She interrupted me, rising to her feet white and peremptory.
“Not for me, monsieur—not for me! And, for my associations—they shall never be of that word with deceit!”
“Deceit!”
“But is it not so? Have you not approached my confidence in a false guise, under a false name? Oh!” (she stamped her foot again) “cannot you see how my condescension to the Citizen Thibaut is stultified by this new knowledge of his rank? how to favour now what I had hitherto held at arm’s-length would be to place myself in the worst regard of snobbishness!”
“No, mademoiselle—I confess that I cannot;—but then I journeyed hither in the National hearse.”
“I do not understand.”
“Why, only that there one finds a ragpicker’s head clapt upon a monseigneur’s neck in the fraternity that is decreed to level all distinctions. What is the advantage of a name, then, when one is denied a tombstone?”
“Ah!” she cried, “you seek to disarm me with levity. I recognise your habit of tolerant contempt for the mental equipment of my sex. It does not become you, monsieur;—but what does it matter! I know already your opinion of me, and how compound it is of disdain and disgust. I am soulless and cruel and capricious—perhaps ill-favoured also; but there, I think, you pronounce me inoffensive or something less. But I would have you say, monsieur—what was Lepelletier to me? I should have sickened, rather, to break bread with my uncle—whom heaven induce to the shame of repentance! And I was ill that night, so that even you might have softened in your judgment of me.”
I stood amazed at the vehemence of her speech, at the rapidity of inconsequence with which she pelted me with any chance missile that came to her hand. It was evident the poor child was overwrought to a degree; and I was fixed helpless between my passionate desire to reassure and comfort her and my sense of her repudiation of my right to do so. Now, it happened that, where words would have availed little, a mute appeal—the manner of which it was beyond my power to control—was to serve the best purposes of reconciliation. For suddenly, as I dwelt bewildered upon the wet flashing of Carinne’s eyes, emotion and fatigue, coupled with the sick pain of my wound, so wrought upon me that the vault went reeling and I with it. I heard her cry out; felt her clutch me,—and then there was sense for little but exhaustion in my drugged brain.
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