"Yet `tis simple enough," he said with sudden bitterness, which seemed literally to surge through his words, though he was making visible efforts to suppress it, "I humbly put the question to you, for my slow wits are unable to grasp the cause of this, your ladyship's sudden new mood.Is it that you have the taste to renew the devilish sport which you played so successfully last year? Do you wish to see me once more a love-sick suppliant at your feet, so that you might again have the pleasure of kicking me aside, like a troublesome lap-dog?"She had succeeded in rousing him for the moment: and again she looked straight at him, for it was thus she remembered him a year ago.
"Percy! I entreat you!" she whispered, "can we not bury the past?""Pardon me, Madame, but I understood you to say that your desire was to dwell in it.""Nay! I spoke not of THAT past, Percy!" she said, while a tone of tenderness crept into her voice."Rather did I speak of a time when you loved me still! and I...oh! I was vain and frivolous;your wealth and position allured me: I married you, hoping in my heart that your great love for me would beget in me a love for you...but, alas!..."The moon had sunk low down behind a bank of clouds.In the east a soft grey light was beginning to chase away the heavy mantle of the night.He could only see her graceful outline now, the small queenly head, with its wealth of reddish golden curls, and the glittering gems forming the small, star-shaped, red flower which she wore as a diadem in her hair.
"Twenty-four hours after our marriage, Madame, the Marquis de St.Cyr and all his family perished on the guillotine, and the popular rumour reached me that it was the wife of Sir Percy Blakeney who helped to send them there.""Nay! I myself told you the truth of that odious tale.""Not till after it had been recounted to me by strangers, with all its horrible details.""And you believed them then and there," she said with great vehemence, "without a proof or question--you believed that I, whom you vowed you loved more than life, whom you professed you worshipped, that _I_ could do a thing so base as these STRANGERS chose to recount.You thought I meant to deceive you about it all--that Iought to have spoken before I married you: yet, had you listened, Iwould have told you that up to the very morning on which St.Cyr went to the guillotine, I was straining every nerve, using every influence I possessed, to save him and his family.But my pride sealed my lips, when your love seemed to perish, as if under the knife of that same guillotine.Yet I would have told you how I was duped! Aye! I, whom that same popular rumour had endowed with the sharpest wits in France!
I was tricked into doing this thing, by men who knew how to play upon my love for an only brother, and my desire for revenge.Was it unnatural?"Her voice became choked with tears.She paused for a moment or two, trying to regain some sort of composure.She looked appealingly at him, almost as if he were her judge.He had allowed her to speak on in her own vehement, impassioned way, offering no comment, no word of sympathy: and now, while she paused, trying to swallow down the hot tears that gushed to her eyes, he waited, impassive and still.The dim, grey light of early dawn seemed to make his tall form look taller and more rigid.The lazy, good-natured face looked strangely altered.Marguerite, excited, as she was, could see that the eyes were no longer languid, the mouth no longer good-humoured and inane.A curious look of intense passion seemed to glow from beneath his drooping lids, the mouth was tightly closed, the lips compressed, as if the will alone held that surging passion in check.
Marguerite Blakeney was, above all, a woman, with all a woman's fascinating foibles, all a woman's most lovable sins.She knew in a moment that for the past few months she had been mistaken:
that this man who stood here before her, cold as a statue, when her musical voice struck upon his ear, loved her, as he had loved her a year ago: that his passion might have been dormant, but that it was there, as strong, as intense, as overwhelming, as when first her lips met his in one long, maddening kiss.
Pride had kept him from her, and, woman-like, she meant to win back that conquest which had been hers before.Suddenly it seemed to her that the only happiness life could every hold for her again would be in feeling that man's kiss once more upon her lips.
"Listen to the tale, Sir Percy," she said, and her voice was low, sweet, infinitely tender."Armand was all in all to me! We had no parents, and brought one another up.He was my little father, and I, his tiny mother; we loved one another so.Then one day--do you mind me, Sir Percy? the Marquis de St.Cyr had my brother Armand thrashed--thrashed by his lacqueys--that brother whom I loved better than all the world! And his offence? That he, a plebeian, had dared to love the daughter of the aristocrat; for that he was waylaid and thrashed...thrashed like a dog within an inch of his life! Oh, how I suffered! his humiliation had eaten into my very soul! When the opportunity occurred, and I was able to take my revenge, I took it.
