“To the world I was simply a number, to myself a sexless tool, living for one object alone, until you came into my brother’s life, and then, ah, then, I dreamed of the day when my brother should win through you what is his by right—should be Marquis de Beau Séjour. But——”
Denise took her hand.
“If that were only all.” She paused for a moment, overcome. “In London André came into my life. Till that fatal day I have inspired many men with the passion they call love. I thought I alone of women knew not what love could be, but another dream came to haunt me. It could not be. You did not love François. André did not love me. Some day he will tell you the story; the truth he must never know.”
“And your brother——”
“Yes, he worked for you as best he could and I for André. Remember what we were and how we were placed. But we have succeeded—love brought us through. We remembered our Beau Séjour, and you whom he loved, he whom I loved, will share it between you. I thank God for that. My mother,” the girl went on, “was a De Nérac, a cousin of André’s mother. Had justice been done fifteen years ago André’s father should have had my forfeited lands. But love will do what justice could not—your love and mine.”
“André can restore you your name, your honour. He shall, he must.”
“It is impossible. You cannot change the King. He would not, could not, undo the past—his past. My brother is dead, my family will die with me as will my secret. Fate is too strong for you, for me, for France. With François I worked to destroy the woman who now rules at Versailles and will continue to rule. And André from love for you strove to defeat us. Madame de Pompadour has triumphed over the Court, the noblesse, the Church, my brother, and you. Remember the past and to-night. Remember you can only ruin that woman by ruining yourself, by ruining André, and you will not save me. I see it all now. It is the destiny of France, and against the destiny of God’s will we must fight in vain.”
Denise had clasped her hands like one listening to the sentence of a supreme power. Were they not all caught alike in the web of a mysterious and inscrutable force, mere puppets as it seemed in a stupendous drama whose beginning and whose end were beyond all human insight and control, but puppets also of flesh and blood, whose passions and whose spirit, whose ambitions and whose ideals, whose souls and bodies so strong and so weak, gave to the drama the immortal breath of life? If—ah, if—Denise wrung her hands again. How few are there of those born of women from whom has not been wrung that bitter cry of revolt against the “if” of fate—if only they had been taught that out of the past comes the present and out of the present will come the future, and that they, the puppets, must make, every hour, their own lives and the lives of all others.
“You cannot save your France and mine,” the girl was saying. “She is doomed, doomed. The writing is on the walls. Ruin is coming on kings and nobles and the people. In ten, twenty, perhaps fifty years there will be a new France, for the greatness of my people and yours no power can crush. Voices are crying out in the streets of Paris to-day, but France will not listen. She is drunk, mad, diseased, corrupt. Yet I know it, it has been revealed to me, that there is a glorious future for our country, and see to it that the sons of what to-day is called Beau Séjour shall be in the hour of that rebirth on the side of the new France.”
She moved quietly to the door, opened it, and called softly, “Mademoiselle has decided. Come.”