"I smiled involuntarily:
"'My good woman, men of my class don't marry every pretty face they meet; we are not so fond of the institution. You mean well, I know; at the same time, you are deucedly impertinent, and I am not accustomed to interference. Have the goodness to let me pass, if you please.'
"But she would not move. She folded her arms across her chest, quivering from head to foot with passion, her deep-set eyes flashing like coals under her bushy eyebrows.
"'M'sieu, I understand you well enough. The house of the L'Heris is fallen, ruined, and beggared, and you deem dishonor may approach it unrebuked and unrevenged. Listen to me, m'sieu; I am but a woman, it is true, and old, but I swore by Heaven and Our Lady to the Sieur de l'Heris, when he lay dying yonder, years ago, that I would serve the child he left, as my forefathers had served his in peace and war for centuries, and keep and guard her as best I might dearer than my own heart's blood. Listen to me. Before this love of yours shall breathe another word into her ear to scorch and sully it; before your lips shall ever meet hers again; before you say again to a De l'Heris poor and powerless, what you would never have dared to say to a De l'Heris rich and powerful, I will defend her as the eagles by the Nid de l'Aigle defend their young. You shall only reach her across my dead body!'
"She spoke with the vehemence and passionate gesticulation of a Southern; in her patois, it is true, and with rude eloquence, but there was an odd timbre of pathos in her voice, harsh though it was, and a certain wild dignity about her through the very earnestness and passion that inspired her. I told her she was mad, and would have put her out of my path, but, planting herself before me, she laid hold of my arm so firmly that I could not have pushed forwards without violence, which I would not have used to a woman, and a woman, moreover, as old as she was.
"'Listen to one word more, m'sieu. I know not what title you may bear in your own country, but I saw a coronet upon your handkerchief the other day, and I can tell you are a grand seigneur—you have the air of it, the manner. M'sieu, you can have many women to love you; cannot you spare this one? you must have many pleasures, pursuits, enjoyments in your world, can you not leave me this single treasure? Think, m'sieu! If Ma'amselle Florelle loves you now, she will love you only the dearer as years go on; and you, you will tire of her, weary of her, want change, fresh beauty, new excitement—you must know that you will, or why should you shrink from the bondage of marriage?—you will weary of her; you will neglect her first and desert her afterwards; what will be the child's life then? Think! You have done her cruel harm enough now with your wooing words, why will you do her more? What is your love beside hers? If you have heart or conscience, you cannot dare to contrast them together; she would give up everything for you, and you would give up nothing! M'sieu, Florelle is not like the women of your world; she is innocent of evil as the holy saints; those who meet her should guard her from the knowledge, and not lead her to it. Were the Sieur De l'Heris living now, were her House powerful as I have known them, would you have dared or dreamt of seeking her as you do now? M'sieu, he who wrongs trust, betrays hospitality, and takes advantage of that very purity, guilelessness, and want of due protection which should be the best and strongest appeal to every man of chivalry and honor—he, whoever he be, the De l'Heris would have held, as what he is, a coward! Will you not now have pity upon the child, and let her go?'
"I have seldom been moved in, never been swayed from, any pursuit or any purpose, whether of love, or pleasure, or ambition; but something in old Cazot's words stirred me strangely, more strangely still from the daring and singularity of the speaker. Her intense love for her young charge gave her pathos, eloquence, and even a certain rude majesty, as she spoke; her bronzed wrinkled features worked with emotions she could not repress, and hot tears fell over her hard cheeks. I felt that what she said was true; that as surely as the night follows the day would weariness of it succeed to my love for Florelle, that to the hospitality I had so readily received I had, in truth, given but an ill return, and that I had deliberately taken advantage of the very ignorance of the world and faith in me which should have most appealed to my honor. I knew that what she said was true, and this epithet of 'coward' hit me harder from the lips of a woman, on whom her sex would not let me avenge it, with whom my conscience would not let me dispute it, than it would have done from any man. I called a coward by an old peasant woman! absurd idea enough, wasn't it? It is a more absurd one still that I could not listen to her unmoved, that her words touched me—how or why I could not have told—stirred up in me something of weakness, unselfishness, or chivalrousness—I know not what exactly—that prompted me for once to give up my own egotistical evanescent passions and act to Florelle as though all the males of her house were on earth to make me render account of my acts. At old Cazot's words I shrank for once from my own motives and my own desires, shrank from classing Florelle with the cocottes of my world, from bringing her down to their level and their life.
"'You will have pity on her, m'sieu, and go?' asked old Cazot, more softly, as she looked in my face.
"I did not answer her, but put her aside out of my way, went down the mountain-path to where my horse was left cropping the grass on the level ground beneath a plane-tree, and rode at a gallop into Luz without looking back at the gray-turreted ruins of the Nid de l'Aigle.
"And I left Luz that night without seeing Florelle de l'Heris again—a tardy kindness—one, perhaps, as cruel as the cruelty from which old Cazot had protected her. Don't you think I was a fool, indeed, for once in my life, to listen to an old woman's prating? Call me so if you like, I shall not dispute it; we hardly know when we are fools, and when wise men! Well! I have not been much given to such weaknesses.