She laughed. “Do you think I weigh gossip against the chance, however remote, of the trial going in your favour? Do you think I care what they say against me in the court if there is any hope of your acquittal? My darling, I shall fight for your life and your good name, which is mine and Ian’s, too, to my last ounce of strength and my last penny; and in the end there will be victory, because you are innocent, and innocence shows its face as surely as guilt.”
“You really do believe what I say—that I had absolutely nothing to do with her death?” he asked, still hardly daring to credit her trust. His experiences with Dolly had left him with so profound a scepticism in regard to female mentality that even his adoration of Monimé was not wholly proof against it.
She looked down at him, and he seemed to detect an expression upon her face which was almost defiant. “My dear,” she said, “as far as I am concerned, even if you were guilty it would make no difference.”
He stared at her incredulously, for man does not know woman, nor can he penetrate to the source of her deepest convictions. It was not Monimé, it was no individual, who had spoken: it was eternal woman.
“Nothing can alter love,” she explained. “Can’t a man understand that?”
“No,” he answered, “only woman and God love in that way.”
Suddenly he seemed to realize to the full the glory of her sympathy and understanding. It was as though their love in this moment of bitter trial had passed the greatest of all tests, and stood now triumphant, the conqueror of life and death.
All the years of misery were blotted out in the wonder of this revelation of womanhood, and on the instant his desire for life in unity with her came surging back into his heart.
“Monimé,” he said, “this is the biggest moment of all. Whatever I may suffer will be worth while, because it will have brought me the knowledge that our love transcends the ways of man. By God!—I’ll stand my trial; I’ll make a fight for my life, even though the chances of success are small. I didn’t know that such love existed.”
She laughed. “You didn’t know,” she whispered, “because, as I once told you, men don’t bother to study women.”
He looked up at her in the dim light, and of a sudden it seemed to his overwrought fancy that the sanctuary was filled with her presence, as though she were one with the women of all the ages, pressing forward from every side to tend him, to bind up his wounds, to stand by him in his adversity, to forgive his sins. He saw her revealed to him as the eternal woman, the everlasting companion, wife and mother, for ever watching over his welfare, for ever acting upon a code of principles other than that of man, for ever drawing knowledge from sources unattainable to man. Of no account were the little shams of the sex, such as Dolly; they were swamped amidst the hosts of the good and the true. It had been his misfortune to encounter one of the former; but his disillusionment was forgotten in the all-pervading sympathy which now enfolded him like the tender wings of Hathor.