"Wretch, name her not!"
"Well, if I am such a rascal that your precious saints will not interest themselves in my affairs, I must just have recourse to the schnaps in the first place, and the devil in the second—ha! ha! What a hen-hearted fellow I am to sit here all night without having one kiss from you! Trumpery! I am turning a cowardly blunderbuss, like Bernhard; and now, when I think of it, I wonder why that schwindler tarries with my thousand ducats. Lady," continued this ogre, with a ghastly leer; "I am rich. In this mail are bills on the Imperial treasury, and gold to the value of a hundred thousand dollars—the fruits of many years of valour and industry."
"Murder and espionage."
"Call it what you will—call it what you will! With that sum I can purchase a county, either in Germany or Naples, and thou shalt share that county with me."
Ernestine almost uttered a scornful laugh.
"'Twill be a glorious revenge upon that haughty noble, who, when caprioling through the streets of Vienna with all his waving feathers and plates of polished steel, rode over me near the palace gate, and passed on without pity, because I was Bandolo—'twill be a glorious vengeance, I say, when this man, Rupert Count of Carlstein, Lord of Giezar and Kœningratz, has to greet me as his son-in-law—ha! ha!" He attempted to take in his the hand of Ernestine.
"For the sake of Heaven, do not sully me by your touch!"
"Beware, lest by haughty words and scornful glances you turn my softness to anger; my love to hatred; my persuasions to that violence which I may put in force when I choose; and thus, in grim earnest, sully the illustrious blood of Carlstein—ha! ha! Sully, I think, was the term you used, lady—as if the blood in one body was better, or purer, or more divine, than the blood in another."
Full of scorn and fear, Ernestine gazed at him as she would have gazed at a serpent. Anger and horror alternately rendered her silent and motionless. At times she could scarcely believe that all she saw and heard was real—that she was so completely in the power of this man, the touch of whose hand—that hand so often dipped in human blood—struck a chill through her. Was she really awake? Was it not all a hideous dream, from which she would awake to find herself by her sister's side, in their little bed-chamber at Nyekiöbing?
"Mercy on me!" she thought wildly; "to what a fate am I exposed! Here, without a hope, without a chance of escape, but by death—and not even by that, for I am without a poniard. Oh, wretch! would that I could find one, either for myself or for thee!"