The first few days Denise lay in her bed, very white and very silent, taking the wine and food they brought her, and speaking hardly a word. She was like one half awakened from sleep, able to feel and think, but with the languor of sleep still on her. She felt that it was good to lie there in peace, aloof from the world, with the quiet figures gliding in and out, and the sunlight moving in a golden beam with the floor of the little room for a dial. The ringing of the convent bells came to her, and the singing of the nuns in the chapel. Denise lay very still through the long hours in a haze of dreamy thought.
How much did she remember? Enough to inspire her with a new desire to live, enough to make her realise how mad had been the impulse that had set Marpasse’s knife a-flashing. They seemed so far away, and yet so near and intimate, those happenings in the April woodland. In moments of deep passion the human heart seizes on what is vital and utterly true, even as those who are dying sometimes seem to see beyond the bounds of the material earth. So Denise remembered that which a woman’s heart would choose to cherish. It had been no mere golden mist of pity glazing the cold truth. She had lain in Aymery’s arms, arms that had held her with something stronger than compassion.
Thus as Denise lay there abed, a slow, sweet faith revived within her, a belief in things that had seemed dry and dead. Her woman’s pride had been in the dust, and she had given up hope, save the hope of hiding in some far place. It might have been that Aymery’s arms had closed an inward wound, and that the strength of his manhood had given her new life.
What had the “afterwards” been? What had happened after she had lost consciousness, and what had become of Aymery and Marpasse. She longed to ask the nuns these things, and yet a sensitive pride tied her tongue. The women were kind to her, and yet, as Denise’s consciousness became more clear, she could not but feel that the eyes that looked at her were inquisitive and watchful. Now and again came a note of pitying tolerance that jarred the rhythm of her more sacred thoughts; and as the woman in her grew more wakeful she became aware of the shadows that stole across her mind.
On the third day the nuns unswathed her body, soaked the clotted pad away, and looked at the wound. It was healing miraculously with nothing but a blush of redness about its lips. There had been no fever, no inward bleeding. Denise could sit up while they reswathed her in clean linen.
“There is cause for thankfulness here,” said the elder of the two nuns who had the nursing of her; “you will have many prayers to say, and many candles to burn to Our Lady and the Queen Helena, our Saint.”
She spoke with brisk patronage, but Denise took it for the spirit of motherliness in the woman.
“I owe you also a debt,” she said, looking up into the nun’s face.
The sister licked her lips as she smoothed the linen about Denise’s breast.
“The man and the horse are also to be remembered,” she said, a little tartly, “you have much to be thankful for; even I can tell you that.”