Éloin had already hastened on to the screen of roses. Being a fellow of the arras and closets, he scented a royal secret. The Empress lifted her shoulders and would have followed, but Driscoll did not hesitate. He took her by the elbow and gently turned her the other way.
257“You must not!” he said again, with that same scared manner on him.
She bridled indignantly, but when she saw how white he was, and how earnest, something there awed her. In a flash she understood. Her lip curled, baring teeth of the purest pearl, and a sneer quivered on the highbred nostrils. But suddenly, in piteous tumult, her breast heaved once, and betrayed the wound. It gave him to know the knighthood which covets blows in a woman’s behalf. But she, with a will that held him in admiration and reverence for her, spoke to him, and her tone was even, was unbroken.
“I dare say you are right,” she said, and turned to retrace her steps. But, as if to drink deeper of the bitter cup, she paused, and forced herself to a last word.
“I suppose I should thank you,” she went on, and her eyes, still dry of tears, were lustrous as they lifted to his, “but a gentleman–and I have never known one more than you, sir, this minute past–will understand that I cannot–There, I am going now. And after–after this that you have just beheld, I shall never see you again, sir. Alas, it’s the more pity. Such as you are rare, even in–in my world.”
Driscoll watched her blankly as she left him, her head poised high, her step as slow as dignity itself. His own face was cruelly drawn, with the first sickened ghastliness still on him. He stumbled to a bench, and sat down. But there was nothing to think about, nothing he could think about, just then. Yet his brain was full to throbbing, and he had no consciousness of where he was, nor of the passage of time.
258CHAPTER XXXII
The Woman Who Did Not Hesitate
“The soul of man is infinite in what it covets.”
–Ben Jonson.