Her love must needs be weak, her pledge to the gods must needs be but imperfectly redeemed, since she, who had bade them let her perish in his stead, recoiled from the lingering living death of any shame, if such could save him.
The sweet voice of Sartorian murmured on:
"Nay; it were easy. He has many foes. He daunts the world and scourges it. Men hate him, and thrust him into oblivion. Yet it were easy!—a few praises to the powerful, a few bribes to the base, and yonder thing once lifted up in the full light of the world, would make him great—beyond any man's dispute—forever. I could do it, almost in a day; and he need never know. But, then, you are not tired, Folle-Farine!"
She writhed from him, as the doe struck to the ground writhes from the hounds at her throat.
"Kill me!" she muttered. "Will not that serve you? Kill me—and save him!"
Sartorian smiled.
"Ah! you are but weak, after all, Folle-Farine. You would die for that man's single sake,—so you say; and yet it is not him whom you love. It is yourself. If this passion of yours were great and pure, as you say, would you pause? Could you ask yourself twice if what you think your shame would not grow noble and pure beyond all honor, being embraced for his sake? Nay; you are weak, like all your sex. You would die, so you say. To say it is easy; but to live, that were harder. You will not sacrifice yourself—so. And yet it were greater far, Folle-Farine, to endure for his sake in silence one look of his scorn, than to brave, in visionary phrase, the thrusts of a thousand daggers, the pangs of a thousand deaths. Kill you! vain words cost but little. But to save him by sacrifice that he shall never acknowledge; to reach a heroism which he shall ever regard as a cowardice; to live and see him pass you by in cold contempt, while in your heart you shut your secret, and know that you have given him his soul's desire, and saved the genius in him from a madman's cell and from a pauper's grave—ah! that is beyond you; beyond any woman, perhaps. And yet your love seemed great enough almost to reach such a height as this, I thought."
He looked at her once, then turned away.
He left in her soul the barbed sting of remorse. He had made her think her faith, her love, her strength, her sinless force, were but the cowardly fruit of cruelest self-love, that dared all things in words—yet in act failed.
To save him by any martyrdom of her body or her soul, so she had sworn; yet now!—Suddenly she seemed base to herself, and timorous, and false.