“God reward you! God keep you! If I stay, I shall tell you all. Let me go, and forget that we ever met! I am dead—let me be dead to you!”
With another instant he had left the tent and passed out into the red glow of the torchlit evening. And Venetia Corona dropped her proud head down upon the silken cushions where his own had rested, and wept as women weep over their dead—in such a passion as had never come to her in all the course of her radiant, victorious, and imperious life.
It seemed to her as if she had seen him slain in cold blood, and had never lifted her hand or her voice against his murder.
His voice rang in her ear; his face was before her with its white, still, rigid anguish; the burning accents of his avowal of love seemed to search her very heart. If this man perished in any of the thousand perils of war she would forever feel herself his assassin. She had his secret, she had his soul, she had his honor in her hands; and she could do nothing better for them both than to send him from her to eternal silence, to eternal solitude!
Her thoughts grew unbearable; she rose impetuously from her couch and paced to and fro in the narrow confines of her tent. Her tranquillity was broken down; her pride was abandoned; her heart, at length, was reached and sorely wounded. The only man she had ever found, whom it would have been possible to her to have loved, was one already severed from her by a fate almost more hideous than death.
And yet, in her loneliness, the color flushed back into her face; her eyes gathered some of their old light; one dreaming, shapeless fancy floated vaguely through her mind.
If, in the years to come, she knew him in all ways worthy, and learned to give him back this love he bore her, it was in her to prove that love, no matter what cost to her pride and her lineage. If his perfect innocence were made clear in her own sight, there was greatness and there was unselfishness enough in her nature to make her capable of regarding alone his martyrdom and his heroism, and disregarding the opinion of the world. If, hereafter, she grew to find his presence the necessity of her life, and his sacrifice of that nobility and of that purity she now believed it, she—proud as she was with the twin pride of lineage and of nature—would be capable of incurring the odium and the marvel of all who knew her by uniting her fate to his own, by making manifest her honor and her tenderness for him, though men saw in him only a soldier of the empire, only a base-born trooper, beneath her as Riom beneath the daughter of D'Orleans. She was of a brave nature, of a great nature, of a daring courage, and of a superb generosity. Abhorring dishonor, full of glory in the stainless history of her race, and tenacious of the dignity and of the magnitude of her House, she yet was too courageous and too haughty a woman not to be capable of braving calumny, if conscious of her own pure rectitude beneath it; not to be capable of incurring false censure, if encountered in the path of justice and of magnanimity. It was possible, even on herself it dawned as possible, that so great might become her compassion and her tenderness for this man that she would, in some distant future, when the might of his love and the severity of his suffering should prevail with her, say to him:
“Keep your secret from the world as you will. Prove your innocence only to me; let me and the friend of your youth alone know your name and your rights. And knowing all, knowing you myself to be hero and martyr in one, I shall not care what the world thinks of you, what the world says of me. I will be your wife; I have lands, and riches, and honors, and greatness enough to suffice for us both.”
If ever she loved him exceedingly, she would become capable of this sacrifice from the strength, and the graciousness, and the fearlessness of her nature, and such love was not so distant from her as she thought.
Outside her tent there was a peculiar mingling of light and shadow; of darkness from the moonless and now cloud-covered sky, of reddened warmth from the tall, burning pine-boughs thrust into the soil in lieu of other illumination. The atmosphere was hot from the flames, and chilly with the breath of the night winds; it was oppressively still, though from afar off the sounds of laughter in the camp still echoed, and near at hand the dull and steady tramp of the sentinels fell on the hard, parched soil. Into that blended heat and cold, dead blackness and burning glare, he reeled out from her presence; drunk with pain as deliriously as men grow drunk with raki. The challenge rang on the air: