"Thank you, perhaps I will," he replied in languid and exquisite English, utterly ignoring the fact that I had spoken in French. "I am happy to meet a fellow-countrywoman in this Papist land."
The ancient familiar jargon flung at me so unexpectedly, and in a voice that matched it so ill, roused me to immediate hostility. And was my French so bad that he must needs assume I was English? Or did he know? But it was my own annoyance at his Christian phrasing that annoyed me most. Though, to be sure, the voice was not a Christian's. Who could he be?
I looked more boldly, though still avoiding his eyes. It was impossible to guess his age. The fresh skin and beardless chin were a boy's, the carriage suggested a man in the prime of life, the headful of silvery-white denoted venerable age. The features were small, patrician, womanish; the mouth especially being too small for a man's, while full of pride and authority and race. A lordly and effeminate grand seigneur.
The eyes, I knew, were the key to the mysterious face, and at these I dared not look.
All these impressions must have been gathered in a second of time, for he seemed to be still in the same sentence.
"—Yes, I am happy to meet you, for I feel you are the Lord's." The languid voice fashioned such a mockery of our Brethren speech that for a moment I could have railed at him for Antichrist. Then I felt quickly that I was foolish, and let him go on. "Assure me that you are His, Mademoiselle, pray assure me."
"I may be," I said sharply, "but plain 'Miss' is good enough for me, s'il vous plait, monsieur."
"May-be, may-be!" he sneered, for I had roused his spite. "'May-be' is the cry of souls in torment, the watchword of the damned. Beware, young woman, of your woman's filthy pride. It is the snare of men, the source of all wickedness. Woman, subtle of heart and impudent of face, who hath cast down many wounded, whose house is the way to Hell—"
It was a madman. He had forgotten me, he had forgotten himself. He was hypnotizing himself with his own words; his eyes were wild and unseeing. I looked into them now. God, they were not his eyes, but my own, just as I saw them when I stared in a mirror. I was bewitched, and could only go on staring, staring. The mystical excitement seized me, the sense of physical existence departed, more surely than ever before the imminent immanent moment was upon me, I had discovered the World, I was kissing the eyes, my soul moved forward to reach him—. I found myself stumbling up from my chair in his direction, and with my ordinary eyes saw him still standing there, still intoning away, still almost unconscious of everything—but not completely, for he knew his power over me.
Suddenly, in the middle of a phrase, he stopped. I broke in quickly, in sanest worldliest fashion.