For there is a bustle outside, the noise of men coming into the house; but it is only the lieutenant of the guard who enters, a fiddle dripping with blood in his hand and announces: “We have killed every man in the boat, musicians and all.”
At this there is a spasm of hope, the first that has come to Chester. In his military mind has sprung this idea: “The butchery of the musicians was warning to my boats that their captain is beset.”
But this is effaced by the agony of her he loves, for Hermoine is now pleading with her father as if for her own life, calling him loving names as if she adored him in her agony, and sobbing, though she has no tears: “Father, don’t you hear me, don’t you feel me?” As her arms are round the grim old Viceroy’s neck. “Don’t you know—that I—love this man!—See it, believe it by the agony of my breaking heart. If you kill him you kill me. I had mourned for him as dead before; must I be widowed AGAIN?”
Thus supplicating, Hermoine de Alva looks lovelier in her despair than in her joy, for there is now about her a kind of nervous intensity and ethereal electricity that makes her not wholly of this earth; she is as Eve pleading for Adam, not to God, but—to Satan.
But Satan is not merciful, and thinking her father does not really understand how it is her very life he is cutting short, she cries out: “You shall believe my love by this!”
Then this being whom modesty now covers with blushes, in the presence of grim old arquebusiers and all the lackeys and attendants the noise has drawn to the doors of the room, walks up to Guy Chester and her arms go round him and she is kissing him and sobbing over him, and begging him not to think she [[260]]would have betrayed him for all the world, she loves him so.
Even as she does this Hermoine de Alva seems suddenly to change. For, as she flutters over him, Guy, having golden opportunity, whispers in her ear: “Get me time—warn my boats—get me time!”
At this work she goes with every artifice of mind and body.
She looks about, then seems to grow faint, and mutters: “Water—water—my head!”
At this her father cries: “Good heavens, you are swooning!”