God of mercy! It was a spectre from which I shrunk in instinctive loathing. Had it ever been one with beauty, and with me? Its very tattered gown seemed fallen into harsh, lean folds. Love must have trodden, not sat, in those hollow eyes, so to discolour and bury them. It was a just retribution—the more providential in that so squalid a vision sickened my heart from sympathy.
Yet, to break this withered reed! It seemed a despicable task for my strong hands. They must withhold a little, caress a little first, with whatever reluctance to themselves. Nevertheless, I could not but be conscious how forced and artificial rung the tenderness I sought to convey into my voice.
“Patty—Patty Grant! I have come to offer you life and liberty!”
The tiny smile that broke then from her lips was my first earnest of her reality. The sigh she gave was such as a dead sleeper might yield to the dawn of Judgment. Yet she did not move, or come to me, or show one sign of the collapse I had expected and calculated on. And, as the light of the flaring taper fell upon her figure, a new hate and loathing surged in me, so that the persuasiveness with which I sought to dress my tones shivered into a mockery of itself—
“Did you not expect me? Did you not know that I hold your life in my hands?”
“Else why should you have left me to come to this, Diana?”
I shrunk back. What new knowledge of herself, or me, was implied in the chords of that wasted voice? Yet she smiled still, like one waking out of a frightful dream.
“Is it not strange, Diana, this end to all we have known and experienced together? Do you remember the sundial, and the old green garden, and the nuns in the sleepy village? We are Englishwomen, after all, Diana. I should like to rest in England.”
“It lies with yourself,” I answered, half choking. “You have but to speak—I tell you, it needs but a word from you, and all this false sacrifice is passed by and forgotten.”
Her eyes had been fixed on some vision beyond me. Now in a moment they were scorching my soul.