"You will need this gold," she said. "Take it. Restore the miniature to your master. And go,—go at once. If success be in store for him, I share not the shame of it. If defeat, adversity, sickness,—your master knows his wife fears but one thing, has fled but from one thing. Her heart is with him, but she abhors the cause to which he has given himself. She will not share his crime."
Difficult as these words were to speak, she spoke them without faltering, and they admitted no discussion.
The slave lingered yet longer, but there was no more that she would say. Assured at last of that, he said,—
"I obey you," and was gone.
He was gone,—gone! and she had betrayed nothing,—had given no warning,—had uttered not a word by which the life that was of all lives most precious to her might have been saved!
VII.
By eight o'clock next morning Mrs. Edgar was in the church. Von Gelhorn preceded her by five minutes; he was walking up the aisle when she entered, impatient for her appearing, eager to be gone,—wondering, boy-like, that she came not.
He has performed a prodigious amount of labor since they last met. His pictures were all removed to the Odeon, he said. His studio, haunt of dreams, beloved of fame so long, stripped and barren, looked like any other four-walled room,—and he, a freeman, stood equipped for service.
Yes, an hour would see him speeding to the capital. In less time than it had taken him to perfect his arrangements he should be at the head-quarters of the commander-in-chief,—to be made a drummer-boy of, as he said before, or serve wherever there should be room for him.
He stood there so bright, so ready, eager, daring, was capable of so much! What had she done to usurp the functions of conscience, and assume the voice of duty? She had done what she could not revoke, and yet could not contemplate without a sort of terror,—as if to atone, to make amends for disloyalty, which, coming even as from herself, a crime in which she had chief concernment, was not to be atoned for by repentance merely, nor by any sacrifices less than the costliest. She had sought her husband's peer,—deemed that she had found him,—therefore would despatch him to the battle-field, by valor to meet the valiant. But now the light by which she had hurried forward to that deed was gone, and she stood as a prophetess may, who, deserted of the divinity, doubts the testimony of her hour of exaltation.