'You dare to doubt my word!' he cried again passionately; she looked him full in the face coldly and calmly.
'Told earlier,' she said in her serenest voice, 'your comedy might have deceived even me. Told now, I do not think it would deceive the most credulous woman living—and I am not credulous. I am like Montaigne; I do not accept miracles out of church.'
His face grew white and grey with wounded pride and breathless passion as he heard her. The same sense of hopelessness which had come over so many of her lovers when driven to appeal to a mercy which had no existence in her, came over him now. He felt that one might throw one's self for ever against the smooth white marble of her soul, and never gain from it either pity or belief.
His patience was at an end, and his bitter sense of wrong, done to himself and to one absent, broke down all his self-control.
'But as God lives you shall believe!' he cried to her. 'You shall believe it for her sake, not for mine nor yours. You can cover the whole world with the fine scorn of your scepticism if you will, but you shall believe this. I may have done unwisely what I have done for her. I may have acted with that mule-like stupidity which you consider the characteristic of men. I may even, God forgive me, have not done what was best for the child herself; but in all that I have done, I have been honest in it, and not a mere lecherous egotist. You have never deigned to try and measure the feeling with which I have regarded you, but you ought, I think, to understand enough of the common honour which I share with all men who are not scoundrels, to believe in my word when I give it you. The woman with whom she lives at Les Hameaux is of good repute and blameless conduct. Rosselin, who has become her teacher, is a man too upright to accord his assistance in any common intrigue. The money I placed to her credit she imagines to be a legacy of her grandfather, whose heiress she would have been if you in a moment of unaccountable and unconsidered caprice had not tempted her to incur the old man's anger. All these things are capable of the simplest explanations. Still, I will concede that, without explanation, they may have appeared singular and suspicious to you. But, however much they may do so, I expect from you that acceptance of my bare word, that belief in my common honour, which the merest stranger to me on earth would not dare to refuse.'
She preserved her perfect composure, the rose in her breast was not ruffled by one uneven breath; she looked at him with cold, calm, unkind eyes, which never wavered in their rejection of him.
'You are melodramatic,' she said, with her serene contempt. 'Perhaps you will appear on the stage, too! I shall be glad if you will spare me more words on such a subject. I shall not resent it publicly. All I request of you is to avoid publicity in it as far as possible. That is a mere matter of good taste.'
'Good God!' he cried, beside himself. 'Do you credit that I should stand here and lie to you? Do you believe that I should stoop so low?—do you think that I come here like a comedian to repeat a monologue of my own invention? You may think what else of me that you will, but this you shall not think. I am not the lover of Damaris Bérarde; I have never been so—I shall never be so.'
'If you swore it on the lives of your own children, I would not believe you?'
Some reflex and heat of the flame of his rage caught her soul also for one sudden instant, and drew it out for that one instant from its serenity and reticence.