And then—to that music she was in his arms, clinging, sobbing, entreating. “Louis, you shall not go—you shall not, you shall not! It has been a horrible mistake. . . . I have tried—I promised the Princess—but I can’t, I can’t, Louis . . . it’s impossible!”
The heart against which she lay beat furiously, all its hot young blood vibrating to her words. The ghostlike room went dim; she alone was real—too real, overpoweringly human and appealing. And everything pleaded for her—the scent of her hair, Saint-Ermay’s own temperament, his past of facile conquests. . . . Probably only one thing could have saved him; it was on his side now.
“Lucienne,” he said in a strangled voice, “it is impossible. I cannot be such a hound, though God knows I would like to be. Let me go, dear. It is impossible.” And he tried, very gently, with hands that shook a little, to unclasp her twining fingers.
But Lucienne had the tenacity of many impressionable natures, and too little experience to know that there is often more fighting to do after victory than before it. Her victory had been won six months ago; but to-day, after all, she had flung herself into the embrace which then she had repulsed. Unstrung, in bitter revolt against fate and the part she had herself taken in moulding that fate, conscious only of her passionate desire for happiness—conscious, too, that the lover of to-day was not the almost suppliant of that January afternoon—she snatched up arms for a new and a different combat. The force of her love and misery rushed against Saint-Ermay like the tide, and tossing on that impetuous sea like wrack and seaweed went all maidenly reserve and pride.
“Louis, Louis,” she kept repeating over and over again, like a child, and strained him the closer, “I can’t live without you . . . I have tried, but I can’t. . . . I can’t go to England! Oh, why do you say that it is impossible?”
The sight of her beautiful, agonised face, so near his own, made Louis’ head whirl. “Because,” he said hoarsely, looking away, “I owe Gilbert my life, and I can’t do it. Let me go, my darling; it has to be.”
Even with the music of passion in his ears he was conscious of his delicate and ironical situation. It was impossible to avoid the thought that his cousin might at that very moment be coming up the stairs. Nothing but dire catastrophe for all three of them could result if it were so. But he could not bring himself to say it. As he hesitated Lucienne herself loosed her arms from about him.
“Then you do not love me, after all! . . . No, no, Louis—I did not mean it. . . . Do not look like that. . . . I did not mean it. . . . It is God who is against us!” Her voice sank. “If he saved your life——” Turning away she hid her face in her hands and broke into fresh weeping.
And—strange perversity—the moment that she saw the thing as he did, and acknowledged the inevitable, Louis would have given everything he possessed to have her in his arms again. There surged over him a mad desire to dare that inevitable, to defy Gilbert, to claim her, cost what it might. Should he do it? Her sobs, the line of her neck, her shaken body wrung his heart. . . . He could give Gilbert his life if he demanded it. . . .
And there stole into his mind the last recollection that he wished to have at such a moment, the last that he could imagine would be conjured up. For once before he had staked his life for a woman; and had been, too, within an ace of paying it: once before he had felt, with fire in his veins, that a stake so supreme ennobled the cause for which it was ventured. And had it ennobled what followed? No! a thousand times no, and Lucienne was degraded by the parallel. He trampled down the wild impulse.