she was undeceived; her hour had come, and she must meet it as a Christian. Now was the time to prove the sincerity of her faith, the strength of her principles; if they failed her, they were no better than stubble and brass that dissolve at the first breath of the furnace.
A duel to the death is always brief: the foes close in mortal conflict; the thrusts come fast and sharp; one or other falls. When Franceline lifted her head from her arms, the expression of the tear-stained face showed which way the battle had gone: the victor stood erect with his foot upon the victim’s neck, unscathed, serene, and pitiless. Love lay bleeding and maimed, but Conscience smiled in triumph. “I will not let thee go until thou hast blessed me,” the wrestler had said, and the angel had blessed her before he fled.