“After all, I know not why we should pity Father Egremont. He died in his white-souled youth, and very gloriously. Of all deaths one should wish to die for one’s duty, for one’s country, one’s king, and one’s religion.”
Bess looked at Michelle with a kind of horror. With all Bess Lukens’s large and liberal soul, she had very little idea of noblesse oblige. She would have died cheerfully for a person, but not for a cause. This was something not to be understood by her. Stout Protestant as she was, she was no candidate for martyrdom, and she regarded these notions of devotion to an abstract thing as an evidence of cold-heartedness. As she had never happened to see it except among the great, she rashly concluded that it was due to their insensibility. Especially was she prone to think so in this case, for between the Princess Michelle and Bess Lukens was that armed neutrality which must ever exist between two women who love the same man. Bess was ready enough to admit that she was no mate for Roger Egremont, or any gentleman of his caste, but she did not love the woman who was fitting to be his mate, and was prone to see evil in her. She looked at Michelle with bitterly reproachful eyes, and burst out with,—
“That is the way with you fine ladies. You don’t care, not you, that the poor lad is gone; and let me tell you, the death that Dicky Egremont died is a very awful one. I never saw one before, though I was brought up in Newgate gaol, where my uncle was turnkey; and I can tell you, to see that innocent young man led forth, and that bloody butcher, the hangman, making ready with his great knife, and the cutting up alive—”
The recollection of these horrors so worked upon Bess that she bowed her face in her hands; but in a little while it came to her that she had betrayed the secret she was most anxious to conceal,—the secret of her origin,—and had betrayed it to the last person on earth she wished to know it. But this unfortunate admission on the part of this untrained woman of the people was matched instantly with one made by a princess bred in courts,—such damage will women do themselves when playing with the edged tools of the emotions. Michelle said, in a voice which showed the deepest agitation,—
“Mr. Roger Egremont told me that you had been kind to him when he was in prison in England, but he did not tell me that you were the niece of his gaoler. You saw him, then, every day?”
“Every day for more than three years, madam,” replied Bess. Both women had risen then, and were facing each other, Bess crimson and defiant, Michelle pale and profoundly agitated. Some wild impulse, the insane desire to know all, forced her to continue asking questions which filled her soul with shame, but yet which she could not refrain from asking.
“You followed him to St. Germains, then?”
“I came to France, madam,” replied Bess, “because I felt I could never rise, but would rather sink lower in England, and because King James is my king, and not the Prince of Orange. I own to you, had I not known Mr. Roger Egremont was in France, I should hardly have come. And he has repaid me, a thousand times and more, what little I did for him in Newgate gaol.”
Michelle continued looking at Bess with a hostile and jealous gaze quite beyond her to control, and Bess returned the gaze with interest.
“And is it possible—” Michelle began, and then stopped.