"Not you," she answered, gravely. "I am too deeply in your debt, Monsieur
Bulmer, to think of marrying you."
"You refuse," he said, "because you have known for some days past that I loved you. Yet it is really this fact which gives me my claim to become your husband. You have need of a man to do you this little service. I know of at least one person whose happiness it would be to die if thereby he might save you a toothache. This man you cannot deny—you have not the right to deny this man his single opportunity of serving you."
"I like you very much," she faltered; and then, with disheartening hastiness, "Of course, I like you very much; but I am not in love with you."
He shook his head at her, "I would think the worse of your intellect if you were. I adore you. Granted: but that constitutes no cut-throat mortgage. It is merely a state of mind which I have somehow blundered into, and with which you have no concern. So I ask nothing of you save to marry me. You may, if you like, look upon me as insane; it is the view toward which I myself incline. However, mine is a domesticated mania and vexes no one save myself; and even I derive no little amusement from its manifestations. Eh, Monsieur Jourdain may laugh at me for a puling lover!" cried John Bulmer; "but, heavens! if only he could see the unplumbed depths of ludicrousness I discover in my own soul! The mirth of Atlas could not do it justice."
Claire meditated for a while, her eyes inscrutable and yet not unkindly. "It shall be as you will," she said at last. "Yes, certainly, I will marry you."
"O Mother of God!" said the Dominican, in profound disgust; "I cannot marry two maniacs." But, in view of John Bulmer's sword and pistol, he went through the ceremony without further protest.
And something embryonic in John Bulmer seemed to come, with the knave's benediction, into flowerage. He saw, as if upon a sudden, how fine she was; all the gracious and friendly youth of her: and he deliberated, dizzily, the awe of her spirited and alert eyes; why, the woman was afraid of him! That sunny and vivid glade had become, to him, an island about which past happenings lapped like a fretted sea. "Dear me!" he reflected, "but I am really in a very bad way indeed."
Now Mistress Bulmer gazed shyly at her husband. "We will go back to
Bellegarde," Claire began, "and inform Louis de Soyecourt that I cannot
marry the Duke of Ormskirk, because I have already married you, Jean
Bulmer,—"
"I would follow you," said John Bulmer, "though hell yawned between us. I employ the particular expression as customary in all these cases of romantic infatuation."
"Yet I," the Friar observed, "would, to the contrary, advise removal from
Poictesme as soon as may be possible. For I warn you that if you return to
Bellegarde, Monsieur de Soyecourt will have you hanged."