And, being thus bidden, I said quickly “I love you, Roxalanne.”
Her heel beat the shimmering parquet of the floor; she half turned towards me, her cheek flushed, her lip tremulous with anger.
“Will you say what you have to say, monsieur?” she demanded in a concentrated voice, “and having said it, will you go?”
“Mademoiselle, I have already said it,” I answered, with a wistful smile.
“Oh!” she gasped. Then suddenly facing round upon me, a world of anger in her blue eyes – eyes that I had known dreamy, but which were now very wide awake. “Was it to offer me this last insult you forced your presence upon me? Was it to mock me with those words, me – a woman, with no man about me to punish you? Shame, sir! Yet it is no more than I might look for in you.”
“Mademoiselle, you do me grievous wrong–” I began.
“I do you no wrong,” she answered hotly, then stopped, unwilling haply to be drawn into contention with me. “Enfin, since you have said what you came to say will you go?” And she pointed to the door.
“Mademoiselle, mademoiselle–” I began in a voice of earnest intercession.
“Go!” she interrupted angrily, and for a second the violence of her voice and gesture almost reminded me of the Vicomtesse. “I will hear no more from you.”
“Mademoiselle, you shall,” I answered no whit less firmly.
“I will not listen to you. Talk if you will. You shall have the walls for audience.” And she moved towards the door, but I barred her passage. I was courteous to the last degree; I bowed low before her as I put myself in her way.
“It is all that was wanting – that you should offer me violence!” she exclaimed.
“God forbid!” said I.
“Then let me pass.”
“Aye, when you have heard me.”
“I do not wish to hear you. Nothing that you may say can matter to me. Oh, monsieur, if you have any instincts of gentility, if you have any pretension to be accounted anything but a mauvais sujet, I beg of you to respect my grief. You witnessed, yourself, the arrest of my father. This is no season for such as scene as you are creating.”
“Pardon! It is in such a season as this that you need the comfort and support that the man you love alone can give you.”
“The man I love?” she echoed, and from flushed that they had been, her cheeks went very pale. Her eyes fell for an instant, then – they were raised again, and their blue depths were offered me. “I think, sir,” she said, through her teeth, “that your insolence transcends all belief.”
“Can you deny it?” I cried. “Can you deny that you love me? If you can – why, then, you lied to me three nights ago at Toulouse!”
That smote her hard – so hard that she forgot her assurance that she would not listen to me – her promise to herself that she would stoop to no contention with me.
“If, in a momentary weakness, in my nescience of you as you truly are, I did make some such admission, I did entertain such feelings for you, things have come to my knowledge since then, monsieur, that have revealed you to me as another man; I have learnt something that has utterly withered such love as I then confessed. Now, monsieur, are you satisfied, and will you let me pass?” She said the last words with a return of her imperiousness, already angry at having been drawn so far.
“I am satisfied, mademoiselle,” I answered brutally, “that you did not speak the truth three nights ago. You never loved me. It was pity that deluded you, shame that urged you – shame at the Delilah part you had played and at your betrayal of me. Now, mademoiselle, you may pass,” said I.
And I stood aside, assured that as she was a woman she would not pass me now. Nor did she. She recoiled a step instead. Her lip quivered. Then she recovered quickly. Her mother might have told her that she was a fool for engaging herself in such a duel with me – me, the veteran of a hundred amorous combats. Yet though I doubt not it was her first assault-at-arms of this description, she was more than a match for me, as her next words proved.
“Monsieur, I thank you for enlightening me. I cannot, indeed, have spoken the truth three nights ago. You are right, I do not doubt it now, and you lift from me a load of shame.”
Dieu! It was like a thrust in the high lines, and its hurtful violence staggered me. I was finished, it seemed. The victory was hers, and she but a child with no practice of Cupid’s art of fence!
“Now, monsieur,” she added, “now that you are satisfied that you did wrong to say I loved you, now that we have disposed of that question – adieu!”
“A moment yet!” I cried. “We have disposed of that, but there was another point, an earlier one, which for the moment we have disregarded. We have – you have disproved the love I was so presumptuous as to believe you fostered for me. We have yet to reckon with the love I bear you, mademoiselle, and of that we shall not be able to dispose so readily.”
With a gesture of weariness or of impatience, she turned aside. “What is it you want? What do you seek to gain by thus provoking me? To win your wager?” Her voice was cold. Who to have looked upon that childlike face, upon those meek, pondering eyes, could have believed her capable of so much cruelty?
“There can no longer be any question of my wager; I have lost and paid it,” said I.
She looked up suddenly. Her brows met in a frown of bewilderment. Clearly this interested her. Again was she drawn.
“How?” she asked. “You have lost and paid it?”
“Even so. That odious, cursed, infamous wager, was the something which I hinted at so often as standing between you and me. The confession that so often I was on the point of making – that so often you urged me to make – concerned that wager. Would to God, Roxalanne, that I had told you!” I cried, and it seemed to me that the sincerity ringing in my voice drove some of the harshness from her countenance, some of the coldness from her glance.
“Unfortunately,” I pursued, “it always seemed to me either not yet time, or already too late. Yet so soon as I regained my liberty, my first thought was of that. While the wager existed I might not ask you to become my wife, lest I should seem to be carrying out the original intention which embarked me upon the business of wooing you, and brought me here to Languedoc. And so my first step was to seek out Chatellerault and deliver him my note of hand for my Picardy possessions, the bulk – by far the greater bulk – of all my fortune. My second step was to repair to you at the Hotel de l’Epee.
“At last I could approach you with clean hands; I could confess what I had done; and since it seemed to me that I had made the utmost atonement, I was confident of success. Alas! I came too late. In the porch of the auberge I met you as you came forth. From my talkative intendant you had learnt already the story of that bargain into which Bardelys had entered. You had learnt who I was, and you thought that you had learnt why I wooed you. Accordingly you could but despise me.”
She had sunk into a chair. Her hands were folded in a listless manner in her lap, and her eyes were lowered, her cheeks pale. But the swift heave of her bosom told me that my words were not without effect.” Do you know nothing of the bargain that I made with Chatellerault?” she asked in a voice that held, I thought, some trace of misery.
“Chatellerault was a cheat!” I cried. “No man of honour in France would have accounted himself under obligation to pay that wager. I paid it, not because I thought the payment due, but that by its payment I might offer you a culminating proof of my sincerity.”
“Be that as it may,” said she, “I passed him my word to – to marry him, if he set you at liberty.”
“The promise does not hold, for when you made it I was at liberty already. Besides, Chatellerault is dead by now – or very near it.”
“Dead?” she echoed, looking up.
“Yes, dead. We fought–” The ghost of a smile, of sudden, of scornful understanding, passed like a ray of light across her face. “Pardieu!” I cried, “you do me a wrong there. It was not by my hands that he fell. It was not by me that the duel was instigated.”