Who's The One Who Really Wants To Cry Here

As Herman moved forward, the crowd parted like a channel opening before water. Scorn and shock clung to every step we took, but I held my chin stiffly high and kept my eyes on Herman as he strode ahead.

“…”

Herman held my hand tightly, as though he would never let go, no matter what.

Right about then, my forehead prickled as if struck by an arrow, and I instinctively turned toward the source of a gaze burning with anger.

…Father.

There stood my father, his face flushed red, his neatly groomed mustache quivering, perhaps from the sheer depth of his fury. He certainly hadn’t been among the crowd during the uproar a moment ago, and the Seymour retiring room lay in the exact opposite direction. Word of the commotion must have reached him after all. In his eyes sat something worse than reproach. Contempt.

Never in my life had I been on the receiving end of such a look. I swallowed a trembling breath, and yet I couldn’t for the life of me tear my eyes from my father’s face.

Have I truly done something so wrong? So terrible you’d glare at me as though you could kill me?

The moment our eyes met, tears welled up and spilled over before I knew it. I bit down hard on my lip to keep them from running down my cheeks, struggling to steady myself.

Of course, since I now existed as ‘Gloria,’ I knew my father’s fury too was aimed at Gloria.

Would it have been any different, had I done it as Marienne?

Probably not.

He’d have looked at me no differently than he does now. He isn’t a man to understand conduct so utterly devoid of sense.

Even so, I had no regrets.

I had deliberately played the madwoman the rumors made me out to be, but thanks to that I’d been able to say everything I’d wanted to say to those two, to my heart’s content. No, if anything it struck me as the finest thing I’d done in all my life. Perhaps that was why I felt nothing but resentment toward my father as he glared at me as though to scold me.

If only you hadn’t failed to recognize me in the first place, none of this would ever have happened.

Perhaps this was my father’s own comeuppance.

That day — if only my father had recognized me…

Had that been so, I would have lived out my whole life for house and family, just as my father wished. As a daughter who knew nothing of stirring up such tumult, and a wife of flawless devotion. Just so.

“Gloria.”

I was still standing there, eyes brimming, laying all the blame on my father.

“Look only at me.”

The call broke off my long spiral of thought. Herman had turned his head gently, murmuring low.

“And nowhere else.”

Once he’d ordered an attendant to bring the carriage around, Herman crossed to where I stood a little way off.

“…”
“…”

The weight of his gaze on my face was more than I could bear, and I turned aside. The very next instant, a large hand swept in and turned my cheek back.

“Why should you be the one crying?”
“…”
“Who’s the one who really wants to cry here.”

Before I could get out a word, his fingers brushed the corners of my eyes. His words sounded like a reproach, but his hands, for all the world, looked worried.

I quietly took hold of that hand and drew it down. Without a word, Herman looked off down the road the carriage would come.

“Go on ahead. There’s still some business I need to hear from His Majesty about.”
“…Why don’t you ask me anything?”

Herman hadn’t asked a single thing about how it had all come about, hadn’t grown angry and demanded why I’d behaved that way. And somehow that only made me more uneasy.

“About what.”

Herman shrugged and tossed the question back.

“Whether you truly threw your arms around Cedric Drake — and whether you ditched me and went off to the retiring room to do it. Something along those lines, is it?”

He let out a soft snort of a laugh.

“There’s no need to ask. I know it isn’t so — why bother?”

He reached out and pressed the spot between my brows, then rubbed at it slowly with a thick thumb. Only then did I realize I’d been frowning without knowing it.

“A woman who scrunches up her face like this at the mere mention of his name, who wouldn’t so much as glance toward the Drakes through the whole triumphal ceremony. Short of some fervent spirit of charity, why would she ever embrace that bastard.”
“Herman…”
“Don’t go out of your way to explain. I’ve no wish to hear it, and it changes nothing. Above all — with me, you needn’t.”

He stood by me more firmly than anyone, and I found it hard to bear. In the end, before Herman could stop me, I poured out just how improper my conduct had been.

