"Too common, Monsieur," she broke in, her eyes blazing, her hands clenched in her lap as again she shrank back as far as the hollows of the chair would let her. "Oh, you honourable gentlemen! Do you think that because I am Suzanne de Narbonne and she a peasant I care nothing for her womanhood? Shame, Monsieur Hellewyl, shame; she is my sister."
"I thought you trusted me, Mademoiselle?" I retorted, not sorry she had put herself in the wrong.
"I said so, Monsieur, but this common story of yours——"
"Is it not common that a man should think himself in love with the one pretty face he has ever seen in his life? that he should dress her coarse mind with the graces he knew later had never touched her, no, not for an hour? that he should hold her sacred for her very womanhood, and worship as God's fine gold what, when his knowledge wakened, he knew to be at its best but honest potters' clay? Is it——"
"Yes, Monsieur," she interrupted softly, and stretching her open hand across the angle of the table, "that last at least is so uncommon from a Seigneur of where you will to a peasant born in his woods, that I may be forgiven if for a minute I doubted. Am I forgiven, Monsieur Gaspard?"
It was a return of the old Suzanne D'Orfeuil, and resting her hand on mine, I kissed it as I might have kissed a Queen's, or no, not quite: if the kiss was reverent and carefully passionless, the touch of the lips lingered a moment or two beyond the nice allotment of ceremony.
"No woods of mine, for I owned not one rood of the land nor stick of the timber."
"Never mind that," she answered, withdrawing her hand; "you understand my meaning, and I think I need hear no more of the woods of Flanders. What of the hostage in Plessis?"
The rest was easy; not even when the King put the construction he did on the mention of Brigitta's name did the softness wither from her face. Only at the grim picture of how other limbs would writhe in my default, and a tortured woman scream her curse of Gaspard Hellewyl, she drew in her breath with a shudder, covering her eyes with her hand as if to shut out the sight. Nor, when I had ended, did she say more than—"Yes, you are right, and Father Paul was right; there is nothing for it but Plessis and the King's mercy."
The King's mercy! I had it in my heart to copy her bitter phrase: Morsigny must indeed be remote from Plessis when you talk of the King's mercy! But her white face restrained me. And why recall the only reproach she ever uttered?