Instinctively she clutched the letter tighter, and her whole figure seemed to stiffen as she looked at him full now, a deep frown between her eyes, her whole attitude suggestive of haughty surprise and of lofty contempt. There was dead silence in the vast room save for the crackling of that paper, which to a keenly sensitive ear would have suggested the idea that the dainty hand which held it was not as steady as its owner would have wished.

It seemed suddenly as if with the speaking of a few words these two people, who had been almost strangers, had by a subtle process become antagonists, and were unconsciously measuring one another's strength, mistrustful of one another's hidden weapons. But already the woman was prepared for a conflict of will, a contest for that hitherto undisputed mastery, which she vaguely feared was being attacked, and which she would not give up, be the cost of defence what it may, whilst the man was still diffident, still vaguely hopeful that she would not fight, for his armour was vulnerable where hers was not, and she owned certain weapons which he knew himself too weak to combat.

"Therefore I proffer my request again, Madame," he said after a pause. "That paper – "

"A strong request, milor," said Lydie coldly.

"It is more than a request, Madame."

"A command perhaps?"

He did not reply; obviously he had noted the sneer, for a very slight blush rose to his pale cheeks. Lydie, satisfied that the shaft had gone home, paused awhile, just long enough to let the subtle poison of her last words sink well in, then she resumed with calm indifference:

"You will forgive me, milor, when I venture to call your attention to the fact that hitherto I have considered myself to be the sole judge and mentor of my own conduct."

"Possibly this has worked very well in all matters, Madame," he replied, quite unruffled by her sarcasm, "but in this instance you see me compelled to ask you – reluctantly I admit – to give me that letter and then to vouchsafe me an explanation as to what you mean to do."

"You will receive it in due course, milor," she said haughtily; "for the moment I must ask you to excuse me. I am busy, and – "

She was conscious of an overwhelming feeling of irritation at his interference and, fearing to betray it beyond the bounds of courtesy, she wished to go away. But now he deliberately placed his hand on the knob, and stood between her and the door.

"Milor!" she protested.

"Yes, I am afraid I am very clumsy, Madame," he said quite gently. "Let us suppose that French good manners have never quite succeeded in getting the best of my English boorishness. I know it is against every rule of etiquette that I should stand between you and the door through which you desire to pass, but I have humbly asked for an explanation and also for that letter, and I cannot allow your ladyship to go until I have had it."

"Allow?" she said, with a short mocking laugh. "Surely, milor, you will not force me to refer to the compact to which you willingly subscribed when you asked me to be your wife?"

"'Tis not necessary, Madame, for I well remember it. I gave you a promise not to interfere with your life, such as you had chosen to organize it. I promised to leave you free in thought, action, and conduct, just as you had been before you honoured me by consenting to bear my name."

"Well, then, milor?" she asked.

"This is a different matter, Mme. la Marquise," he replied calmly, "since it concerns mine own honour and that of my name. Of that honour I claim to be the principal guardian."

Then as she seemed disinclined to vouchsafe a rejoinder he continued, with just a shade more vehemence in his tone:

"The proposal which His Majesty placed before me awhile ago, that same letter which you still hold in your hand, are such vile and noisome things that actual contact with them is pollution. As I see you now with that infamous document between those fingers which I have had the honour to kiss, it seems to me as if you were clutching a hideous and venomous reptile, the very sight of which should have been loathsome to you, and from which I should have wished to see you turn as you would from a slimy toad."

"As you did yourself, milor?" she said with a contemptuous shrug of the shoulders, thinking of his blunder, of the catastrophe which he all but precipitated, and which her more calm diplomacy had perhaps averted.

"As I did, though no doubt very clumsily," he admitted simply, "the moment I grasped its purport to the full. To see you, my wife – yes, my wife," he repeated with unusual firmness in answer to a subtle, indefinable expression which at his words had lit up her face, "to see you pause if only for one brief half hour with that infamy before your eyes, with that vile suggestion reaching and dwelling in your brain the man who made it – be he King of France, I care not – kissing those same fingers which held the abominable thing, was unspeakably horrible in my sight; it brought real physical agony to every one of my senses. I endured it only for so long as etiquette demanded, hoping against hope that every second which went by would witness your cry of indignation, your contempt for that vile and execrable letter which, had you not interposed, I myself would have flung in the lying face of that kingly traitor. But you smiled at him in response; you took the letter from him! My God, I saw you put it in the bosom of your gown!"

