“Oh-h-h!” sighed Alice, suddenly sinking at his feet. “It was to return to my allegiance; at whatever personal risk, to yield myself to you; to abide henceforth by my duties. And oh, General Garnet, do not misunderstand me! If I have humbled myself before you—vainly, perhaps, it is not from so base a motive as fear! Oh, I have outlived and outsuffered the fear of pain—the fear of death—the fear of anything that might befall me! I am at your feet. If I have placed myself unconditionally in your hands, it is for the sake of the holiest principles, the most sacred duties. General Garnet, you believe me—I see that you do! General Garnet, listen to me farther; this is positively the first time in our married life of seventeen years that I ever opposed you.”
“The first time that you ever successfully opposed me, madam; and, by Heaven, you have made a signal beginning!” commented General Garnet, no longer speaking in a furious voice, but in the dry, hard, stern tone, and fixed, inflexible brow with which he had in the beginning of their interview heard and replied to her gentle words. The burst of violent passion had passed away and left him—the hard, scornful, sarcastic, yet cool, calculating, dissembling, most dangerous man that he was before.
Alice gazed up at his face, seeking to read the changed expression there; but it passed her skill, and she murmured slowly:
“Perhaps I was wrong; I know that under other circumstances it would have been very wrong; yet I dare not say that I regret what I did, for under the same circumstances I should do it again. Not to obtain your forgiveness would I deceive you, though to obtain it would make me comparatively happy; but I deeply regret that anything I had a hand in should give you pain. And I say, do as you please, I shall not complain, I cannot. From the one revolt of my whole life I return to a full and unconditional allegiance; there is nothing farther to disturb it, nothing to draw me aside. My love for my child only did it; that cannot move me again.”
“Ha! can it not?” he asked scornfully.
“No, no, indeed it cannot!”
“Never!”
“Never! How can my love for Elsie ever again draw me aside from you? Elsie is married and gone; now I have only you; my duty is undivided—and, oh, if you would let me, I would try to make you so happy!”
“Would you?” he asked, doubtfully, scornfully.
“Yes, I would,” she said, suddenly rising, leaning her hand upon his arm, and her head upon his shoulder, with the confidence of perfect love and faith. “Oh, Aaron, you have not been yourself for a few days past. Yet I do not love you the less on that account; indeed, I do not. Oh, Aaron, I can excuse your violence more than you can excuse yourself, I know, for I have been used to it in others. My father was violent sometimes. And I know that anger is a brief intoxication—’a short madness’—in which people do and say what they never intended. Come, you are not angry now; you are smiling; and I—I can only repeat what I said in the beginning, ‘Let us forgive each other, and live better and happier all our future lives.’ That is right—put your arm around me, dear Aaron, for I am very weak.”