"I fear me that plea will avail us little," Raoul answered. "But say on, dearest Melanie, and believe that there is nothing you can ask which I will not give you gladly—even if it were my own life-blood. Say on, so shall we best arrive at the truth of this intricate and black affair."
"Mark me, then, Raoul, for every word I shall speak is as true as the sun in heaven. It is near two years now since we heard that you had fallen in battle, and that your body had been carried off by the barbarians. Long! long I hoped and prayed, but prayers and hopes were alike in vain. I wrote to you often, as I promised, but no line from you has reached me, since the day when you sailed for India, and that made me fear that the dread news was true. But at the last, to make assurance doubly sure, all my own letters were returned to me six months since, with their seals unbroken, and an endorsement from the authorities in India that the person addressed was not to be found. Then hope itself was over; and my father, who never from the first had doubted that you were no more—"
"Out on him! out on him! the heartless villain!" the young man interrupted her indignantly. "He knows, as well as I myself, that I am living; although it is no fault of his or his coadjutors that I am so. He knows not as yet, however, that I am here; but he shall know it ere long to his cost, my Melanie."
"At least," she answered in a faltering voice, "at least he swore to me that you were dead; and never having ceased to persecute me, since the day that fatal tidings reached, to become the wife of La Rochederrien, now Marquis de Ploermel, he now became doubly urgent—"
"And you, Melanie! you yielded! I had thought you would have died sooner."
"I had no choice but to yield, Raoul. Or at least but the choice of that old man's hand, or an eternal dungeon. The lettres de cachet were signed, and you dead, and on the conditions I extorted from the marquis, I became in name, Raoul, only in name, by all my hopes of Heaven! the wife of the man whom you pronounce, wherefore, I cannot dream, the basest of mankind. Now tell me."
"And did it never strike you as being wonderful and most unnatural that this Ploermel, who is neither absolutely a dotard nor an old woman, should accept your hand upon this condition?"
"I was too happy to succeed in extorting it to think much of that," she answered.
"Extorted!" replied Raoul bitterly, "And how, I pray you, is this condition which you extorted ratified or made valid?"
"It is signed by himself, and witnessed by my own father, that, being I regard myself the wife of the dead, he shall ask no more of familiarity from me than if I were the bride of heaven!"