It seemed as if she were choking, and her small white hands, with a gruesome and pathetic gesture, went up to her neck, smoothed it and fondled it, as if to shield it from that awful fate.
Bertrand tried to pacify her. It was he who was the more calm of the two now. It seemed as if her danger had brought him back to full consciousness. He forgot his own danger, the threat of death which lay in wait for him, probably on the very threshold of this house. He was a marked man now; martyrdom had ceased to be a dream; it had become a grim reality. But of this he did not think. Theresia was in danger, compromised by his own callous selfishness. His mind was full of her; and Régine, the true and loyal friend, the beloved of past happier years, had no place in his thoughts beside the exquisite enchantress, whose very nearness was paradise.
"I am going," he said earnestly. "Theresia, my beloved, try to forgive me. I was a fool—a criminal fool! But lately—since I thought that you—you did not really care; that all my hopes of future happiness were naught but senseless dreams; since then I seem to have lost my head—I don't know what I am doing! . . . And so——"
He got no farther. Ashamed of his own weakness, he was too proud to let her see that she made him suffer. For the moment, he only bent the knee and kissed the hem of her diaphanous gown. He looked so handsome then, despite his bedraggled, woebegone appearance, so young, so ardent, that Theresia's egotistical heart was touched, as it had always been when the incense of his perfect love rose to her sophisticated nostrils. She put out her hand and brushed with a gentle, almost maternal, gesture the matted brown hair from his brow.
"Dear Bertrand," she murmured vaguely. "What a foolish boy to think that I do not care!"
Already he had been brought back to his senses. The imminence of her danger lent him the courage which he had been lacking, and unhesitatingly now he jumped to his feet and turned to go. But she, quick in the transition of her moods, had already seized him by the arm.
"No, no!" she murmured in a hoarse whisper. "Don't go just yet . . . not before Pepita has seen if the stairs are clear."
Her small hand held him as in a vice, whilst Pepita, obedient and silent, was shuffling across the vestibule in order to execute her mistress's commands. But, even so, Bertrand struggled to get away. An epitome of their whole life, this struggle between them!—he trying to free himself from those insidious bonds that held him one moment and loosed him the next; that numbed him to all that he was wont to hold sacred and dear—his love for Régine, his loyalty, his honour. An epitome of her character and his: he, weak and yielding, ever a ready martyr, thirsting for self-immolation; and she, just a bundle of feminine caprice, swayed by sentiment one moment and by considerations of ambition or of personal safety the next.
"You must wait, Bertrand," she urged insistently. "Citizen Tallien may be on the stairs—he or—or the other. If they saw you! . . . My God!"
"They would conclude that you had turned me out of doors," he riposted simply. "Which would, in effect, be the truth. I entreat you to let me go!" he added earnestly. "'Twere better they met me on the stairs than here."