"No trifling! Answer—yes or no!"
"Well! 'no,' then, monsieur. Since you will have the truth, do not blame me if you find it uncomplimentary and unacceptable."
He let go her hands and reeled back, staggered, as if struck by a shot.
"Mon Dieu! it is true—you love me no longer! And you tell it me thus!"
Madame la Marquise, for an instant, was silenced and touched; for the words were uttered with the faint cry of a man in agony, and she saw, even by the dim twilight of dawn, how livid his lips turned, how ashy gray grew the hue of his face. But she smiled, playing with Osmin's new collar of pearls and coral.
"Tell it you 'thus'? I would not have told it you 'thus,' monsieur, if you had been content with a hint, and had not evinced so strong a desire for candor undisguised; but if people will not comprehend a delicate suggestion, they must be wounded by plainer truths—it is their own fault. Did you think I was like a little shepherdess in a pastoral, to play the childish game of constancy without variations? Had you presumption enough to fancy you could amuse me for ever——"
He stopped her, his voice broken and hoarse, as he gasped for breath.
"Silence! Woman, have you no mercy? For you—for such as you—I have flung away heaven, steeped myself in sin, lost my church, my peace, my all—forfeited all right to the reverence of my fellows, all hope for the smile of my God! For you—for such as you—I have become a traitor, a hypocrite, an apostate, whose prayers are insults, whose professions are lies, whose oaths are perjury! At your smile, I have flung away eternity; for your kiss, I have risked my life here, my life hereafter; for your love, I held no price too vast to pay; weighed with it, honor, faith, heaven, all seemed valueless—all were forgotten! You lured me from tranquil calm, you broke in on the days of peace which but for you were unbroken still, you haunted my prayers, you placed yourself between Heaven and me, you planned to conquer my anchorite's pride, you wagered you would lure me from my priestly vows, and yet you have so little mercy, that when your bet is won, when your amusement grows stale, when the victory grows valueless, you can turn on me with words like these without one self-reproach?"
"Ma foi, monsieur! it is you who may reproach yourself, not I," cried his hearer, insolently. "Are you so very provincial still, that you are ignorant that when a lover has ceased to please he has to blame his own lack of power to retain any love he may have won, and is far too well-bred to utter a complaint? Your language is very new to me. Most men, monsieur, would be grateful for my slightest preference; I permit none to rebuke me for either giving or withdrawing it."
The eyes of Madame la Marquise sparkled angrily, and the smile on her lips was a deadly one, full of irony, full of malice. As he beheld it, the scales fell at last from the eyes of Gaston de Launay, and he saw what this woman was whom he had worshipped with such mad, blind, idolatrous passion.