She had gone evidently, bearing her humiliation, leaving him in doubt and fear, to endure a torture of the soul which well-nigh unmanned him.
She must have known that he had heard, and yet she said nothing.
To the Duke of Wessex, the most favoured man in England, the grand seigneur with one foot on the throne, the idea of suffering a false accusation in silence was a thing absolutely beyond comprehension--weakness which must have its origin in guilt.
Human nature is so constituted that man is bound to measure his fellow-creatures by his own standard; else why doth charity think no evil? The goodness and purity which comes from the soul is always mirrored in the soul of others. Evil sees evil everywhere. Pride does not understand humility.
Had his sovereign liege--that sovereign being a man--dared to put forth a base insinuation against him, he would have forgotten the kingship and struck the man, who impeached his honour, fearlessly in the face. Nothing but conscious guilt would have stayed his avenging hand, or silenced the indignant words on his lips.
Of course he could not see what was actually passing: he could but surmise, and a fevered, tortured brain is an uncertain counsellor.
He could not understand Ursula's attitude. The girlish weakness, the submission to the highest authority in the land born of centuries of tradition, the maidenly bashfulness at the monstrosity of the accusation, were so many little feminine traits which at this moment appeared to him as so many admissions of guilt.
He would have loved them at other times: loved them in _her_ especially, because they were so characteristic of her simple nature, bred in the country, half woman and wholly child. Just now they were repellent to his pride, incomprehensible to his manhood, and for the first time his faith began to waver.
Pity him, my masters! for he suffered intensely.
Pity him, mistress, for he loved her with his whole soul.
Nay! do not sneer. Love-at-first-sight is a great and wonderful thing, and, more than that, it is real--genuinely, absolutely, completely real. But it is not immutable. It is the basis, the solid foundation of what will become the lasting passion. In itself it has one great weakness--the absence of knowledge.