“I asked of Alain, as the great crowd seemed about to rush upon the gates of the Hotel: ‘What would be, at this juncture, the greatest misfortune that could befall the House of Bourbon?’ He answered: ‘That your young Hannibal should give the word to fire!’”
She imposed silence upon Dunoisse, who was about to break into impetuous speech, by laying a little velvet hand upon his lips, as she had once laid them upon de Moulny’s. She kept the hand there as she said:
“Do not interrupt—it takes all my courage to tell this! I carry a loaded pistol upon all occasions—it is a habit I learned in Spain—in Algeria I found it of use. And I drew the weapon from its hiding-place,—I can hear my own voice saying as I did so: ‘One shot might hasten the crisis.—What if I fired?’... And M. de Moulny said: ‘No, no! You must not!’ And I did! I pulled the trigger, and before the echo of the shot had died, and the salt blue smoke cleared from before my face.”
She was at his feet, weeping, clinging to the shaking hands with which Dunoisse strove to raise her, choking with sobs, burying her face upon his arm, wetting the blue cloth with real tears, entangling silken shining strands of night-dark hair in the rough gold embroidery of the Staff brassard on the Assistant-Adjutant’s sleeve.
“This is my place! Let all the world come and find me here! I do not care! What is humiliation if I can atone? Make no allowances or excuses for me.... Do not say: ‘It was a moment of madness!’ Think of me as your enemy and your destroyer! Ah! what a heart I must have to have smiled in your eyes, as I did when we met this evening, and not have cried out at the first look: ‘Pardon! Forgiveness!—you whom I have wronged!’”
She drew some sobbing breaths, and said, lifting beautiful tear-drenched eyes like pansies in a thunder-shower:
“Hate me for the cold, calculating selfishness—bred of the base desire to save myself from the taint of all that blood—the cowardly fear of the possible vengeance of Red Republicans—that led me to say to you: ‘Take the advice of a sister. Say that you were guilty of this crime!’ For it is a crime. It has defiled my soul with stains that cannot be wiped away.”
The supple red hands of Dunoisse tightened upon the little hands they clasped. He said, looking in her eyes:
“The pistol-shot was yours. But he cried, ‘Fire!’”