The simplicity of her implied admission struck him dumb with surprise for a moment, and he stared at her in stupefied amazement.
“What?” he almost shouted. “You still love that chap after—after—”
Speech failed him and he could only continue to look at her in awed wonder.
Hard as they may find it to observe other precepts of the Great Master, this one, at least, most women have practised easily and naturally for over nineteen hundred years—“Forgive, until seventy times seven.”
The acts of some of these—how they warred with their husbands and paramours and were worsted; how they provoked the presiding magistrate and stultified the attesting policeman by obstinately ignoring their injuries written legibly in red, and black, and blue; how they interceded with many sobs for the aggressor—are they not written in the book of the chronicles of every police court in the world?
This propensity leads them into scrapes, it is true, for our world in its wisdom will always take advantage of such weaknesses. Perhaps the next will make them some amends.
The bright, fever-lit eyes never left Benton’s face, and two tears rolled down her sunken cheeks as she nodded silently in answer to his incredulous query. Such an expression, indeed, might the Covenanter’s widow have worn, as she looked into the ruthless countenance of Graham of Claverhouse and begged for the life of her only son. And such it is, also, that makes Guido’s famous picture of Beatrice Cenci one of the saddest paintings on earth.
That look was almost more than the Sergeant could endure, and he hastily turned his head away to hide the hot, blinding tears that sprang to his eyes. There seemed something very terrible, just then, in the pathetic working of his stern face, as the strong man strove to hide his emotion.
“Diamonds and pearls,” he whispered brokenly to himself; “diamonds and pearls.”
And this—love such as this, had the dead man gained, then spurned brutally from him, and cast away.