She only said it to tantalize me—the very idea of such a thing was monstrous; but it gave me an opportunity for some little heroics.
“Then it would be a bad thing for our friend the alcalde and his friends,” I returned.
“Would you fight—you?” she cried, her eyes sparkling with new animation, as though the situation appealed to her irresistibly.
“It was agreed between Robbins and myself that we would never be taken alive. Perhaps your hatred of me would be satisfied and the past fully avenged if you saw me lying here at your feet covered with wounds and dying,” I said, solemnly, for a touch of the old witchery was upon me—the sheen of her golden hair, the glow of her bonnie blue eyes, the very scent of her garments, united to create a riot in my treacherous heart that I only subdued with an iron grip.
She shivered at my foreboding words and I fancied turned pale.
Then she smiled to conceal her perturbation.
When I look back upon this scene I feel sad to think what cheap theatrical business I bordered upon when I so graphically pictured my forlorn fate; but to the best of my belief I spoke just what I felt as I stood there and found my grand resolutions to hate and scorn trembling in the balance in the presence of the lady who was now, alas! no longer—my Hildegarde.
“Oh, your argument overwhelms me. It would be too sad a fate for one to whom the gods have given the face and figure of an Apollo together with the fortune of a Crœsus. I see I must surrender against my will.”
In her words and manner there was an air of scorn, which I could not but feel.
What would I give to prove my manhood in the eyes of this woman, who persisted in believing me a weakling, when God knows that if any such spirit animated me in the old days, it had been completely annihilated during my two years of lonely wanderings.