"Duke! Oh, you are the best, the noblest of men!" she exclaimed, smiling through her tears: "Do you know that I love you as I never did before? I thought it perfectly natural that you could not love me as you saw me during those days. I felt it, though you did not intend to let me see it."
She had not meant to assume it, but these words expressed the charming artlessness which had formerly rendered her so irresistible, and the longer the duke had missed it, the less he was armed against the spell.
"Madeleine!" he held out his arms--and she--did she know how it happened? Was it gratitude, the wish to make at least one person happy? She threw herself on his breast--for the first time he held her in his embrace. Surely she was his betrothed bride! But she had not thought of what happened now. The duke's lips sought hers--she could not resist like a girl of sixteen, he would have considered it foolish coquetry. So she was forced to submit.
"Honi soit qui mal y pense!" he murmured, kissing her brow, her hair--and her lips. But when she felt his lips press hers, it suddenly seemed as though some one was saying dose beside her: "You!" It was the word Freyer always uttered when he embraced her, as though he knew of nothing better or higher than that one word, in which he expressed the whole strength of his emotion! "You--you!" echoed constantly in her ears with that sweet, wild fervor which seemed to threaten: "the next instant you will be consumed in my ardor." Again he stood before her with his dark flaming eyes and the overwhelming earnestness of a mighty passion, which shadowed his pale brow as the approaching thunder-storm clouded the snow-clad peaks of his mountains. And she compared it with the light, easy tenderness, the "honi soi qui mal y pense" of the trained squire of dames who was pressing his first kiss upon her lips--and she loathed the stranger. She released herself with a sudden movement, approached the window and looked out. As she gazed, she fancied she saw the dark figure of the deserted one, illumined by the crimson glare of the forest conflagration, holding out his hand with a divinely royal gesture to raise and shelter her on his breast. Once more she beheld him gaze calmly down at the charred timber and heard him say smiling: "The wood was mine."
Then--then she beheld in the distant East a sultry room, shaded by gay awnings, surrounded by rustling palm-trees, palm-trees, which drew their sustenance from the soil on which the Redeemer's blood once flowed. He sat beside the bed of the mother of a new-born child, whispering sweet, earnest words--and the mother was she herself, the babe was his.
Then she beheld this same man kneeling by the coffin of a child, the rigid, death-white face buried under his raven locks. It was the child born on the consecrated soil of the burning East, which she had left to pine in the cold breath of the Western winter. She withdrew from it the mother-heart, in which the tender plant of the South might have gained warmth. She had left that father's child to die.
Yet he did not complain; uttered no reproach--he remained silent.
She saw him become more and more solitary and silent. The manly beauty wasted, his strength failed--at last she saw him noiselessly cross the carpeted floor of this very room and close the door behind him never to return! No, no, it could not be--all that had happened was false--nothing was true save that he was the father of her child, her husband, and no one else could ever be that, even though she was separated from him for ever.
"Duke!" she cried, imploringly. "Leave me to myself. I do not understand my own feelings--I feel as if arraigned before the judgment seat of God. Let me take counsel with my own heart--forgive me I am a variable, capricious woman--one mood to-day and another to-morrow; have patience with me, I entreat you."
The duke looked gravely at her, and answered, nodding: "I understand--or rather--I am afraid to understand!"