A soft light she had seen there before crept into the eyes of Bras-de-Fer. As though unconscious, she saw his extended arms thrust forward to her support and heard as from a distance the resonant voice, the notes of which, with a strange, sweet insistence, sang among her emotions until, like lute strings, they sang and trembled in return. And the chord which they awoke to melody rang through every fiber of her being with a new-pulsing joy, a splendid delight, like the full-throated song of praise of a bird at early morn.
She felt his hand seek hers. She made no move to resist him. She could not. Something in the break of his voice, the reverence in his touch, sought and subdued her. In a moment she learned that the love of a life had come and that all else was as nothing.
“Barbara! Barbara!” he was saying. “Look at me, chérie. Tell me that you are not angry. I have tried so hard to leave you—so hard. I have spoken to you bitterly and coldly, that your mind might be poisoned and frozen against me, that you might hate and despise me for the unworthy thing that I am. Alas! it is my own heart that I have pierced and broken. Look up at me, Barbara. I cannot bear to see you thus. Ah, if you had only opposed me in anger, I could have continued the deception. Your anger was my refuge. It was the only thing that made my cruelty possible. It cried aloud like a naked sword. I welcomed it, and set steel upon steel that I might shield my heart. But now, listless, yielding, submissive, you disarm me, you rob me of my only weapon. I am yours. Do with me what you will.”
His voice trembled, and he bent his head upon her hand to hide the excess of his emotion. As she felt the touch of his lips, she started and moved ever so slightly, but with no effort to withdraw. When he lifted his head it was to meet eyes that wavered and looked away.
“Do not turn from me, Barbara. Do not add to the deep measure of my contrition. The cup is full. Add to it but one drop and it will overflow. Requite me with tenderness, madame, if you can find it in your heart, for mine is very near to breaking. Look in my eyes, where my love glows like a beacon. Listen, and you will hear it speak in my voice like a young god. Can you not feel my very finger-tips singing into your palms the cadences of my heart’s chorus? Is it not thus that women wish to be loved? Search my heart as you will, you’ll find an answer there to every wish and every prayer.”
She trembled and swayed in his arms like a slender shrub in a storm. It seemed as though, in his fervor, he were running the gamut of her every vulnerable sensibility. But as she felt his breath warm upon her hair and cheek she raised her eyes until they looked into his; then drew away from him with a gentle firmness. She was perturbed and shaken with the compounding of new emotions. She could not see all things clearly. She only knew that what she had expected least had come to pass. She had burnished her woman’s weapons in vain. She had sought to delude and beguile, and had only deluded and beguiled herself. As she had promised herself, she had drawn aside the mask, but she had unmasked herself at the same time. She had sought and she had found so many things that she knew not which way to turn. She must do something to gain time to think and plan. It was all so different to London. In spite of herself, she knew that he had conquered, and a suffusion of shame that she had been so easily won mounted to her neck and forehead, and she turned her head away. And then, in a last obedience to that instinct of self-preservation which sets a woman upon the defensive when she knows not what she would defend (nor would defend it if she could), she broke away from him and stood alone, pulsing with the effort, but triumphant.
“Monsieur,” she breathed with difficulty, “it is unfair—to—to—press me so.”
But he was relentless. “Ah, madame, am I then despised, as on that night in Dorset Gardens? Nay, I am as God made me—not the thing you would have supposed—”
“Monsieur, have pity.”
“Ah, then look at me again, Barbara. Look in my face and deny. Look in my eyes, chérie—deny me if you can.”