Oh! the shame of it! And he, to whom she had given her entire heart and soul, to whom she was ready to yield herself absolutely and completely had bought her at a price. Love? She no longer believed in it. If he had lied to her, then neither love nor purity nor manhood existed on God's earth—and this was no vale of tears but one of infinite shame.
She looked down on him with just such a cold look in her eyes as he had compared to the infliction of the tortures of the damned. She knew that physically she would be too weak to resist him, and she would scorn to call out to her father. This she tried to convey to him by that cold look and by the perfect placidity of her demeanour.
For one moment he was conscious of the wild desire to snatch his happiness from out the burning brand even now, and to take her in his arms and ride away with her into the land of forgetfulness. The wind in the trees seemed to call out to him not to let her go, and the reeds murmured as they bent their heavy heads that she would forgive everything after another kiss.
"Rose Marie!"
Something of what was passing in his mind must have reached her inner consciousness. She was quite woman enough to know that here was no ephemeral passion, no flame of desire extinguished as soon as born. He loved her and she loved him, that was as true, as incontestable as that—in her understanding—the treacherous act which he had committed now stood irremediably between them, whilst to his wild and rugged sense of the overwhelming grandeur of love, nothing could or should ever part him from her.
In her eyes the betrayal was greater than the love which—in his—had by its very existence atoned for everything. But throughout her deeply resentful feeling of wrong done to her and hers there was mayhap an unconscious sense of weakness, a desire to bring forth a greater array of will power and set it up against the insinuating persuasion of his voice, the insidious magic of his touch. Certain it is that she felt suddenly compelled to break the rigid silence which throughout his impassioned pleading she had so deliberately imposed upon herself.
Held in his nervy grip, she could not altogether withdraw from him, but her eyes, cold and calm sought his in the gloom.
"My lord," she said quietly and firmly, "since I know you by no other name, therefore still my lord to me, I would have you recall the day when sitting in my father's house, you whiled away an idle afternoon by telling a foolish maid the pretty allegory of water lilies growing on the weedy pond at Cluny, and of the slime which oozes from unclean things and pollutes the white petals of the flowers. 'Twas a pretty tale and no doubt it afforded you much amusement to see the look of puzzledom in the eyes of an ignorant tailor's wench. Well, my lord! the wench is no longer ignorant now—she understands the rude imagery, her eyes have seen such pollution, such miserable corruption as will forever leave them tainted with the villainy which they have seen. Whoever you are, sir, I know not—what other deeds of evil and disgrace you may have committed I care not—I only pray God that we may never meet again. You no doubt will find pleasures elsewhere, some other flower to pollute with your touch, some other heart to break. That you brought shame upon me, mayhap God will one day forgive you, I could perchance have forgiven you that had your sin rested there, but you tried to bring dishonour on my father's house. You did succeed in bringing sorrow and shame into it. My father and mother, who loved you almost as a son, will never again hold their heads high among their kind; a dishonoured daughter—for I am that now, for my true husband will cast me off as a woman unfit to be his mate—a dishonoured daughter is a lasting curse upon a house. That is your work, stranger, whoever you are; and this deed like unto the treachery which by a kiss brought the beloved Master to death upon the Cross, cries out to heaven for punishment; it is writ on the very front page in the book of the recording angel, and all the tears which you may shed, all the blood and all the atonement could not now wipe that front page clean. All this I do know, and yet one thing more: and that is that you do err when you speak of my love for you. To you who have lied, who with soft words and false pretences did enter my father's house and stole that which is most precious to us humble folk, our honour and the integrity of our name, to such as that, I gave no love. 'Tis true that I did love a man once—for one brief hour he lived in my heart but nowhere else. He was true and loyal, too proud to lie, too noble to steal. He has vanished like the mist, leaving no trace of his passage, for my heart wherein he dwelt is broken, and even his memory hath faded from my ken—"
Her voice died away like a long-drawn-out sigh, mingling with the murmur of the reeds and the moaning as of lost souls gliding through the branches of the acacias in their restless wandering through infinite space.
The next moment she was gone, leaving in Michael's trembling hands a scrap of torn lace, a tiny shred of her gown.