Then I asked her what she wished to say to me. She hesitated for a few moments. Then she put her hand on my arm with the childlike abandon so peculiarly hers.
“Tell me what I must do,” she said. “The prince he has gone away to see, someone else he should not go to see.”
She asked me such a question! Anger, jealousy! I have been angry often, too often—but jealousy? I have condemned others for that meanest passion in human nature, and now I am punished. I know what it is!
“What do you mean?” I said. “I do not understand.”
“Ah!” (It was a sob rather than a sigh.) “Monsieur, I am sure you do not understand,” she said, once more standing still, but this time confronting me. “You were good to your wife, I know that!”
“I was not good to my wife,” I said, bitterly. “You must not come to me for advice. Ask Lady Forwood, Mrs. Mervyn, anyone, not me!”
At that moment I forgot my theory, that Mercedes’ soul and Lilia’s are one and the same; this was the wife of the Prince Andriocchi, and I, daring to love her as no man should dare to love another man’s wife, was burning with jealousy, and was false to Lilia’s memory.
“Never tell me you are not good,” she said; “I know better.”
The words were ordinary enough. But at the end of her speech she gave a little satisfied laugh—Lilia’s laugh.
I felt less human—the ghostly, creepy sensation reasserted itself.