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The Choices
by
Rosamund said, quite simply: “You have known him always. I envy the circumstance, Madame Gertrude–you alone of all women in the world I envy, since you, his sister, being so much older, must have known him always.”
“I know him to the core, my girl,” the Countess answered, and afterward sat silent, one bare foot jogging restlessly; “yet am I two years the junior– Did you hear nothing, Rosamund?”
“Nay, Madame Gertrude, I heard nothing.”
“Strange!” the Countess said; “let us have lights, since I can no longer endure the overpopulous darkness.” She kindled, with twitching fingers, three lamps and looked in vain for more. “It is as yet dark yonder, where the shadows quiver very oddly, as though they would rise from the floor–do they not, my girl?–and protest vain things. Nay, Rosamund, it has been done; in the moment of death men’s souls have travelled farther and have been visible; it has been done, I tell you. And he would stand before me, with pleading eyes, and reproach me in a voice too faint to reach my ears–but I would see him–and his groping hands would clutch at my hands as though a dropped veil had touched me, and with the contact I would go mad!”
“Madame Gertrude!” the girl now stammered, in communicated terror.
“Poor innocent dastard!” the woman said, “I am Ysabeau of France.” And when Rosamund made as though to rise, in alarm, Queen Ysabeau caught her by the shoulder. “Bear witness when he comes I never hated him. Yet for my quiet it was necessary that it suffer so cruelly, the scented, pampered body, and no mark be left upon it! Eia! even now he suffers! Nay, I have lied. I hate the man, and in such fashion as you will comprehend only when you are Sarum’s wife.”
“Madame and Queen!” the girl said, “you will not murder me!”
“I am tempted!” the Queen hissed. “O little slip of girlhood, I am tempted, for it is not reasonable you should possess everything that I have lost. Innocence you have, and youth, and untroubled eyes, and quiet dreams, and the glad beauty of the devil, and Gregory Darrell’s love–” Now Ysabeau sat down upon the bed and caught up the girl’s face between two fevered hands. “Rosamund, this Darrell perceives within the moment, as I do, that the love he bears for you is but what he remembers of the love he bore a certain maid long dead. Eh, you might have been her sister, Rosamund, for you are very like her. And she, poor wench–why, I could see her now, I think, were my eyes not blurred, somehow, almost as though Queen Ysabeau might weep! But she was handsomer than you, since your complexion is not overclear, praise God!”
Woman against woman they were. “He has told me of his intercourse with you,” the girl said, and this was a lie flatfooted. “Nay, kill me if you will, madame, since you are the stronger, yet, with my dying breath, Gregory has loved but me.”
“Ma belle,” the Queen answered, and laughed bitterly, “do I not know men? He told you nothing. And to-night he hesitated, and to-morrow, at the lifting of my finger, he will supplicate. Throughout his life has Gregory Darrell loved me, O white, palsied innocence! and he is mine at a whistle. And in that time to come he will desert you, Rosamund–though with a pleasing Canzon–and they will give you to the gross Earl of Sarum, as they gave me to the painted man who was of late our King! and in that time to come you will know your body to be your husband’s makeshift when he lacks leisure to seek out other recreation! and in that time to come you will long at first for death, and presently your heart will be a flame within you, my Rosamund, an insatiable flame! and you will hate your God because He made you, and hate Satan because in some desperate hour he tricked you, and hate all masculinity because, poor fools, they scurry to obey your whim! and chiefly hate yourself because you are so pitiable! and devastation only will you love in that strange time which is to come. It is adjacent, my Rosamund.”