“Well!” thought Caracal, “this is getting to be amusing. I had thought all my chances lost, but they are coming back. Miss Ethel is still free! Helia a duchess! Well, stranger things have been seen; but all the same it is funny. After my ‘House of Glass’ and ‘Worms from a Dung-hill’ I shall study from nature a ducal marriage and make it a roman à clef! I shall write up every class of society—bourgeois, peasants, and princes! He certainly will marry her: you can’t trifle with an oath among such a population of fools; there are currents you can’t stem.”
And so Caracal shouted louder than the others: “Long live Morgana! Long live the duchess!” Then he offered his arm to Miss Rowrer, who refused it!
“What are they crying ‘Long live the duchess!’ for?” she asked Caracal, as they issued from beneath the steel arch, surrounded by children who wafted kisses toward them and bombarded them with flowers. Caracal recounted the oath which had been taken in presence of the people, and before God. The duke had sworn to offer the heroine his titles and his throne.
“Poor duke!” thought Ethel; “he really believed it was I—otherwise he would have sworn to nothing. Well, let it be so! We shall see if an oath is a sacred thing, or if women are only dolls for amusement. We shall see if the duke is a man!”
Ethel now knew the whole story. On the yacht, that very evening, she had chanced to hear Helia talking with Suzanne. Their few words had been a revelation to her. She had already imagined what now she knew. The cow painting in the Luxembourg, the whole little combination invented by Caracal, all the coarse horse-play—ah! if Phil thought she was going to think less of him because of it, how mistaken he was! All that was about as important to her as Mr. Charley’s hair, brushed like a horse’s mane, and his velvet trousers—less than nothing at all! But Phil had other reasons to blush for himself, indeed. She understood his embarrassed air when he spoke of Helia. That he should promise marriage with an oath, should give hopes of happiness to Helia and lift her above her position, and then thrust her back into her hard life—that Phil, a Christian and an American, should do a thing like that! Ethel also knew the duke’s love-making to Helia. Poor Helia! simply a plaything for those two men!
“The duke stood alone”
She looked with admiration at the splendid couple before her,—the duke and Helia,—without a glance at the two men beside her—Phil and Caracal.
Helia was superb. The red lights, shaken by the wind, illuminated her. The popular enthusiasm was beyond description; the crowd pressed forward behind the torch-bearers along the way. They touched her garments like the relics of a saint. The women lifted up their children to make them see Morgana. Young girls sang in chorus, while young men twirled their sabers aloft in warlike rhythm.