“Come, Monsieur de Vibrac. You must get over this.”
The hand was still on my shoulder. The touch thrilled through me. I was hardly conscious of what I said, but I slipped back a year, and pleaded madly for her love. Only a few words escaped me; they were enough, however, and she stopped me, white and trembling.
“Monsieur!” she said, “you are mad! How dare you!”
“How dare I,” I repeated. And then the memory of the words I had overheard in the Queen’s Terrace came back to me, and in unmanly, bitter anger I cast them up at her.
I can see it all now: the red light of sunset broadening through the mist, the bare tree trunks burning like copper, the outlines of the château growing more solid and defined, and the figure of Marie before me. I had stepped back a pace as I spoke in my anger, and she had half turned her horse’s head toward me, listening with blazing eyes as I finished my cruel speech.
I know now that what she said was to cure me of my madness. I was fool enough to believe then every word she spoke in her hot anger.
“So you accuse me of playing with you, monsieur. You refuse to believe that a woman may have strength to save herself from being lost. You cast up in my face what I had buried, what I hoped had passed from my life forever. Well, let it be so—I wanted amusement, and you afforded it to me. You are right—I think no more of you than of an old glove or a worn-out mask.”
With that she turned her horse’s head, and, striking him smartly with the whip, galloped off in the direction of St. Loup.
CHAPTER XIX
THE PRIORY OF THE JACOBINS
It was true then, and my worst suspicions were confirmed. Out of Marie’s own lips was she convicted twice over, and had I been struck across the face with her riding-whip, the sting, the smart, would have been nothing to the intolerable pain her words inflicted upon me. I lost all power of reason. All power of thought left me. For a space my mind seemed numbed and paralyzed. I looked dully around on the purple haze, and the still, silent trees, listening, I know not why, to the beat of her horse’s hoofs, as the sound grew fainter and more faint, until at last it died away in the distance. I might have stood there for a half-hour, with a mind in which all things were blurred and dark, save for that one thought of revenge, burning like an evil star through the chaos of gloom in my soul. At last, with a bitter oath, I remounted and rode back to Orleans, giving my horse his head and the spur, seeking in his speed some relief for the torment in my mind; essaying, in short, to perform the impossible, and to flee from myself.