"How?" she asked--and now I noticed that in her face there seemed to be a look of dawning hope, a look too, as though with that newborn hope there was a return of strength accompanied by an absence of such utter despair as had broken her down. "How know you that?"
"I was there in the court when he was tried," I said, "I heard his words--and none who heard them could doubt their truth, no more than they could his fierce denouncement of that unutterable villain, Eaton. Juana," I said, endeavouring to speak as impressively as was in my power, to thrust home more decisively the growing conviction to her heart that Gramont was not the devil he had been painted, "you must teach yourself to think less ill of your father than report has made him. And--and remember, he could have escaped an he would; it was, as that man said, a sublime sacrifice when he went to his doom."
"But why?" she asked, "why?" Though even as she did so, I saw, I knew, that in her heart there was the hope and wish to find something that might whiten his memory for her.
"Why," I repeated, bending near to her, speaking as deeply and earnestly as I could; above all, the softened feeling I was endeavouring to bring about in her heart toward that lost, dead father must be made to grow, until at last she should regard his memory with pity if naught else. "Why, because as I do believe, as I believe before God, he knew we loved each other, Juana----"
"Ah, Mervan!"
"Because his life was already far spent, because ours were in their spring; because, it may be, he knew that with him gone and me escaped in his place there was the hope of many happy years before you--with me--of years always together, of our being ever by each other's side until the end. Juana, my beloved, my love, think not of him as one beyond pardon and redemption, but rather as one who purified forever the errors of his life by the deep tenderness and sacrifice of his end."
I had won.
As I concluded she raised herself from the pillows on which she lay, the long shapely arms met round my neck, the dark curly head sank to my shoulder; soon nothing broke the silence of the room but her sobs. Yet ever and again she whispered through her tears: "My father, my unhappy father. May God forgive me if I have judged you too harshly."
Soon after that I left her sleeping peacefully and with, as it seemed to me, much of her fever gone--yet even as she slept I, sitting watching by her side, saw still the tears trickle forth from beneath the long eyelashes that fringed her cheeks, and knew that in her sleep she was dreaming of him.
But again I told myself that I had won; that henceforth the memory of her father's erring life would not stand between her and me, between our love.