Chapter VI

Clotilde had gone back to her father’s shabby old castle, and her first knowledge of the tragedy was through a visit from the Archduchess. She stalked in, long, lank and grey of face. Dirty, too, for she had travelled six hours by post-chaise, urging the coachman until the horses almost dropped. She put Clotilde’s mother out of the room with a gesture and confronted the frightened girl.

“You!” she said. “You wanton! Wantons both of you, living your dirty little lives under my roof!”

“No, madame,” Clotilde stammered. “I assure you—”

Great ladies sometimes allow themselves very coarse speech, and the Archduchess launched into quite imprintable language. In the end, however, she stalked to a mirror, straightened her bonnet with a jerk, and without waiting for a bell to be rung, went to the door.

“From now on,” she said, “I have no daughter. She can die and rot. I shall never recognise her again.”

And she did not.

She died two years later, leaving the Archduke surprisingly disconsolate. Clotilde, hearing she was dying, tried to see her beforehand to have her rescind that bitter ultimatum.

“But when I got there it was over,” she said. “She was lying in the chapel, very majestic, with a pall of purple velvet and ermine laid over her and six of her ladies keeping vigil, all in long black veils and holding candles. I relieved one of them who was faint and I had to stand perfectly still for six hours.”

One can see Clotilde standing there, I think, the light from the candles flickering on the dead woman’s white face, and Clotilde’s mind hopelessly circling; Rudi, the queen, the child, the dead woman. A cold air numbing her, her veil stirring, the candles flickering and—Rudi, the queen, the child, the dead woman. Over and over.

There may have been just a bit of hope still in her heart at that time. The lovers were so hopelessly separated, and Rudi was still young and vital. She would fight it back, of course. She may only have prayed as she stood there for surcease of suffering. So many women pray, not for happiness but for an end of misery. But to stand there and think that this was the end all must reach, and not even hope to live before dying.

Later on she wrote to Rudi.

“But he had heard of the Queen’s malady and he was very ill in a hospital. Somehow or other the letter never reached him.”

She does not say, but I rather think Rudi was under pretty careful espionage at the time. The wonder is that they let him live. However that may be, the failure of Rudi to reply gave the last blow to Clotilde’s always faint hope.

She made the only decision she felt was possible and chose the gentlewoman’s retreat from the sorrows of the world. She entered a convent.

“I do not know that I had any vocation,” she said thoughtfully. “But I had lived through a great deal and I wanted peace. Perhaps it was not a worthy motive.” Her voice lapsed for a moment. “But you see, I took my troubles in with me and there was too much time to think.”

Toward the end of her novitiate, however, she seems to have attained a sort of peace. Certainly by the time she emerged she had almost achieved that selflessness which has carried her on ever since. For she did emerge.

That in itself is a story. One can see how this narrative becomes a series of small scenes like a play, each leading on with a certain inevitability to the next, and all of them to that quiet curtain of the chess game in the sitting room, and to what, that night, was to follow.

There was a nun in the convent, a Sister Maria. Clotilde often found her watching her, and now and then they talked. Then one night Sister Maria came to her cell.

“I cannot sleep,” said the Sister. “I hardly ever sleep now, and the reason I cannot sleep is that I have a sin on me.”

“A sin?” said Clotilde. “But surely not!”

“A sin,” said Sister Maria. “One who acquiesces in a wickedness is likewise wicked. And I have acquiesced.”

Then she told Clotilde that she had been with the Queen during her accouchement, and that the Queen was sane.

Clotilde followed the earlier example of the palace chaplain and spent the rest of that night face down on the cold floor of the chapel before the altar. When she arose in the morning her last battle was fought. Not that she said this.

“I prayed for help and guidance,” was what she said. “And I received it.”

She left the convent soon after, drew her small patrimony from the bank, wrote to Rudi and then betook herself to Italy, where she rented a little house not so far from the Queen’s villa and settled herself to her vigil.

It lasted exactly three years.