“Now, listen to me, M. Cabarus,” I said. “It is, I acknowledge, no question of a sister or a step-sister; but it is a question of an honourable trust, which I may not specify, but which to this moment I have maintained. When I bid you this morning to the test, I bid you, as one totally disinterested for himself, to a venture which would have honoured any man in its achievement. You understand me? It was to achieve an unsullied name. But I never professed the least authority over any one’s tastes or predilections. That anyone was free to do as she liked, to accept or reject as she liked. If you chose to presume absurdly, and arrogantly I must say, on a brief acquaintance, that was your business. I should not have stood in her way: I did not stand in yours.”
“Ah!” He looked up at me, with a strange woeful expression: “But unconsciously, Monsieur—unconsciously, we will say.”
He rose, with a profound sigh, and lifted the lantern.
“Judge you, Monsieur,” he said, “if, for all my vanity, my soul is small. This morning she spoke to me—words of bitter scorn and upbraiding, difficult to forget. She was angry to see me appear without you; she received my proposals with amazement, heaping insults on my head. Sweet poisonous flowers they were, dropping from those incomparable lips. Yet, mark; when anxiety rose and grew over your failure to return, it was to me she came to appeal, to my wounded soul she addressed her suit. I was responsible, she said, for your absence, for letting you go to wander among the darkening hills alone. And when they whispered of mist and pitfalls, her fears grew wildly clamorous, and she entreated me, yes me, to imperil my own safety, to issue forth and seek for you among the clouds, careless of what befell me so not a hair of your head should be injured. And I came, Monsieur; unable at the last to witness unconcerned the agony of mind of her who had so abused me, I counselled my own heart to nobility, and came to seek you.”
He turned from me. “Follow,” he said; “and I will lead you down into safety. So I requite my defamer. Only let me entreat you, Monsieur, to humour in me by the way a silence which indeed my heart is too full to relieve with words.”
How could I answer but by acquiescing. It was a strange descent, that from my rocky prison—in the white ghast light, following the bright spark of the swinging lantern, while vast shapes and shadows seemed to bend and look at us as we passed. It needed a sure knowledge to accomplish it without mishap; but at last it was done, and we stood at the head of the valley, where the road branched upwards to La Reine Jeanne. A clock struck eleven as we paused; I turned and held out my hand to my rescuer.
“I am sorry,” I said. I felt that it did not become me to utter more.
But he could not bring himself to accept the proffered advance.
“Your way is now clear to you, Monsieur,” he answered frigidly, backing a little from me. “You will need my services no longer.”
“But what are you going to do with yourself?”