PAGE 6
The Choices
by
The girl kept silence. She sat erect in the tumbled bed, her hands clasping her knees, and appeared to deliberate what Dame Ysabeau had said. The plentiful brown hair fell about this Rosamund’s face, which was white and shrewd. “A part of what you say, madame, I understand. I know that Gregory Darrell loves me, yet I have long ago acknowledged he loves me but as one pets a child, or, let us say, a spaniel which reveres and amuses one. I lack his wit, you comprehend, and so he never speaks to me all that he thinks. Yet a part of it he tells me, and he loves me, and with this I am content. Assuredly, if they give me to Sarum I shall hate Sarum even more than I detest him now. And then, I think, Heaven help me! that I would not greatly grieve– Oh, you are all evil!” Rosamund said; “and you thrust thoughts into my mind I may not grapple with!”
“You will comprehend them,” the Queen said, “when you know yourself a chattel, bought and paid for.”
The Queen laughed. She rose, and either hand strained toward heaven. “You are omnipotent, yet have You let me become that into which I am transmuted,” she said, very low.
Anon she began, as though a statue spoke through motionless and pallid lips. “They have long urged me, Rosamund, to a deed which by one stroke would make me mistress of these islands. To-day I looked on Gregory Darrell, and knew that I was wise in love–and I had but to crush a filthy worm to come to him. Eh, and I was tempted–!”
The fearless girl said: “Let us grant that Gregory loves you very greatly, and me just when his leisure serves. You may offer him a cushioned infamy, a colorful and brief delirium, and afterward demolishment of soul and body; I offer him contentment and a level life, made up of tiny happenings, it may be, and lacking both in abysses and in skyey heights. Yet is love a flame wherein must the lover’s soul be purified, as an ore by fire, even to its own discredit; and thus, madame, to judge between us I dare summon you.”
“Child, child!” the Queen said, tenderly, and with a smile, “you are brave; and in your fashion you are wise; yet you will never comprehend. But once I was in heart and soul and body all that you are to-day; and now I am Queen Ysabeau. Assuredly, it would be hard to yield my single chance of happiness; it would be hard to know that Gregory Darrell must presently dwindle into an ox well-pastured, and garner of life no more than any ox; but to say, ‘Let this girl become as I, and garner that which I have garnered–!’ Did you in truth hear nothing, Rosamund?”
“Why, nothing save the wind.”
“Strange!” said the Queen; “since all the while that I have talked with you I have been seriously annoyed by shrieks and various imprecations! But I, too, grow cowardly, it maybe– Nay, I know,” she said, and in a resonant voice, “that I am by this mistress of broad England, until my son–my own son, born of my body, and in glad anguish, Rosamund–knows me for what I am. For I have heard– Coward! O beautiful sleek coward!” the Queen said; “I would have died without lamentation and I was but your plaything!”
“Madame Ysabeau–!” the girl stammered, and ran toward her, for the girl had risen, and she was terrified.
“To bed!” said Ysabeau; “and put out the lights lest he come presently. Or perhaps he fears me now too much to come to-night. Yet the night approaches, none the less, when I must lift some arras and find him there, chalk-white, with painted cheeks, and rigid, and smiling very terribly, or look into some mirror and behold there not myself but him–and in that instant I will die. Meantime I rule, until my son attains his manhood. Eh, Rosamund, my only son was once so tiny, and so helpless, and his little crimson mouth groped toward me, helplessly, and save in Bethlehem, I thought, there was never any child more fair– But I must forget all that, for even now he plots. Hey, God orders matters very shrewdly, my Rosamund.”