DIEGO
I stand rebuked, my Lord. But, in my own defence——how shall I say it?——Your Highness has a manner to-night which disconcerts me by its novelty; a saying things and then unsaying them; suggesting and then, somehow, treading down the suggestion like a spark of your lightning. Lovers, I have been told, use such a manner to revive their flagging feeling by playing on the other one's. Even in so plain and solid a thing as friendship, such ways—I say it subject to your Highness's displeasure—are dangerous. But in love, I have known cases where, carried to certain lengths, such ways of speaking undermined a woman's faith and led her to desperate things. Women, despite their strength, which often surprises us, are brittle creatures. Did you never, perhaps, make trial of this——Magdalen, with——
DUKE
With what? Good God, Diego, 'tis I who ask thy pardon; and thou sheddest a dreadful light upon the past. But it is not possible. I am not such a cur that, after all she did, after all she was,—my life saved by her audacity a hundred times, made rich and lovely by her love, her wit, her power,—that I could ever have whimpered for my freedom, or made her suspect I wanted it more than I wanted her? Is it possible, Diego?
DIEGO (slowly)
Why more than you wanted her? She may have thought the two compatible.
DUKE
Never. First, because my escape could not be compassed save by her staying behind; and then because—-she knew, in fact, what thing I was, or must become, once set at liberty.
DIEGO (after a pause)
I see. You mean, my Lord, that you being Duke of Mantua, while she——If she knew that; knew it not merely as a fact, but as one knows the full savour of grief,—well, she was indeed the paragon you think; one might indeed say, bating one point, a virtuous woman.