She moved her lips soundlessly and nodded.
“I recognized his voice.... I should recognize it through the noise of battle—above all the tumult of the Judgment Day. It claimed payment for the false step—indemnity for the broken foil. Well, let him have both, and find his joy in them!”
He laughed harshly, and his grip was merciless. Yet she bore the pain of it without crying out. His eyes had quitted her face—they were fixed upon the portrait of the nun-Princess of Orleans. And as though some subtle, evil influence had passed from those proud voluptuous painted eyes into his blood, he was conscious of the shaping of a purpose within him and the surging of a flood that was to carry all before it and undo the work of years.
“But one joy he shall not have....”
He hardly knew whether his own lips or another’s had uttered the words. But he looked down and saw Henriette at his feet, between his hands. And as his eyes fell upon the creamy treasure of the fair bosom that heaved so near, Monsieur the Marshal, had he been enabled to look into the gray boudoir at that particular moment, would no longer have been able to say to Hector:
“You are an iceberg. You have Carmel in your blood!”
For the son of Marie Bathilde—carried away by a tidal wave of passion, such as had swept Sister Thérèse de St. François out from among the pallets of the Lesser Ward of the Mercy-House at Widinitz, out of her nun’s cell into the wild, turbulent ocean that rolled and billowed outside the convent walls—was to yield, and take, and eat as greedily as any other son of Adam of the fruit of the Forbidden Tree.
How it matures, the first bite into the sweet, juicy pulp! He had seemed to Henriette a brilliant boy; obstinate and stiff-necked, scrupulous and absurd. Now she saw him transformed to a new being. Vigorous, alert, decisive, masterful, a man to be reckoned with, to be feared while you deceived. And on the boiling whirlpool of passion her own light fragile craft began to dance, and rock, and spin in ever-narrowing circles, as he said, with a strange smile that showed the white teeth gleaming under the small black mustache, but set no gay light dancing in the brilliant, cold black eyes:
“Have no fear. Try to believe me when I promise you, upon my word of honor, that no harm shall come to you from—this that you have done.”
He stooped and kissed the little white hands, and said to their owner: