“Never mind what I know.”
“That is as much as to confess that I have done harm in your opinion by coming.”
“Harm? My God, I should think you have done harm!”
He gave a little odd crowing laugh.
“You can’t help betraying the truth, you see, for all your efforts. But what does it matter? I have seen her face, and it is enough. Fanchette—” he touched the scar on his temple—“do you note this? It knocked me silly for the time being; and, while I lay insensible, I think my spirit left my body and flew to her. She was asleep; I could not wake her; and I turned to see how near the basil was to flowering. O, my God, girl! it was all shrunk and neglected; and I thought I took it in my hand and turned to her with wild reproach. But at that moment she opened her eyes, and, seeing the deathless sorrow in them, the words died upon my lips—and on the instant I awoke, to find someone staunching my wound. Tell me—does she keep the basil still—she has not forgotten it?”
Fanchette, like all fundamental worldlings, was helplessly superstitious. She stared and gasped behind her veil, hearing of this ghostly coincidence. How was she to dare henceforth, shrinking, conscious of her guilt, under the detective eyes of the unseen? She could only gulp and shake her head in answer.
He laughed again:
“And you pretend to me that she is happy!”
“O, monsieur!” said the girl, inclining at last towards the refuge of hysteria: “if she is not, have you any way to make her so? No way at all that is possible—that can conceivably end in anything but death to yourself and disaster to her. If she had not learned to forget, she had learned to be resigned; and now you come to undo again the work of months. It is cruel.”
“Is it not, Fanchette—a most damnable cruelty. But you do not know the full measure of my baseness. I promised the archduke himself that I would forbear, would withdraw myself from the temptation, would endeavour at the eleventh hour to vindicate my honour. But death was in the bargain; and, if in my despair I have broken it, it is the fault of Death, that would not come to me, however much I sought and called him. It is useless to threaten me with death.”