He paused a moment, as if ashamed of this outburst of passion, so different to his usual impassiveness. It seemed as if her haughty look, her ill-concealed contempt, was goading him on, beyond the bounds of restraint which he had meant to impose on himself. She no longer now made an attempt to go. She was standing straight before him, leaning slightly back against the portière – a curtain of rich, heavy silk of that subtle brilliant shade, 'twixt a scarlet and a crimson, which is only met with in certain species of geranium.

Against this glowing background her slim, erect figure, stiff with unbendable pride, stood out in vivid relief. The red of the silk cast ardent reflections into her chestnut hair, and against the creamy whiteness of her neck and ear. The sober, almost conventual gray of her gown, the primly folded kerchief at her throat, the billows of lace around the graceful arm formed an exquisite note of tender colour against that glaring geranium red. In one hand she still held the letter, the other rested firmly against the curtain. The head was thrown back, the lips slightly parted and curled in disdain, the eyes – half veiled – looked at him through long fringed lashes.

A picture worthy to inflame the passion of any man. Lord Eglinton, with a mechanical movement of the hand across his forehead, seemed to brush away some painful and persistent thought.

"Nay, do not pause, milor," she said quietly. "Believe me, you interest me vastly."

He frowned and bit his lip.

"Your pardon, Madame," he rejoined more calmly now. "I was forgetting the limits of courtly manners. I have little more to say. I would not have troubled you with so much talk, knowing that my feeling in such matters can have no interest for your ladyship. When awhile ago this great bare room was at last free from the bent-backed, mouthing flatterers that surround you, I waited patiently for a spontaneous word from you, something to tell me that the honour of my name, one of the oldest in England, was not like to be stained by contact with the diplomatic by-ways of France. I had not then thought of asking for an explanation; I waited for you to speak. Instead of which I saw you take that miserable letter once more in your hand, sit and ponder over it without a thought or look for me. I saw your face, serene and placid, your attitude one of statesmanlike calm, as without a word or nod you prepared to pass out of my sight."

"Then you thought fit to demand from me an explanation of my conduct in a matter in which you swore most solemnly a year ago that you would never interfere?"

"Demand is a great word, Madame," he said, now quite gently. "I do not demand; I ask for an explanation on my knees."

And just as he had done a year ago when first she laid her hand in his and he made his profession of faith, he dropped on one knee and bent his head, until his aching brow almost touched her gown.

She looked down on him from the altitude of her domineering pride; she saw his broad shoulders, bent in perfect humility, his chestnut hair free from the conventional powder, the slender hands linked together now in a strangely nervous clasp, and she drew back because her skirt seemed perilously near his fingers.

Will the gods ever reveal the secret of a woman's heart? Lydie loathed the King's proposal, the letter which she held, just as much as Lord Eglinton did himself. Awhile ago she had hardly been able to think or to act coherently while she felt the contact of that noisome paper against her flesh. If she had smiled on Louis, if she had taken the letter away from him with vague promises that she would think the matter over, it had been solely because she knew the man with whom she had to deal better than did milor Eglinton, who had but little experience of the Court of Versailles, since he had kept away from it during the major part of his life. She had only meant to temporize with the King, because she felt sure that that was the only way to serve the Stuart Prince and to avert the treachery.

Nay, more, in her heart she felt that milor was right; she knew that when a thing is so vile and so abominable as Louis' proposed scheme, all contact with it is a pollution, and that it is impossible to finger slimy mud without some of it clinging to flesh or gown.

Yet with all that in her mind, a subtle perversity seemed suddenly to have crept into her heart, a perversity and also a bitter sense of injustice. She and her husband had been utter strangers since the day of their marriage, she had excluded him from her counsels, just as she had done from her heart and mind. She had never tried to understand him, and merely fostered that mild contempt which his diffidence and his meekness had originally roused in her. Yet at this moment when he so obviously misunderstood her, when he thought that her attitude with regard to the King's proposals was one of acceptance, or at least not of complete condemnation, her pride rose in violent revolt.

He had no right to think her so base. He had invaded her thoughts at the very moment when they dwelt on his friend and the best mode to save him; nay, more, was she not proposing to associate him, who now accused her so groundlessly, with her work of devotion and loyalty?

He should have known, he should have guessed, and now she hated him for his thoughts of her; she who had kept herself untainted in the midst of the worst corruption that ever infested a Court, whose purity of motives, whose upright judgments had procured her countless enemies amongst the imbecile and the infamous, she to be asked and begged to be loyal and to despise treachery!

