“Marcel Caboff! the fellow whom my father ransomed at the risk of his own life!” said the count. “And he would force you into marrying him! By heaven! he shan’t. I will foil him there.”
“O monseigneur, monseigneur! you will not kill him,” pleaded Alba, clasping her hands and appealing to the murderer with a scared face. “It is not his fault—it is not indeed, monseigneur!”
“I don’t mean to kill him; I would not touch a hair of his head,” said Hermann. “But why do you say it is not his fault? Does he not love you? Does he not want you to marry him?”
“He does, oh! so dreadfully. But I should not mind that. It is mother whom I have promised. It is to please her that I must marry him,” said Alba, and her breast heaved with big sobs, and all the floods were let loose again.
Hermann longed to draw her to his breast and kiss away the tears—she was such a child in spite of her sixteen summers and their full-blossomed beauty! But he checked the impulse. There is no majesty so imposing as the majesty of childhood. “Alba,” he said, “I will save you from Marcel Caboff without hurting him or any one. You shall not marry him, unless you come to wish it yourself. Are you sure that if he gave you up you would not change your mind and wish him back again?” This was Hermann’s estimate of woman’s nature; true, his experience had been gathered among types as different from the one before him as the flowers of a hot-house are from the primrose of the woods.
“I should never wish him to come back; I could never love him,” said Alba—“never, never, never.”
“Then I swear to you on my sword you shall not marry him!” said the count impetuously. “Now tell me, Alba,” he resumed, seeing that she did not speak, “is there not some one you would like to marry better than this fellow Caboff? Tell me the truth. If you had a brother, you would not mind telling him. Try and fancy I am your brother.”
Fancy him her brother! Alba’s fancy had taken many an aerial flight, but never such a one as this.
“Who is he? What is his name?” said Hermann in a whisper, bending closer to her.
But she shook her head. “There is no one, monseigneur.”