Madama’s cheek flamed as she rose; her lips set tightly; she looked an inch taller than her wont.
“Thank you, Benoît,” she said. “I will go down to him.”
CHAPTER VII
He bowed to her gravely as she entered. She responded with the iciest salutation. Throughout their interview they both remained standing.
He noticed, with dark ruth, how wan her face had grown, how sharpened from its blunt youthful curves, how prematurely aged even—like a late-blown lily, shrunk, in its first lovely opening, to a freezing wind. The nearer thereby, the more pathetic, to his own barren passion. He could claim his pallid kinship with this sorrow, as never he might have done with insolent felicity. He was so changed by love, he could have prized dead beauty in this woman above all the living graces of her happier sisters. Had she waned like the moon, his arms had lusted for the last shred of her.
His heart beat thickly. For whatever reason, he was to have speech with her once more—was to reclaim her to some interest in his own. So that that might be, he cared little how she wounded him.
“You asked to see me, Monsieur,” she said frigidly. “I am here. To what importunate circumstance, may I ask, do I owe this—yes, this insult, Monsieur, of your visit?”
She had hardly intended to be so explicit; but her indignation took her, irresistibly and on the instant, off her feet. Cartouche slightly shrugged his shoulders.
“Importunate, Madame?” he said. “You shall judge. I come as Prefect. The insult is official.”
His eyes, fastened on her, feeding gluttonously after their long abstinence, saw how she started slightly at his words—how she looked at him in sudden fear. To whatever offensive motive she had thought to attribute his visit, the possibility of its impersonal character had evidently not occurred to her. He was become master by that disillusionment; and would have been less than human not to have recognised it—not to have held her frightened heart fluttering for one moment in his hand. It was fierce ecstasy to feel it beat—to have it own him lord of itself through terror—if only he might reassure it in the end, and release it to fly away on wings of poignant gratitude!