“Say, at the best, it was remorse made him a spendthrift, and his conscience that salved itself with a lying pretext. Does that condone his perfidy to me? Yet, I swear that he so blinded my eyes and my heart that, while he was close to me I could not, despite his confession of wickedness, see him for the wretch he was. Now——”
She came suddenly quite close up to the young man.
“Edouard!” she whispered, in a voice so wooing that it seemed to stroke his cheek. He should have leapt away; but for the first time the fragrant sweet sensuousness of her presence bewitched him. She put her hands timidly up to his shoulders, and let her gaze melt into his. The motion of her bosom communicated to his heart a soft slow throbbing. In the pause that ensued, the voice of the old drunken debauchee sounded fitfully from the dining-room.
“Now,” she murmured, “I see the truth stripped of all that passion that so falsely adorned it. I see it in you, as in myself, a generous principle that owes nothing to self-indulgence. Thou couldst use this in me, thou cold, beautiful man—thou couldst use me to such ends, and never fail of thy self-respect.”
She slipped her hands a thought closer about his neck.
“This evil magnificence,” she said—“so strange and so terrible to the poor country girl. Every evening the old lord gets tipsy over his wine; every evening he prays to me on his knees. To-night I thought he would have died—the passion so enraged him. I swear that is all. Oh! I have something cries in me for action; some voice, too, summons me to that dark city where is being born, in agony and travail, the child of our hopes—yours and mine. Not his now—Edouard, not his. I pray only to meet him there, that I may denounce him before the Liberty he has outraged. Take me hence. I am weary of the vile display; weary of being sought the tool to designing men. Take me away to Paris, where the era of the new life is beginning!”
In a paroxysm of entreaty, emboldened by her little success, she so tightened the soft embrace of her arms as to bring her lips almost into touch with his.
“Have I not proved myself, as I promised, a possession to covet?” she whispered.
Now, upon that, Ned came to himself at a leap. He loosened her hands; he repulsed and backed from her.
“What shameless thing are you,” he cried—the more violently from a consciousness of his late peril—“that you persist in the face of such rejection as you have already forced from me? I do not desire your favour, madame. To offer it to me here, in this place, is nothing but an insult. Nor, believe me, do I covet the possession of one who——”