Chaste as Ice, Pure as Snow: A Novel

by C. Despard

"Patience!" replied the man when he had wrenched himself free from that strong grasp. "You shall have my life. Mon Dieu! it is worth little. But first you must listen to me."

He retreated to the side of the little window, the evening light shone full on his face. He fixed his enemy with his piercing eyes, to which the fever of his brain had given strange brilliancy. "You want to know what brought me here," he continued. "I have told you—no love to you, albeit my hand and voice may restore you to life and happiness—to all life holds most precious and dear. And yet it is love as well as penitence that has brought me to this. Love—a truer love than I have ever known—to the woman and child whom you have forsaken; for your little daughter changed my mood. I dare not speak of her. It would make me soft when I should be stern. She has been with me ever since; she is with me now. See her for yourself. She is a living proof of what I tell." The man bowed his head. "I give her up to you. I have found you for this, that you may take my treasure. And now—for I read the fierce hunger of your eyes; you Englishmen are all alike, insatiate, uncontrolled—la revanche. Well! it is well. Monsieur Grey, I understand your nature, and my hand shall supply you with an instrument. I went into your room to-day. I found these; I have brought them with me."

He took from a chair on which he had laid them the pair of pistols, one of which Maurice had loaded and prepared for action only a few days before.

The sight inflamed him. It recalled to his mind what this man had done—how for these long years his life had been a blank of good—a burden from which he had even sought to free himself. He seized the offered case. "Yes," he said sternly, "it is well. Villain, it were a good deed to rid the world of such as you."

The Frenchman shrugged his shoulders. "Soit donc," he said calmly; then folded his arms with the equanimity of a red Indian, who looks death and all its horrors in the face without shrinking.

It was too much for Maurice Grey's patience. He drew near to his enemy and shook him roughly: "Do you take me for an assassin? Come out, if you have any of the feelings of a man left in you, and defend yourself," he said hoarsely, and led the way to the door.

L'Estrange followed with a calmness that was no longer real, for his nervous system had given way suddenly. The tension that had supported him through these long weeks of wandering, the iron purpose, the self-constraining force, had given way suddenly when the necessity had gone by, when his tale had been told, when he had read in his enemy's face that it was counted true.

For this time Maurice could not help himself. Perhaps even in his passionate longing for this, a restored belief in the truth and purity of her who had once been to him the embodiment of all that was best and fairest in womanhood, had kept him incredulous through Arthur's tale. This strange confirmation of its every detail, wrung out from the very torture of his enemy's heart, commended itself to him as true.

He disbelieved her no longer. Rather, his soul was overflowing with passionate repentance and pity—repentance for the cruel blow he had dealt her, pity for those years of loneliness, anguish for his own mistakes, for a past that would ever remain the past, that no future, however blessed, could recall. All this was surging in his brain as he listened to those few but fate-laden words, and the first impulse was indignation against her betrayer. He could not detach his past from his present; out of his own mouth he was condemned. Persecutor, villain, torturer of weak women and helpless children (for Maurice had not seen his child; how could he tell that she had not suffered ill-treatment at his hands?), he should die the death of a dog, be cast out into the frozen valleys to sleep the sleep of bitter ignominy.

It may be that in the glance cast at him by his enemy when he had seized him, when his pale face was close to his own, L'Estrange had read this wild determination, for as he followed his guide his knees trembled. He was no more the accuser, but the accused, the condemned.