"Ah, dearest Madame! then it is no marvel that, as you have inherited the cestus of Aphrodite, your votaries bow as blindly, as helplessly, as those over whom your ancient Greek mother ruled so despotically. By divine right of birth you should reign as Odille Anadyomene."
"Madame Odille Orme has abjured the pagan æsthetics that seem to trench rather closely upon Mr. Laurance's ethics, and shed far too rosy an Orientalism over his mind and heart; and hopes he will not forget her proud boast that by divine right she wears a dearer, nobler, holier title—Odille Orme, wife and mother."
Bolder libertinism than found shelter in Mr. Laurance's perverted nature, would have cowered before the pure face that now leaned far forward, with dilated, scornful eyes which seemed to run like electric rays up and down the secret chambers of his heart.
Involuntarily he shrank back into the depths of his chair, and mutely questioned as on the previous night, "Where have I heard that voice before?"
With some difficulty he recovered himself, and said hastily:
"Will you forgive me if I tell you frankly, that ever since I saw you last night I have been tantalized by a vague yet very precious consciousness that somewhere you and I have met before? When or where, I cannot conjecture, but of one thing I am painfully certain, we can never be strangers henceforth. Some charm in your voice, in the expression of your eyes when as 'Amy Robsart' the loving woman you looked so fondly into your 'Leicester's' face, awoke dim memories that will never sleep again. Happy—enviable indeed—that Leicester who really rules the empire of your love."
Tightening the clasp of her palms which enclosed the little gold locket containing the image of their child, a wintry smile broke over her white face, lending it that mournful glimmer which fading moonlight sheds on some silent cenotaph in a cemetery.
"If my stage tricks of glance or tone, my carefully studied and practised attitudes and modulations, recall some neglected memories of your sunny past, let me hope that Mr. Laurance links me with the holy associations that cluster about a mother's or a sister's sacred features; reviving the earlier years, when he offered at the shrine of friendship, of honour, and of genius, tributes too sincere to admit the glozing varnish of fulsome, fashionable adulation, which degrades alike the lips that utter and the ears that listen. If at some period in the mysterious future, you, whom—because my countryman—I reluctantly consented to receive, should really discover a noble lovely woman before whose worth and beauty that fickle heart you call your own utterly surrenders, and whom winning as wife, and cherishing as only husbands can the darlings they worship, you were finally torn away from—by inexorable death—the only power that can part husbands and wives, then think you, Mr. Laurance, that the universe holds a grave deep enough to keep you quiet in your coffin—if vain heartless men profaned her sacred widowhood by such utterances as you presume to offer me? The stage is the arena, where in gladiatorial combat I wage my battle with the beasts of Poverty and Want: there I receive the swelling acclamations of triumph, or the pelting hisses of defeat; there before the footlights where I toil for my bread, I am a legitimate defenceless target for artistic criticism; but outside the precincts of the theatre, I hold myself as sacred from the world as if I stood in stone upon an altar behind some convent's bars, and as a lonely, sorrow-stricken mother widowed of the father of my child, bereft of a husband's tenderly jealous guardianship, I have a right to claim the profound respect, the chivalric courtesy, which every high-toned, honourable gentleman accords to worthy stainless women. Because as an actress I barter my smiles and tears for food and raiment for my fatherless child, it were not quite safe to imagine that I share the pagan tendencies which appear to have smitten some of my countrymen with moral leprosy."
The words seemed to burst forth like a mountain cataract long locked in snow, which, melting suddenly under some unseasonable fiery influence, falls in an impetuous icy torrent, bearing the startling chill of winter into flowery meadows, where tender verdure sown thick with primroses and daisies smiles peacefully in summer sunshine.
Twice the visitor half rose and essayed to speak, but that deep steady voice bore down all interruption, and as he watched her, Mr. Laurance just then would have given the fortune of the Rothschilds for the privilege of folding in his own the perfect hands that lay clasped on the marble slab.