It was so. The brilliant beauty who for two seasons had ruled the world in which she moved so imperiously—insatiate of conquest, and defying rivalry—the delicate aristocrate who from her childhood had been used to every imaginable luxury, and had appreciated them all—was found again, here, in the gray robe of a Sister of Charity, content to endure real, bitter hardships, and to witness daily sights from which womanhood, with all its bravery, must needs recoil. The motives that had urged her to such a step would be hard indeed to define. The same weariness and impatience of inaction that have been alluded to in the case of Royston Keene may have had much to do with it; to this, perhaps, was added a feeling of wild remorse, seeking to vent itself in self-torturing penance, such as impelled kings and conquerors in old days to don the palmer’s gown, and macerate their bodies by fast and scourge; there may have been, too, some vague, unacknowledged longing to seize the last chance of seeing her lost love once again. Might she not tend him as she nursed the other wounded, without adding to the weight of her sin? If she ever entertained such an idea, her punishment may well have atoned for her offense, when she came suddenly and unprepared into that sick-chamber, and looked upon the mangled wreck lying senseless there.
Royston spoke first. “What brought you here?” If it was possible that he could feel any thing like terror, surely the hollow, tremulous voice betrayed it then.
Cecil Tresilyan sprang to her feet as if an electric shock had moved her, and stood gazing at him with her great, desolate, tearless eyes; all her misery could not make them hard or haggard, nor dispel their marvelous enchantment. Royston marked the impulse that would have drawn her to his side; and threw out one weak hand to warn her off; with the other he tried to cover his own scarred, ghastly face. “Don’t come near me,” he muttered; “I can’t bear it.” Her woman’s instinct fathomed his meaning instantly: he thought that even she must shrink from him. She laughed out loud (for her brain was almost turning) as she knelt down and raised his head on her arm, and smoothed his matted hair, and kissed the death-damp from his forehead, murmuring between the caresses, “You dare not keep me from you. Do you think that I fear you, my own—my own!”
The glory of a great triumph—grand, even if sinful—lighted up the face of the dying man; and intense passion made even his voice strong and steady. “I believe this is better than the paradise we dreamed of in the island of the Greek Sea.”
Without a moment’s pause the sweet, sad voice replied, “Yes, it is better. Then I should have died first, and hopelessly. Now there is no guilt between us that may not be forgiven.”
Silence lasted till Royston gathered energy to speak again.
“You remember the glove? See—I have not parted with it yet.” He drew from his breast a case of steel links hung round his neck by a chain: it held Cecil’s gauntlet—stained and stiffened with his blood. That was the treasure he would not resign when he lay on the ground, waiting for the Russian lances. “You did not think that I should forget you, because I never answered your letter?”
As had happened once before, a portion of his fortitude and self-command seemed transfused into Cecil Tresilyan. She spoke quite steadily now.
“How could I misjudge your silence, when I begged you not to write? I have been very miserable, thinking how angry you would be; and yet I could not help what I did. But I never fancied you had forgotten me. Forgetting is not so easy. Now tell me about yourself. I have heard of that glorious charge. But those terrible wounds—how you must have suffered!”
Out of the dim, glazing eyes flashed for one moment a gleam of soldierly pride. “Yes, we rode straight, on the twenty-fifth—I among the rest. I suppose I have suffered some pain, but that is all past and gone. I am sensible of nothing but the great happiness of holding your little hand once more. See—I can hold it without shame, for my fingers have not pressed those of any woman alive since we parted.”