Nay, she was too proud now to explain. An explanation would seem like a surrender, an acknowledgment —par Dieu of what? and certainly a humiliation.

According to milor, her husband, was there not one single upright and loyal soul in France except his own? No honour save that of his own name?

She laughed suddenly, laughed loudly and long. Manlike, he did not notice the forced ring of that merriment. He had blundered, of course, but this he did not know. In the simplicity of his heart he thought that she would have been ready to understand, that she would have explained and then agreed with him as to the best means of throwing the nefarious proposal back into the King's teeth.

At her laugh he sprang to his feet; every drop of blood seemed to have left his cheeks, which were now ashy pale.

"Nay, milor," she said with biting sarcasm, "but 'tis a mountain full of surprises that you display before my astonished fancy. Who had e'er suspected you of so much eloquence? I vow I do not understand how your lordship could have seen so much of my doings just now, seeing that at that moment you had eyes and ears only for Irène de Stainville."

"Mme. de Stainville hath naught to do with the present matter, Madame," he rejoined, "nor with my request for an explanation from you."

"I refuse to give it, milor," she said proudly, "and as I have no wish to spoil or mar your pleasures, so do I pray you to remember our bond, which is that you leave me free to act and speak, aye, and to guide the destinies of France if she have need of me, without interference from you."

And with that refinement of cruelty of which a woman's heart is sometimes capable at moments of acute crises, she carefully folded the English letter and once more slipped it into the bosom of her gown. She vouchsafed him no other look, but gathering her skirts round her she turned and left him. Calm and erect she walked the whole length of the room and then passed through another doorway finally out of his sight.

PART III
THE WOMAN

CHAPTER XVII
SPLENDID ISOLATION

M. Durand looked flustered when Lydie suddenly entered his sanctum. But she was hardly conscious of his presence, or even of where she was.

The vast audience chamber which she had just quitted so abruptly had only the two exits; the one close to which she had left milor standing, and the other which gave into this antechamber, where M. Durand usually sat for the express purpose of separating the wheat from the chaff – or, in other words, the suppliants who had letters of introduction or passports to "le petit lever" of M. le Contrôleur-Général, from those who had not.

It was not often that Mme. la Marquise came this way at all; no doubt this accounted in some measure for M. Durand's agitation when she opened the door so suddenly. Had Lydie been less absorbed in her own thoughts she would have noticed that his hands fidgeted quite nervously with the papers on his bureau, and that his pale watery eyes wandered with anxious restlessness from her face to the heavy portière which masked one of the doors. But, indeed, at this moment neither M. Durand nor his surroundings existed for her; she crossed the antechamber rapidly without seeing him. She only wanted to get away, to put the whole enfilade of the next reception rooms between herself and the scene which had just taken place.

Something was ringing in her ears. She could not say for certain whether she had really heard it, or whether her quivering nerves were playing her a trick; but a cry had come to her across the vastness of the great audience-chamber, and rang now even through the closed door.

A cry of acute agony; a cry as of an animal in pain. The word: "Lydie!" The tone: one of reproach, of appeal, of aching, wounded passion!

She fled from it, unwilling to admit its reality, unwilling to believe her ears. She felt too deeply wounded herself to care for the pain of another. She hoped, indeed, that she had grievously hurt his pride, his self-respect, that very love which he had once professed for her, and which apparently had ceased to be.

Once he had knelt at her feet, comparing her to the Madonna, to the saints whom Catholics revered yet dared not approach; then he talked of worship, and now he spoke of pollution, of stained honour, and asked her to keep herself free from taint. What right had he not to understand? If he still loved her, he would have understood. But constant intercourse with Irène de Stainville had blurred his inward vision; the image of the Madonna, serene and unapproachable, had become faded and out of focus, and he now groped earthwards for less unattainable ideals.

That this was in any way her fault Lydie would not admit. She had become his wife because he had asked her, and because he had been willing to cover her wounded vanity with the mantle of his adoration, and the glamour of his wealth and title. He knew her for what she was: statuesque and cold, either more or less than an ordinary woman, since she was wholly devoid of sentimentality; but with a purpose in her mind and a passion for work, for power and influence. Work for the good of France! Power to attain this end!

