“It’ll kill her,” he murmured in a horrible, low voice, talking to himself as though she were not present. “She’ll die of grief for him.”
Muriel smiled—a clear, still smile that made him shiver.
“You think so!” she replied, in firm and steady tones. “You think I will die of grief for my slain husband? Well you may, for I loved him with a love of whose strength and fervency a nature like yours knows, and can know, nothing. Well may you think so, for he was the light of life to me. But see—” she seized the merchant’s hand, and laid it on her wrist—“the pulse beats calm! Feel”—she placed his hand upon her heart—“there is no throb of anguish there! Look at my face—it is not the face of grief! Kill me? No, it will not kill me! Grieve me? No it can never grieve me! Sorrow nor death can come not nigh me—for he lies dead in the divinest death a man can die, and I am filled with gladness and with pride! Should I not be glad and proud? The most forsaken of mankind, the Pariah of a despised and trampled race, came from long years of misery to his charge, and when you stole that most wretched being that you might send him back to the hourly murder from which he had emerged, my spotless hero went from this house knowing that he never would return alive, and willingly laid down his life to save him. Yes—he knew that the price of that man’s liberty was his own life, and he paid it. Alone he did it—alone he took your victim from his captors—alone and naked-handed he crushed the seven assassins who dared to front him in his manhood—and with that red star of honor on his breast he came home here to die in my exulting arms. There he lies—dead in the noblest death a man can suffer—death in the service of the weak and poor. Dead—and on all his life the splendor of that heroic devotion; dead—and on his breast that red blazon of glory immortal; and I could rifle earth of its roses to deck this hour, and break up heaven for the music of my joy!”
The clear and fiery silver of her voice rang through him like a hundred swords, and staggering back a pace, he fairly crouched before the stormy effulgence of her beauty. For she flamed upon him, dilated, with a terrible enthusiasm quivering through her flushed and kindled features and an electric aureole of victory darting from her like a sense of rays. Not him alone did she overwhelm—the air of the room was deluged with the torrent magnetism of her spirit, as if it had been flooded with a rushing ether of light flame, and every heart beat as with the wings of eagles, and every cheek was pale with the draining rapture of her ardor. Not him alone, but him chiefly, and only him with dread. Had she flashed hate and scorn upon him, he could have better borne it. But this supernatural exultation over an event which he thought would have bowed her in pallid agonies of grief—this sublime and haughty glory in her husband’s fate—astounded and terrified him. It mingled with his sense of her pæan tones and words, the patrician nobility of her figure in its snowy odor-breathing raiment, all the fiery beauty and dazzling enchantments of her presence—and it rushed into a consciousness worse than the consciousness of her hate and scorn—the consciousness of the thing he was contrasted with her. The very sight of her was the insupportable verdict of his own utter baseness, and he stood crouching and shuddering, with his glassy eyes bound to her face, as if some judgment angel, dreadful in loveliness, had burst upon him from the woman he knew.
She turned away, and his gaze slowly reverted to the corpse. At once, with tenfold vehemence, his former fear and horror rose within him.
“My God!” he gasped, “this is an awful tragedy!”
Sudden as lightning she wheeled around, and the first slanting beam of the sunrise smote her forehead, and lit her noble features with a new resplendence!
“It is not!” she cried, in a proud and ringing voice. “It is a triumph! You threw the interests of your party and your trade into the scale against a man’s liberty. He threw the rich, red blood of his heart into the other side, and weighed you down. It is a triumph! Call it no tragedy which breaks one fetterlock, even at the cost of a sweet life! Oh, brother of the despised and the rejected, well for earth’s proudest if he went to God like you, the savior of a poor spirit from the curse of bonds, and bearing up to heaven the trophy of one broken chain! Pass me, sorrow, pass, and come not nigh me—for oh, my husband, you laid down your life for a weak and lowly slave, and there is morning in my heart forever!”
Her pealing voice, proud and ringing while she spoke to him, melted into clear and noble pathos as she turned to the visioned image of her hero, and the words breathed in tones of illimitable ecstasy upon an air that seemed to beat and swim in rapture. The swiftly ascending sunlight rested upon her as she stood with clasped hands, her tresses shining in golden glory around her divinely kindled face, her soft, white drapery flowing and trembling around her, and gazing upon her from the inner room as through a veil of fire and tears, she seemed to them like some splendid seraph of the morning, dilated with holy and heroic joy.
A low groan heaved from the chest of the wretched Atkins. She looked at him. He was gazing with a face of abject horror and despair on the majestic figure of the dead.