“How? What do you say, my love?”
“My voice and stringed instrument have pleased my master, and I would crave of him a boon.”
“Dearest love! do not use such a phrase, even in the wantonness of your sport.”
“What is, then, Mr. Helmstedt but Marguerite’s master?”
“Her own faithful lover, husband, servant, all in one; and my lady knows she has but to speak and her will is law,” said Philip, gallantly.
“Away with such tinsel flattery. In ‘grand gravity,’ as my dear father used to say, I am no longer my own, but yours—I cannot come or go, change my residence, sell or purchase property, make a contract or prosecute an offender, or do anything else that a free woman would do, without your sanction. You are my master—my owner.”
Was this possible? her master? the master of this proud and gifted woman, who ever before had looked and stepped, and spoken like a sovereign queen? Yes, it is true; he knew it before, but now from her own glowing lips it came, bringing a new, strong, thrilling, and most delicious sense of possession and realization, and his eye traveled delightedly over the enchanting face and form of his beautiful wife, as his heart repeated, “She speaks but truth—she, with all her wondrous dower of beauty and genius and learning is solely mine—my own, own! I wish the prerogative were even greater. I would have the power of life and death over this glorious creature, that were I about myself to die, I could slay her lest another should ever possess her;” but his lips spoke otherwise.
“Dear love,” he said, drawing her up to him, “we all know that the one-sided statute, a barbarous remnant of the dark ages, invests a husband with certain very harsh powers; but it is almost a dead letter. Who in this enlightened age thinks of acting upon it? Never reproach me with a bad law I had no hand in making, sweet love.”
“‘Reproach’ you, Philip!” she whispered, yielding herself to his caress; “no! if the law were a hundredfold stricter, investing you with power over your Marguerite a hundredfold greater, she would not complain of it; for it cannot give so much as her heart gives you ever and ever! Should it clothe you with the power of life and death over her, it would be no more than your power now, for the sword could not kill more surely, Philip, than your possible unkindness would. No! were the statutes a thousand times more arbitrary, and your own nature more despotic, they nor you could exact never so much as my heart pours freely out to you, ever and ever.”
He answered only by folding her closer to his bosom, and then said: