'Listen,' she murmured, 'I love you, I love you! I care nothing what you were born, what sins you have sinned; I love you! Love me, and she shall never know. I will silence Egon. I will bury your secret as though it were one that would cost me my life were it known.'
Only at the touch of her hands did he arouse himself to any consciousness of what she was saying, of how she tempted him. Then he shook off her clasp with a rude gesture; he looked down on her with the bitterest of scorn: not for a single instant did he dream of purchasing her silence so.
'You are even viler than I thought,' he said in his throat, with a dreary laugh of mockery. 'How long would you spare me if I sinned against her with you? Go, do your worst, say your worst! But if you stay beneath my wife's roof to-night, I will drive you out of the house before all her people, if it be my last act of authority in Hohenszalras!'
'I love you!' she murmured, and almost knelt to him; but he thrust her away from him, and stood erect, his arms folded on his chest.
'How dare you speak of love to me? You force me to employ the language of the gutter. If Egon Vàsàrhely have put me in your power, use it, like the incarnate fiend you are. I ask no mercy of you, but if you dare to speak of love to me I will strangle you where you stand. Since you call me the wolf of the steppes you shall feel my grip.'
She fell a few steps backward and stretched her hand behind her, and rung a little silver bell. Absorbed in his own bitterness of thought he did not hear the sound or see the movement. She had already, between Greswold's visit to her and his master's, written a little letter:
'Loved Wanda,—Will you be so good as to come to me for a moment at once?—Yours,
'OLGA.'
She had said to one of her women, who was in the next apartment: 'When I ring you will take that note at once to my cousin, the Countess, yourself, without coming to me.' She had had no fear of leaving the woman in the adjoining room, who was a Russian, wholly ignorant of the French tongue, which she herself always used.
She recoiled from him, frightened for the moment, but only for that; she had nerves of steel, and many men had cursed her and menaced her for the ruin of their lives, and she had lived on none the worse. 'On crie—et puis c'est fini,' she was wont to say, with her airy cynicism. Something in his look, in his voice, told her that here it would not finish thus.
'He will shoot himself if he do not strangle me; and he will escape so,' she thought, and a faint sort of fear touched her. She was alone before him; she had said enough to drive him out of all calmness and all reason. She had left him nothing to hope for; she had made him believe that she knew all his fatal past. If he had struck her down into the dumbness of death he would have been scarcely guilty.