“You may say what you like, Felix,” she answered. “I make allowances for your natural grief, however wrong the false interpretation it drives you to put upon my motives. But you do not understand those, I say; and I, who do, cannot at this hour believe that I was misdirected in the course I pursued. It is justified in the result; in an appalling design frustrated; in a rescue accomplished at last through much difficulty and danger. You regard it only as an imperilled life saved.”
“What else?”
“Much more and much worse.”
“What worse?”
“O, Felix Dane! the worse that was actually perpetrated, and on very much the same provocation, by a mediæval monster called Francesco Cenci. It was to save her from that fate that I did what I had to do.”
Marion was gone—and in peace. We parted friends; but I hope I may never see her again. Truly, character is the fruit of circumstance, rich or insipid according to the climate it inhabits. Transplanted straight from a humdrum parsonage into the volcanic soil of passion and insanity, who would have thought that that starchy puritanism could ever have developed the qualities of resource and imagination it came to reveal in the face of almost supernatural difficulties and terrors. She was a great soul, I think—the material of a great commander, rigid and unswerving in the course which her duty, as she conceived it, pointed out to her; prepared, if necessary, to sacrifice the lesser to the greater where the ultimate good demanded an inexorable decision.
But I turned from her at last to my dreams, with a sigh of renunciation of all things in the world that were not of them or for them. I knew at length the whole that was to be known of the story of Fifine, and, for that knowledge, all of new that blossomed from it was the piteous added sense of martyrdom. She had suffered, my darling, that her sister might be spared.
That evening, for the first time since my bereavement, I lifted her portrait from the place where I had laid it with its face to the wall, and we sat and talked together, she and I; and, with the tears dropping unconstrained down my cheeks, I upbraided her tenderly for that, of all her sweetnesses, she had withheld from me one that I should have loved among the best.
Now that night, falling asleep and dreaming, I was all at once on the shining hill-sides of les Baux, climbing and seeking alone, but with a great rapture in my soul; and a thousand butterflies looped about my head, and a scent of warm crushed lavender went with me like incense—only I was alone. But suddenly from amongst the ruins came a voice to me, singing so sweetly that my heart brimmed over to hear it in a very ecstasy of joy, and with blinded eyes I stumbled on and towards the beautiful tones—so strange, yet so familiar. And, lo! my girl, with yearning smiling eyes, and extended arms—
I have heard it, then—I will never believe but that I have heard it. Could she bear to withhold from me, even in death, one charm that had not been mine?