"Will not?" says she, her voice cold and sneering. "They are brave words though unbravely spoken. You forget I have the advantage and can compel you."
"Madame," I replied, "you overrate your powers. Your servants can bind me hand and foot, but they cannot compel me to speak what I will not."
"Have you no lie ready? What? Does your invention fail?" and she suddenly rose from the stool in a whirlwind of passion. "God forgive me!" she cried. "For even now I believed you."
She ceased abruptly and pushed her head forward, listening. The creak of wheels came faintly to our ears.
"You hear that? It is Mr. Buckler's carriage, and Mr. Buckler rides within it. Do you understand? The carriage takes you to Meran; you will not be the first traveller who has disappeared on the borders of Italy. I am afraid your friend at Venice will wait for you in vain."
The carriage rumbled down the hill, and we both listened until the sound died away.
"For the future you shall labour as my peasant on the hillside among the woods, with my peasants for companionship, until your thoughts grow coarse with your body, and your soul dwindles to the soul of a peasant. So shall you live, and so shall you die, for the wrong which you have done to me." She towered above me in her outburst, her eyes flashing with anger. "And you dared to charge me with trickery! Why, what else has your life been? From the night you went clothed as a woman to Bristol Bridewell, what else has your life been? A woman! The part fitted you well; you have all the cunning. You need but the addition of a petticoat."
The bitterness of her speech stung me into a fury, and, forgetful of the continence I owed to her:
"Madame!" I said, "I proved the contrary to your husband."
"Silence!" she cried, and with her open hand she struck me on the face. And then a strange thing happened. It seemed as though we changed places. For all my helplessness, I seemed to have won the mastery over her. A feeling of power and domination, such as I had never experienced before, grew stronger and stronger within me, and ran tingling through every vein. I forgot my bonds; I forgot the contempt which she had poured on me; I forgot the very diffidence with which she had always inspired me. I felt somehow that I was her master, and exulted in the feeling. Whatever happened to me in the future, whether or no I was to labour as her bondslave for all my days, for that one moment I was her master. She could never hold me in lower esteem, in greater scorn than she did at this hour, and yet I was her master. Something told me indeed that she would never hold me in contempt at all again. She stood before me, her face dark with shame, her attitude one of shrinking humiliation. Twice she strove to raise her eyes to mine; twice she let them fall to the ground. She began a sentence, and broke off at the second word. She pulled fretfully at the laces of her gloves. Then she turned and walked to the door. She walked slowly at first, constraining herself; she quickened her pace, fumbled with the key in her hurry to unlock the door, and once out of the pavilion, without pausing to latch or lock it, fled like one pursued towards the house. And from the bottom of my heart I pitied her.