“But I behaved in a way unbecoming of a noble, and I brought disgrace upon the Ernst name. Whatever my reasons, that was plainly wrong of me.”
“And here I’d taken you for someone rather good with figures.”

Herman went on, as though it did him no harm at all.

“I raised the Ernst name high at the triumphal ceremony, so even if you brought it down a little at the triumphal banquet, it’s no great matter.”
“…”
“What I’m saying is, add it up and take it away again, and it comes to nothing but zero.”

He was, in truth, a man steadfast to the point of sheer folly.

I squeezed my eyes shut and half-turned away. Gazing off somewhere across the vast imperial palace, I let my frustration pour out.

“This isn’t like you. Weren’t you a man who put his house above all else?”
“A house exists for the sake of its people. In the end, it’s nothing more than a means to protect those who are mine.”

He drew a breath, then went on.

“And having seen it for myself today, with my own two eyes, my thinking’s shifted a little as well.”

I turned back around and looked at Herman, silently asking what he meant.

“It occurred to me that some of the rumors about you might be mistaken. And that you might be hiding something from me, too.”
“…I’m not hiding anything.”
“Right. We’ll leave it at that.”

I couldn’t understand why Herman placed such trust in me.

What on earth did he see in me, to believe in me like this?
Why must it be you, of all people, who gives me what even my parents and my husband never could…

“Please divorce me.”

In that instant, fear was the first thing to rise. It felt as though, once I put a name to the feelings I held for him, there would be no turning back.

“You shouldn’t have defended me back there — you should have cast me aside. That was the best you could have done.”

I was someone who could not be with Herman. Someone who must not be.

“I promise I’ll be the best thing for you. So you be the best thing for me in return.”

For some reason, in that moment, Herman’s words came drifting back to me. Even at a time like this, I thought, I was fouling his very best.

“Are you certain that casting you aside would be my best? No matter how I turn it over, it seems to me that’s your best — not mine.”

He pressed on, his face gone a touch stiff.

“That’s the gist of it. When I sit and listen to you quietly, it sounds as though the only thing you want is a divorce.”
“You said you saw it yourself, with your own two eyes. What sort of scandal I’m caught up in. What sort of outrage I carried on with.”
“Yes. I saw.”

At his answer, so utterly unabashed, I lost my words altogether.

“And I decided that much, I could handle.”
“What?”

The whole flow of the conversation had gone strange. What in the world went on in this man’s head? No, what on earth had he lived through, to declare so confidently that he could handle a situation like this?

“Gloria. You don’t love that bastard Drake. What woman could stamp down on the foot of a man she loved as though she meant to bore a hole clean through it?”
“That isn’t the point right now. I’m telling you, there’s not a single good thing to be had from keeping me at your side.”
“Right — thanks to you, my reputation’s taken a hit and remarrying’s become a hard prospect. So you take responsibility for that.”

I couldn’t fathom how he never lost, not even once. Herman seemed ready to bat back whatever I threw at him.

Just then the carriage drew to a stop before the banquet hall. As always, Herman held out his large hand to me, and with no strength left for any more sparring with words, I meekly took it and climbed inside.

“…”

Herman didn’t close the door. For a little while he simply looked at me.

“Get some rest. I’ll see to it I’m back early.”

With those last words, Herman shut the carriage door. A moment later we were speeding down the smooth road, and before we passed out of the imperial palace, I peered through the window.

There stood Herman Ernst, still keeping to his place.

“Why…”

Why was he just standing there like that, not even leaving?

My heart was a tangle. The guilt I felt toward him had sunk long roots inside me, a tree that only clung more stubbornly the harder I tried to tear it away.

Come to think of it, even this guilt didn’t seem to be mine to carry. Whether I ought to leave it as ‘Gloria’s’ or as ‘Marienne’s,’ I could not tell.

The man to whom I’d shown only my most perfect self had cast me aside so miserably. So why would the man to whom I could show only my most sordid self refuse, so stubbornly, to let me go?

I truly cannot understand why.

Herman Ernst.

Whatever these feelings toward him were, it made no difference. I had to cut them away, so that they could grow no further.