‘I can’t, general,’ said Mina.
‘No,’ answered the Italian; ‘and nobody shall force you. You shall have your own way, madam, whether it be right or wrong.’
Before Miss Laury could answer a voice from within the mansion spoke her name.
‘It is my lord!’ she exclaimed, and ran over the sward, through the porch, along the passage, to a summer parlour whose walls were painted a fine pale red, its mouldings burnished gilding, and its window-curtains artistical draperies of dark blue silk covered with gold waves and flowers. Here Zamorna sat alone. He had been writing. One or two letters, folded, sealed, and inscribed with western directions, lay on the table beside him. His gloves and cambric handkerchief with a crown wrought upon it in black hair appeared on his desk. He had not uncovered since entering the house three hours since; and either the weight of his dragoon helmet or the gloom of its impending plumes or else some inward feeling had clouded his face with a strange darkness. Mina closed the door and softly drew near. Without speaking or asking leave she began to busy herself in unclasping the heavy helmet. The duke smiled faintly as her little fingers played about his chin and luxuriant whiskers, and then, the load of brass and sable plumage being removed, as they arranged the pressed masses of glossy brown ringlets and touched with soft cool contact his feverish brow. Absorbed in the grateful task she hardly felt that His Majesty’s arm had encircled her waist, and yet she did feel it too and would have thought herself presumptuous to shrink from the endearment. She took it as a slave ought to take the caress of a Sultan, and obeying the gentle effort of his hand slowly sank on to the sofa by her master’s side.
‘My little physician,’ said he, meeting her adoring but anxious upward gaze with the full light of his countenance, ‘you look at me as if you thought I was not well. Feel my pulse.’
She folded that offered hand, white, supple, and soft with youth and delicate nature, in both her own, and whether Zamorna’s pulse beat rapidly or not his handmaid’s did as she felt the slender grasping fingers of the monarch laid quietly in hers. He did not wait for the report, but took his hand away again, and laying it on her raven curls said:
‘So, Mina, you won’t leave me though I never did you any good in the world? Warner says you are resolved to continue in the scene of war.’
‘To continue by your side, my lord.’
‘But what shall I do with you, Mina? Where shall I put you? My little girl, what will the army say when they hear of your presence? You have read history? Recollect that it was Darius who carried his concubines to the field, not Alexander! The world will say: “Zamorna attends to his own pleasures and cares not how his men suffer.”’
Mina writhed at these words as if the iron had entered into her soul. A vivid burning flush crimsoned her cheek, and tears of shame and bitter self-reproach gushed at once into her bright black eyes. Zamorna was touched acutely.