Buckhurst, eyes bent on the floor, began picking to pieces his paper toy. Presently he looked up, not at me, but at the Countess, who sat with hands clasped earnestly watching him.
“If—if the state pardons me, can ... you?” he murmured.
She looked at him with intense earnestness. I saw he was sailing on the wrong tack.
“I have nothing to pardon,” she said, gravely. “But I must tell you the truth, Mr. Buckhurst, I cannot forget what you have done. It was something—the one thing that I cannot understand—that I can never understand—something so absolutely alien to me that it—somehow—leaves me stunned. Don’t ask me to forget it.... I cannot. I do not mean to be harsh and cruel, or to condemn you. Even if you had taken the jewels from me, and had asked my forgiveness, I would have given it freely. But I could not be as I was, a comrade to you.”
There was a silence. The Countess, looking perfectly miserable, still gazed at Buckhurst. He dropped his gray, symmetrical head, yet I felt that he was listening to every minute sound in the room.
“You must not care what I say,” she said. “I am only an unhappy woman, unused to the liberty I have 101 given myself, not yet habituated to the charity of those blameless hearts which forgive everything! I am a novice, groping my way into a new and vast world, a limitless, generous, forgiving commune, where love alone dominates.... And if I had lived among my brothers long enough to be purged of those traditions which I have drawn from generations, I might now be noble enough and wise enough to say I do forgive and forget that you—”
“That you were once a thief,” I ended, with the genial officiousness of the hopelessly fat-minded.
In the stillness I heard Buckhurst draw in his breath—once. Some day he would try to kill me for that; in the mean time my crass stupidity was no longer a question in his mind. I had hurt the Countess, too, with what she must have believed a fool’s needless brutality. But it had to be so if I played at Jaques Bonhomme.
So I put the finishing whine to it—“Our Lord died between two thieves”—and relapsed into virtuous contemplation of my finger-tips.
“Madame,” said Buckhurst, in a low voice, “your contempt of me is part of my penalty. I must endure it. I shall not complain. But I shall try to live a life that will at least show you my deep sincerity.”