“You make me boil!” she went on, clenching her little fists. “Don’t you know that Piotr adores you? That he is you, your very image, although his coloring is more like his mother’s? Oh, Basil, your own little son! How dare you think of making him responsible! Why, he is you! you! you!”
With a smothered oath Basil leaped to his feet, white as his sporting-cravat.
“What makes you act so?” she asked, rising quickly and trying to confront him; but he turned his back upon her and pushed off her detaining hand.
“Have you gone distracted?” she asked, and then stopped appalled, for his shoulders were shaking suspiciously. Trembling like a leaf, she stepped back in positive terror. She had never seen a man cry, and it is a sorrowful experience indeed when the man is a man.
“Basil,” she whispered. “Basil! Please! Please don’t! I did not mean to hurt you.... Oh, please forgive me, Basil!”
Struggling furiously with himself, cursing his fool’s behavior with all the might of his being, he could not at first wrest the mastery, but in a few short moments he turned toward her, and in an almost inaudible voice begged her pardon.
“My pardon!” she tremulously murmured. “Mine? It is I who was in the wrong to torment you as I did. You know best what to do, of course. No doubt you have your reasons—reasons you will not tell me, although I think you should. But I am stupid—I know that—so don’t remember what I said. Leave us Piotr. We will look after him well, and teach him how to love you more and more every day, so that when you come home at last this strange feeling of yours will be gone.”
There was something so delicately childlike, so innocent and so crystal-pure in the words, that Basil felt tempted to kneel down in worship before her. What call had he to bring so near to her his thoughts of bitterness and revolt, his conviction that the child he was ready enough to confide to her bore the stain of antenatal dishonor? It was nothing short of blasphemy, of desecration, to have done this. And in his heart he thanked Heaven that, however imprudent his words had been, she, being what she was, could not guess what they portended.
The scene had been short, but it had left such traces upon both that when they slowly returned to their horses old Ireland almost cried out at the sight of them. He was wise in his generation, though, and the impassiveness with which he regirthed “The Cid,” “Narses,” and his own mount, would have done credit to an articulated wooden image; but pounding behind them along the sunken forest road, where the twelve hoof-strokes fell hushedly upon the damp turf, he sadly reflected upon a future that seemed somber enough for his beloved young mistress. His shrewd wits had been alive for many a long month to the trouble that—as far as he knew—had begun for Mademoiselle “Gamin” at the time of that other ride in the woods to the “Rock of the Seven Sages” at Plenhöel. He had wondered vastly at Prince Basil’s obtuseness (saving his presence), marveled over the aberration of taste that had caused this great gentleman to prefer Miss Seton to Marguerite; and ever since, during their now countless excursions over field and moor, forest and valley, he had watched over Le Chevalier “Gamin” as tenderly and pitifully as a mother might have done. And what was there amiss again? Surely Prince Basil was free now, and the legal formalities over, with a decorous interval added thereto, he could lead Mademoiselle de Plenhöel to the altar? Why those tears, then? Why the agitation and distress he had not been able to avoid noticing from his post beneath the trees some yards away? Was there more misery coming to her? No! that he could not believe. God is just and kind—he was sure of that—and could not but protect this little angel from Paradise, so true, so loyal, and so faithful!
On the morrow it was he, Ireland, the old piqueux, who sat beside His Serene-Highness in a dog-cart—by Basil’s own request—to go to the station. The funereal expressage had been seen to, Laurence was making her last princely progress to the great White Empire she had so absolutely abhorred, and Tatiana began to hope that soon, save for the exquisitely tended spot where Preston Wynne slept, the whole grewsome tragedy would be forgotten.