The wooing which followed made a curious impression; this impression was not only produced upon the house, but upon both Prince and Princess.
Priscilla, too, had encountered Hammond’s earnest gaze. That gaze fired her heart, and she became once again not herself but he; poor, awkward, and gauche little Prissie sank out of sight; she was Hammond pleading his own cause, she was wooing Maggie for him in the words of Tennyson’s Prince. This fact was the secret of Priscilla’s power; she had felt it more or less whenever she acted the part of the Prince; but, on this occasion, she communicated the sensations which animated her own breast to Maggie. Maggie, too, felt that Hammond was speaking to her through Priscilla’s voice.
“I cannot cease to follow you, as they say
The seal does music; who desire you more
Than growing boys their manhood; dying lips,
With many thousand matters left to do,
The breath of life; O more than poor men wealth,
Than sick men health—yours, yours, not mine—but half
Without you; with you, whole; and of those halves
You worthiest, and howe’er you block and bar
Your heart with system out from mine, I hold
That it becomes no man to nurse despair,
But in the teeth of clench’d antagonisms
To follow up the worthiest till he die.”
In the impassioned reply which followed this address it was noticed for the first time by the spectators that Maggie scarcely did herself justice. Her exclamation—
“I wed with thee! I, bound by precontract
Your bride, your bond-slave!”
was scarcely uttered with the scorn which such a girl would throw into the words if her heart went with them.
The rest of the play proceeded well; the Prince following up his advantage, until his last words—
“Accomplish thou my manhood and thyself;
Lay thy sweet hands in mine and trust to me,”
brought down the house with ringing applause.
The curtain fell and rose again. The Prince and Princess stood with hands clasped. The eyes of the conquered Princess looked again at the people in the gallery, but the eyes she wanted to see did not meet hers.