He held her eyes with his own as he spoke, and after a momentary struggle and shrinking she grew quiet, and he felt her body relax. Her eyes closed and she sank down against the pillow, turning her face towards him.
"Pauvre enfant!" Emile muttered.
He released her hands and they lay still, and she made no movement to hinder him as he re-adjusted the bandage.
He stood looking down upon her. A vast compassion shone in the grey eyes, that she had only seen hard and penetrating. The gesture of mute abandonment, the ready compliance had appealed to his complex nature, which he kept hidden under an armour of coldness and cynicism. For an instant his years of outlawry and poverty were blotted out and he had gone back to the days in Russia when he had first come into his kingdom, and had believed women faithful and their honour a thing on which to stake one's own.
As sweet and yielding Marie Roumanoff had seemed when she had lain in his arms. A few years hence if Arithelli did not succeed in breaking her neck in the ring, she would probably also make Paradise and Hell for some man.
He could see that the dangerous crisis was over. She would live and eventually go back to her work again. The swift intelligence, the wit and charm of her—À quoi bon? She had been saved, and to what end? For a dangerous and toilsome profession, and, in secret, another and still greater peril.
Husband and children, and the average woman's uneventful, if happy, fate could never be hers. Her very beauty was of the type almost repellent to the strictly normal and healthy man.
She would no doubt have her hour of triumph, of passion. Some connoisseur of beauty would purchase her as a rare jewel is bought to catalogue among his treasures.
In Paris she might achieve notoriety. Not now, perhaps, but later when she had developed into a woman and knew her own power. Paris loved all things strange, and gave homage to the woman who was among her fellows as the orchid among flowers.
"FATALITÉ," he had named her in jest. Truly a name to bring misfortune to any woman. Her fate had been in his own hands a few minutes ago. He could so easily have denied her her chance, her chance of life. Perhaps the time might come when she would reproach him for having helped her to live.