'This house is wretched for you,' said he: 'and you must be hungry. Let me...'

'I cannot eat. I will ask you': she paused, drawing on her energies, and keeping down the throbs of her heart: 'this: do you love me?'

'I love you with all my heart and soul.'

'As in Normandy?'

'Yes.'

'In Venice?'

'As from the first, Renee! That I can swear.'

'Oaths are foolish. I meant to ask you--my friend, there is no question in my mind of any other woman: I see you love me: I am so used to consider myself the vain and cowardly creature, and you the boldest and faithfullest of men, that I could not abandon the habit if I would: I started confiding in you, sure that I should come to land. But I have to ask you: to me you are truth: I have no claim on my lover for anything but the answer to this:--Am I a burden to you?'

His brows flew up in furrows. He drew a heavy breath, for never had he loved her more admiringly, and never on such equal terms. She was his mate in love and daring at least. A sorrowful comparison struck him, of a little boat sailing out to a vessel in deep seas and left to founder.

Without knotting his mind to acknowledge or deny the burden, for he could do neither, he stood silent, staring at her, not so much in weakness as in positive mental division. No, would be false; and Yes, not less false; and if the step was irretrievable, to say Yes would be to plunge a dagger in her bosom; but No was a vain deceit involving a double wreck. a.s.suredly a man standing against the world in a good cause, with a runaway wife on his hands, carries a burden, however precious it be to him.

A smile of her lips, parted in an anguish of expectancy, went to death over Renee's face. She looked at him tenderly. 'The truth,' she murmured to herself, and her eyelids fell.

'I am ready to bear anything,' said Beauchamp. 'I weigh what you ask me, that is all. You a burden to me? But when you ask me, you make me turn round and inquire how we stand before the world.'

'The world does not stone men,' said Renee.

'Can't I make you feel that I am not thinking of myself?' Beauchamp stamped in his extreme perplexity. He was gagged; he could not possibly talk to her, who had cast the die, of his later notions of morality and the world's dues, fees, and claims on us.

'No, friend, I am not complaining.' Renee put out her hand to him; with compa.s.sionate irony feigning to have heard excuses. 'What right have I to complain? I have not the sensation. I could not expect you to be everlastingly the sentinel of love. Three times I rejected you! Now that I have lost my father--Oh! poor father: I trifled with my lover, I tricked him that my father might live in peace. He is dead. I wished you to marry one of your own countrywomen, Nevil. You said it was impossible; and I, with my snake at my heart, and a husband grateful for nursing and whimpering to me for his youth like a beggar on the road, I thought I owed you this debt of body and soul, to prove to you I have some courage; and for myself, to reward myself for my long captivity and misery with one year of life: and adieu to Roland my brother! adieu to friends! adieu to France! Italy was our home. I dreamed of one year in Italy; I fancied it might be two; more than that was unimaginable.

Prisoners of long date do not hope; they do not calculate: air, light, they say; to breathe freely and drop down! They are reduced to the instincts of the beasts. I thought I might give you happiness, pay part of my debt to you. Are you remembering Count Henri? That paints what I was! I could fly to that for a taste of life! a dance to death! And again you ask: Why, if I loved you then, not turn to you in preference?

No, you have answered it yourself, Nevil;--on that day in the boat, when generosity in a man so surprised me, it seemed a miracle to me; and it was, in its divination. How I thank my dear brother Roland for saving me the sight of you condemned to fight, against your conscience! He taught poor M. d'Henriel his lesson. You, Nevil, were my teacher. And see how it hangs: there was mercy for me in not having drawn down my father's anger on my heart's beloved. He loved you. He pitied us. He reproached himself. In his last days he was taught to suspect our story: perhaps from Roland; perhaps I breathed it without speaking. He called heaven's blessings on you. He spoke of you with tears, clutching my hand. He made me feel he would have cried out: "If I were leaving her with Nevil Beauchamp!" and "Beauchamp," I heard him murmuring once: "take down Froissart": he named a chapter. It was curious: if he uttered my name Renee, yours, "Nevil," soon followed. That was noticed by Roland. Hope for us, he could not have had; as little as I! But we were his two: his children. I buried him--I thought he would know our innocence, and now pardon our love. I read your letters, from my name at the beginning, to yours at the end, and from yours back to mine, and between the lines, for any doubtful spot: and oh, rash! But I would not retrace the step for my own sake. I am certain of your love for me, though...' She paused: 'Yes, I am certain of it. And if I am a burden to you?'

'About as much as the air, which I can't do without since I began to breathe it,' said Beauchamp, more clear-mindedly now that he supposed he was addressing a mind, and with a peril to himself that escaped his vigilance. There was a secret intoxication for him already in the half-certainty that the step could not be retraced. The idea that he might reason with her, made her seductive to the heart and head of him.

