“My princess,” and he kissed her hand, carefully looking round to assure himself that they were alone, “I am come to ask you a last favour before the king arrives. Already his presence is signalled on the outskirts of the city.”
At that dreaded name, Blanche, whose soft face had broken into the sunniest of smiles as Don Fadique entered, trembled and sank back against the wall. At that one word, “the king,” the soft glamour her imagination had conjured up, vanished. She was the bride of the cruel tyrant all men hated. He was at hand to claim her. She burst into tears.
“Sweet Blanche,” and Don Fadique’s eyes melted at her distress, as taking her tenderly by the hand, upon which he impressed another fervent kiss, he knelt on the floor before her, “be comforted, and listen to me. The time is come when we must part. For a moment, it seemed to me a dream of heavenly bliss, and that, standing in my brother’s place, I could claim you for ever. But now I am less than nothing in your eyes. Tell me, oh, tell me,” and a sigh broke from him, so deep, his very soul seemed poured out in it, “tell me quickly, for our time is short. You will not quite hate me?”
Some wild words were on Blanche’s lips, but remembering the expostulations of Claire she checked them, blushed hotly over brow and neck, hesitated, and said nothing.
“Your pity is all I dare ask,” he continues, drawing nearer and leaning over her, as she shrinks away among a pile of embroidered cushions, anxiously turning her eyes towards the drapery behind which Claire had disappeared. “Of all men I am the most wretched. There is one whom I love more than anything on earth, and I am nothing to her. If it were not so——”
He broke off abruptly, but there is something so bitter and hopeless in his tone that, spite of an involuntary pang of jealousy, Blanche’s eyes turned on him full of sympathy.
“I am so sorry,” she replies, simply. “I think all the world should care to please you. But”—the jealous feeling is growing spite of herself—“if any one——”
At this moment Don Fadique stooped and grasped her arm with such a wild look that she stopped. “If,” lowering his voice, “if this lady,” and he paused to touch her hand, “loved me—could love me at all; if I could hold her for an instant as mine own—though the whole kingdom of Spain were between us——”
Blanche’s gaze has grown dreamy. This was love then. Simple as she was she understood it. Oh! Claire, Claire. If he felt so, what would she think of her, and her face paled and her lips quivered.
“Do I know the lady?” she asks, then pauses to steady her voice, while Fadique gazes down at her with a swift searching glance, terrified by one word to shatter the rapturous conviction which her trouble gave him.