“Get your razor and barber him, Father, and keep a clean edge on the lie. His eyes asked for it—I tell you, and I had not the heart to dash in the truth. I have the yoke on my own shoulders. Two lies sometimes make the truth.”
She took Grimbald’s holly staff from the corner, and put on her hood.
“I am going to fetch her,” she said; “no—I shall not scold. I have my plan. You may sit in the wood-shed out of sight, Father Grimbald, when I bring her back with me. If she sees you it will spoil the whole brew.”
She turned on the threshold, and Grimbald saw suddenly that her eyes were wet.
“Pray for them both, good Father,” she said to him, “my heart’s in the thing whatever rough words my mouth may say.”
And Grimbald promised, and let her go. Yet when she had gone, and he was left alone in the great room with its black beams and smoking hearth, he saw through his prayers the brave, brown face of Marpasse.
Yet Marpasse’s warm-hearted, yet coarser, nature could not vibrate to the subtler emotions that stirred in Denise. The two were like crude sunshine and moonlight; Marpasse healthy and vital in herself, yet lacking mystery and the glimmer of visionary things. Denise had often been more a spirit than a body, though the woman in her had been awakened, and the rich warm scent of the earth had ascended into her nostrils. Suffering had made her very human, and yet the soul in her still beat its wings, even though those wings should carry it away from the world’s desire nearer to the cold stars in a lonely sky. To Marpasse, Denise’s self-condemnation might seem a kind of futile and pitiable sanctity, but then Marpasse had more blood and bone in her, and less of that spirit that is crucified by its own purity.
Denise had passed the whole night in the long grass under the rose tree, looking at the stars and the vague, black shapes of the great beeches. The cell had a horror for her, and she would not enter it, as though her other self lay dead within. That other memory was more vivid than the memories of those nights when Aymery had lain there wounded little more than a year ago.
Give herself to the man she felt she could not, for she was too sensitive, too much a sad soul in a beautiful body not to feel the veil of aloofness that covered her face, that veil that was invisible and impalpable to Marpasse. Her own innocence made her more conscious of that other life—that other innocent soul that had been born in her, and which had taken from the mother that which she would have given to Aymery whom she loved. Only a pure woman could feel what Denise felt in her heart of hearts. The divine girdle had been torn from her. Love might be blind to it, but Denise’s soul could not be blind.
And yet a sense of great loneliness rushed upon her that night, weighing her down into the long grass, and making her heart heavy. The petals of the rose fell dew drenched into her lap. The night was still and fragrant, and no wind made the trees mutter like the hoarse whisperings of an oracle in some ancient forest. The heart of Denise was heavy within her. The sad deeps of life seemed between her and the world, a dark voiceless gulf that no living soul could cross.