She made a hasty, deprecating gesture with her hand. “Oh, carry this old song elsewhere,” she said, “for I am sick of it.” There were now both scorn and weariness in her tone.
He had a singular patience, and he resented nothing. “I understand,” he went on, “what it was sent your heart his way. He came to you when you were yet a child, before you had learnt the first secret of life. He was a captive, a prisoner, he had a wound got in fair fighting, and I will do him the credit to say he was an honest man; he was no spy.”
She looked up at him with a slight flush, almost of gratitude. “I know that well,” she returned. “I knew there was other cause than spying at the base of all ill treatment of him. I know that you, you alone, kept him prisoner here five long years.”
“Not I; the Grande Marquise—for weighty reasons. You should not fret at those five years, since it gave you what you have cherished so much, a husband—after a fashion. But yet we will do him justice: he is an honourable fighter, he has parts and graces of a rude order. But he will never go far in life; he has no instincts and habits common with you; it has been, so far, a compromise, founded upon the old-fashioned romance of ill-used captive and soft-hearted maid; the compassion, too, of the superior for the low, the free for the caged.”
“Compassion such as your Excellency feels for me, no doubt,” she said, with a slow pride.
“You are caged, but you may be free,” he rejoined meaningly.
“Yes, in the same market open to him, and at the same price of honour,” she replied, with dignity.
“Will you not sit down?” he now said, motioning her to a chair politely, and taking one himself, thus pausing before he answered her.
I was prepared to see him keep a decorous distance from her. I felt he was acting upon deliberation; that he was trusting to the power of his insinuating address, his sophistry, to break down barriers. It was as if he felt himself at greater advantage, making no emotional demonstrations, so allaying her fears, giving her time to think; for it was clear he hoped to master her intelligence, so strong a part of her.
She sat down in the high-backed chair, and I noted that our batteries began to play upon the town—an unusual thing at night. It gave me a strange feeling—the perfect stillness of the holy place, the quiet movement of this tragedy before me, on which broke, with no modifying noises or turmoil, the shouting cannonade. Nature, too, it would have seemed, had forged a mood in keeping with the time, for there was no air stirring when we came in, and a strange stillness had come upon the landscape. In the pause, too, I heard a long, soft shuffling of feet in the corridor—the evening procession from the chapel—and a slow chant: