“With all my heart, then!” says he, turning wicked, too. Manlike, it offends his vanity that one who has pretended to love him so deeply should be now so ready to give him to another. “I could wish no fairer fate.”
“But the wedding must be secret.”
“Secret! Believe me, I shall tell all France.”
“And ruin the blue-eyed one! Hear me, my Commodore—once my beloved, ever to be my friend! I have had a world of trouble in your affairs. I arranged with the Marsan; but only by agreeing that the marriage be buried in secrecy. You know much of the sea; little of the shore when all’s said. Should the king hear of Aimee as your wife, he would drive her from court.”
“May I ask why!” and his cheek begins to burn angrily.
“You forget that Aimee is a Bourbon,” returns the Duchess, with a fashion of malicious satisfaction. He has deserted her for his Aimee; it is her revenge to irritate his pride. “You are a valorous man, and the king makes much of you. Besides, you beat the English, whom he fears and hates. And yet he does not forget that you are a peasant—as I did. Marry Aimee, my friend—. marry a Bourbon, even a Bourbon by the left hand, and King Louis will bolt the doors of France in both your faces. Indeed, the Bastile might be the end of it for your Aimee.”
“I think your royal highness sees unnecessary ghosts,” he replies, with a sneer. Just the same, that linking of the Bastile and Aimee alarms him. “Without pausing to question the king’s powers touching Bastiles and French doors, I may tell you he has already heard that I love Aimee. Doctor Franklin, himself, told me.”
“Love Aimee! Yes; love her as much and to what limit you will! The king will never resent that. But do not let the whisper that you have married Aimee reach the kingly ear. Can you not understand! Here, I will put it in the abstract. A Princess may have a liaison with a peasant, and in the shadow of that dishonor she will remain forever a Princess. Should the Princess, in some gust of virtue, be swept into a marriage with the peasant, she becomes instantly a peasant. It is one of those strange cases, my friend, where the word ‘wife’ is a stain and the word ‘mistress’ no stain at all.”
It is midnight; two candles burn dimly on the altar of “Our Lady of Loretto.” The great chapel is dark and vacant; the feeble light does not reach the vaulted roof, and the groined arches disappear upward in a thick blackness.
At the altar stands a priest. Near the rail is gathered a group of four, the Duchess de Chartres, the good Marchioness de Marsan, Aimee—heart a-flutter, her pink cheeks hidden in a veil—and Commodore Paul Jones. The priest draws the Duchess aside.