"My own, my very own," Humphrey whispered. "Ah! if it were not that it was I who took the first step to send that unhappy man and woman to their fate, I should carry no regrets away with me. De Beaurepaire was ever kind and gracious to me; I made him but a poor return."
"Nay, say not so. He would have overthrown the King who had done all for him; his myrmidons would have slain you. Your duty lay along the road you took, you could have travelled no other. Had you held your peace, had you let the King fall a victim to him and those who egged him on to such wickedness--the King who persuaded your own King to do justice to you--then would you not have been the hero in my eyes that you are."
"A hero. I? Ah, no! What did I do to earn that name? What, except bring the Prince to his fate?"
"Humphrey. Humphrey, my love, my husband that is to be, do not palter with yourself. Did you not risk your life against those men at Basle rather than consent to keep silence upon their hateful plot? Would you not have slain that bravo had he not played the coward; would you not sooner have slain yourself than become one of them? That--that--was hero's work; as a hero will you ever stand in my eyes."
Wherefore those words of the old dramatist, Quinault, Les drames sans héros ni héroïne sont les vrais drames, true as their philosophy may be in general, were not so in this particular. For he who, by his actions in an actual human drama, can earn the opinion of the creature he loves best in this world--the woman who is his wife--as well as the opinion of a despotic monarch, that he is a hero, has scarcely failed to disprove that old writer's remark.
It is not, consequently, to be denied that, in the drama of De Beaurepaire's last year of life, if he was no hero at least Humphrey West was one, while was not Emérance a heroine in a different manner? Not a good heroine, it is true, but a heroine in the same manner as Rodogune, as Phædra, were. A heroine who, though the words were not written ere she died, justified the poet's line: "All for love and the world well lost."