“I know well, that my dear father was under a delusion upon this subject; but I, from whom that dear child concealed nothing——”
“Except her religion,” interrupted Fulvius, with bitter irony.
“Peace!” Fabiola went on; “that word sounds like a blasphemy on your lips—I knew that you were but an object of loathing and abhorrence to her.”
“Yes, after you had made me such. From that hour of our first meeting you became my bitter and unrelenting foe, in conspiracy with that treacherous officer, who has received his reward, and whom you had destined for the place I courted. Repress your indignation, lady, for I will be heard out,—you undermined my character, you poisoned her feelings, and you turned my love into necessary enmity.”
“Your love!” now broke in the indignant lady; “even if all that you have said were not basely false, what love could you have for her? How could you appreciate her artless simplicity, her genuine honesty, her rare understanding, her candid innocence, any more than the wolf can value the lamb’s gentleness, or the vulture the dove’s mildness? No, it was her wealth, her family connection, her nobility, that you grasped at, and nothing more; I read it in the very flash of your eye, when first it fixed itself, as a basilisk’s, upon her.”
“It is false!” he rejoined; “had I obtained my request, had I been thus worthily mated, I should have been found equal to my position, domestic, contented, and affectionate; as worthy of possessing her as——”
“As any one can be,” struck in Fabiola, “who, in offering his hand, expresses himself equally ready, in three hours, to espouse or to murder the object of his affection. And she prefers the latter, and he keeps his word. Begone from my presence; you taint the very atmosphere in which you move.”
“I will leave when I have accomplished my task, and you will have little reason to rejoice when I do. You have then purposely, and unprovoked, blighted and destroyed in me every honorable purpose of life, withered my only hope, cut me off from rank, society, respectable ease, and domestic happiness.
“That was not enough. After acting in that character, with which you summed up my condemnation, of a spy, and listened to my conversation, you this morning threw off all sense of female propriety, and stood forward prominently in the Forum, to complete in public what you had begun in private, excite against me the supreme tribunal, and through it the emperor, and arouse an unjust popular outcry and vengeance; such as, but for a feeling stronger than fear, which brings me hither, would make me now skulk, like a hunted wolf, till I could steal out of the nearest gate.”
“And, Fulvius, I tell you,” interposed Fabiola, “that the moment you cross its threshold, the average of virtue will be raised in this wicked city. Again I bid you depart from my house, at least; or at any rate I will withdraw from this offensive intrusion.”