'I am pa.s.sably rich, Nevil,' she said. 'I do not care for money, except that it gives wings. Roland inherits the chateau in Touraine. I have one in Burgundy, and rentes and shares, my notary informs me.'

'I have money,' said he. His heart began beating violently. He lost sight of his intention of reasoning. 'Good G.o.d! if you were free!'

She faltered: 'At Tourdestelle...'

'Yes, and I am unchanged,' Beauchamp cried out. 'Your life there was horrible, and mine's intolerable.' He stretched his arms cramped like the yawning of a wretch in fetters. That which he would and would not became so intervolved that he deemed it reasonable to instance their common misery as a ground for their union against the world. And what has that world done for us, that a joy so immeasurable should be rejected on its behalf? And what have we succeeded in doing, that the childish effort to move it should be continued at such a cost?

For years, down to one year back, and less--yesterday, it could be said--all human blessedness appeared to him in the person of Renee, given him under any condition whatsoever. She was not less adorable now.

In her decision, and a courage that he especially prized in women, she was a sweeter to him than when he was with her in France: too sweet to be looked at and refused.

'But we must live in England,' he cried abruptly out of his inner mind.

'Oh! not England, Italy, Italy!' Renee exclaimed: 'Italy, or Greece: anywhere where we have sunlight. Mountains and valleys are my dream.

Promise it, Nevil. I will obey you; but this is my wish. Take me through Venice, that I may look at myself and wonder. We can live at sea, in a yacht; anywhere with you but in England. This country frowns on me; I can hardly fetch my breath here, I am suffocated. The people all walk in lines in England. Not here, Nevil! They are good people, I am sure; and it is your country: but their faces chill me, their voices grate; I should never understand them; they would be to me like their fogs eternally; and I to them? O me! it would be like hearing sentence in the dampness of the shroud perpetually. Again I say I do not doubt that they are very good: they claim to be; they judge others; they may know how to make themselves happy in their climate; it is common to most creatures to do so, or to imagine it. Nevil! not England!'

Truly 'the mad commander and his French marquise' of the Bevisham Election ballad would make a pretty figure in England!

His friends of his own cla.s.s would be mouthing it. The story would be a d.o.g.g.i.ng shadow of his public life, and, quite as bad, a reflection on his party. He heard the yelping tongues of the cynics. He saw the consternation and grief of his old Bevisham hero, his leader and his teacher.

'Florence,' he said, musing on the prospect of exile and idleness: 'there's a kind of society to be had in Florence.'

Renee asked him if he cared so much for society.

He replied that women must have it, just as men must have exercise.

'Old women, Nevil; intriguers, tattlers.'

'Young women, Renee.'

She signified no.

He shook the head of superior knowledge paternally.

Her instinct of comedy set a dimple faintly working in her cheek.

'Not if they love, Nevil.'

'At least,' said he, 'a man does not like to see the woman he loves banished by society and browbeaten.'

'Putting me aside, do you care for it, Nevil?'

'Personally not a jot.'

'I am convinced of that,' said Renee.

She spoke suspiciously sweetly, appearing perfect candour.

The change in him was perceptible to her. The nature of the change was unfathomable.

She tried her wits at the riddle. But though she could be an actress before him with little difficulty, the torment of her situation roused the fever within her at a bare effort to think acutely. Scarlet suffused her face: her brain whirled.

'Remember, dearest, I have but offered myself: you have your choice.

I can pa.s.s on. Yes, I know well I speak to Nevil Beauchamp; you have drilled me to trust you and your word as a soldier trusts to his officer--once a faint-hearted soldier! I need not remind you: fronting the enemy now, in hard truth. But I want your whole heart to decide.

Give me no silly, compa.s.sion! Would it have been better to me to have written to you? If I had written I should have clipped my glorious impulse, brought myself down to earth with my own arrow. I did not write, for I believed in you.'

So firm had been her faith in him that her visions of him on the pa.s.sage to England had resolved all to one flash of blood-warm welcome awaiting her: and it says much for her natural generosity that the savage delicacy of a woman placed as she now was, did not take a mortal hurt from the apparent voidness of this home of his bosom. The pa.s.sionate gladness of the lover was wanting: the chivalrous valiancy of manful joy.

Renee shivered at the cloud thickening over her new light of intrepid defiant life.

'Think it not improbable that I have weighed everything I surrender in quitting France,' she said.

Remorse wrestled with Beauchamp and flung him at her feet.

Renee remarked on the lateness of the hour.