Thus he had found her, thus he had first learned to love her! She had denied him nothing that he had ever dared to ask. This had been a bond between them, which now he had tried to break; but if he had loved her as heretofore he would not have asked, he would have known. How, and by what subtle process of his mind Lydie did not care to analyze.

He would have known: he would have understood, if he still loved her.

These two phrases went hammering in her brain, a complement to that cry which still seemed to reach her senses, although the whole enfilade of reception rooms now stretched their vastness between her and that persistent echo.

Of course his love had been naught to her. It was nothing more at best than mute, somewhat dog-like adoration: a love that demanded nothing, that was content to be, to exist passively and to worship from afar.

Womanlike, she apprised it in inverse ratio to its obtrusiveness; the less that was asked of her, the less she thought it worth while to give. But the love had always been there. At great social functions, in the midst of a crowd or in the presence of royalty, whenever she looked across a room or over a sea of faces, she saw a pair of eyes which rested on her every movement with rapt attention and unspoken admiration.

Now she would have to forego that. The love was no longer there. On this she insisted, repeating it to herself over and over again, though this seemed to increase both the tension of her nerves, and the strange tendency to weakness, from which her proud spirit shrank in rebellion.

She was walking very rapidly now, and as she reached the monumental staircase, she ran down the steps without heeding the astonished glances of the army of flunkeys that stood about on landing and corridors. In a moment she was out on the terrace, breathing more freely as soon as she filled her lungs with the pure air of this glorious summer's day.

At first the light, the glare, the vibration of water and leaves under the kiss of the midday sun dazzled her eyes so that she could not see. But she heard the chirrup of the sparrows, the call of thrush and blackbird, and far away the hymn of praise of the skylark. Her nostrils drew in with glad intoxication the pungent fragrance of oak-leaved geraniums, and her heart called out joyfully to the secluded plantation of young beech trees there on her left, where she often used to wander.

Thither now she bent her steps. It was a favourite walk of hers, and a cherished spot, for she had it always before her when she sat in her own study at the angle of the West Wing. The tall windows of her private sanctum gave on this plantation, and whenever she felt wearied or disheartened with the great burden which she had taken on her shoulders, she would sit beside the open casements and rest her eyes on the brilliant emerald or copper of the leaves, and find rest and solace in the absolute peace they proclaimed.

And, at times like the present one, when the park was still deserted, she liked to wander in that miniature wood, crushing with delight the moist bed of moss under her feet, letting the dew-covered twigs fall back with a swish against her hands. She found her way to a tiny glade, where a rough garden seat invited repose. The glade was circular in shape, a perfect audience chamber, wherein to review a whole army of fancies. On the ground a thick carpet of brilliant green with designs of rich sienna formed by last year's leaves, and flecks of silver of young buds not yet scorched by the midday sun; all around, walls of parallel, slender trunks of a tender gray-green colour, with bold patches of glaring viridian and gold intermixed with dull blue shadows. And then a dado of tall bracken fantastic in shape and almost weird in outline, through which there peeped here and there, with insolent luxuriance, clumps of purple and snow-white foxgloves.

Lydie sank on to the rough bench, leaning well back and resting her head against the hard, uneven back of the seat. Her eyes gazed straight upwards to a patch of vivid blue sky, almost crude and artificial-looking above the canopy of the beeches.

She felt unspeakably lonely, unspeakably forsaken. The sense of injustice oppressed her even more than the atmosphere of treachery.

Her father false and weak; her husband fickle and unjust! Prince Charles Edward abandoned, and she now powerless, probably, to carry through the work of rescue which she had planned! Until this moment she had not realized how much she had counted on her husband to help her. Now that she could no longer ask him to ride to Le Havre, and take her message to the commander of Le Monarque, she cast about her in vain for a substitute: some one whom she could trust. Her world was made up of sycophants, of flatterers, of pleasure-loving fops. Where was the man who would cover one hundred and eighty leagues in one night in order to redeem a promise made by France?

Her head ached with the agony of this thought. It was terrible to see her most cherished hope threatened with annihilation. Oh! had she been a man!.

Tears gathered in her eyes. At other times she would have scorned the weakness, now she welcomed it, for it seemed to lift the load of oppression from her heart. The glare of that vivid blue sky above weighed down her lids. She closed her eyes and for the space of a few seconds she seemed to forget everything; the world, and its treachery, the palace of Versailles, the fugitives in Scotland.

Everything except her loneliness, and the sound of that cry: "Lydie!"