“Vengeance is mine”.
The pretence of a headache enabled Juliette to keep
in her room the greater part of the day. She
would have liked to shut herself out from the entire
world during those hours which she spent face to face
with her own thoughts and her own sufferings.
The sight of Anne Mie’s pathetic little face
as she brought her food and delicacies and various
little comforts, was positive torture to the poor,
harrowed soul.
At very sound in the great, silent house she started
up, quivering with apprehension and horror. Had
the sword of Damocles, which she herself had suspended,
already fallen over the heads of those who had shown
her nothing but kindness?
She could not think of Madame Deroulede or of Anne
Mie without the most agonising, the most torturing
shame.
And what of him—the man she had so remorselessly,
so ruthlessly betrayed to a tribunal which would know
no mercy?
Juliette dared not think of him.
She had never tried to analyse her feelings with regard
to him. At the time of Charlotte Corday’s
trial, when his sonorous voice rang out in its pathetic
appeal for the misguided woman, Juliette had given
him ungrudging admiration. She remembered now
how strongly his magnetic personality had roused in
her a feeling of enthusiasm for the poor girl, who
had come from the depths of her quiet provincial home,
in order to accomplish the horrible deed which would
immortalise her name through all the ages to come,
and cause her countrymen to proclaim her “greater
than Brutus.”
Deroulede was pleading for the life of that woman,
and it was his very appeal which had aroused Juliette’s
dormant energy, for the cause which her dead father
had enjoined her not to forget. It was Deroulede
again whom she had seen but a few weeks ago, standing
alone before the mob who would have torn her to pieces,
haranguing them on her behalf, speaking to them with
that quiet, strong voice of his, ruling them with
the rule of love and pity, and turning their wrath
to gentleness.
Did she hate him, then?
Surely, surely she hated him for having thrust himself
into her life, for having caused her brother’s
death and covered her father’s declining years
with sorrow. And, above all, she hated him—indeed,
indeed it was hate!—for being the cause
of this most hideous action of her life: an action
to which she had been driven against her will, one
of basest ingratitude and treachery, foreign to every
sentiment within her heart, cowardly, abject, the
unconscious outcome of this strange magnetism which
emanated from him and had cast a spell over her, transforming
her individuality and will power, and making of her
an unconscious and automatic instrument of Fate.
She would not speak of God’s finger again:
it was Fate—pagan, devilish Fate!—the
weird, shrivelled women who sit and spin their interminable
thread. They had decreed; and Juliette, unable
to fight, blind and broken by the conflict, had succumbed
to the Megaeras and their relentless wheel.
