The
Church has said so; the state says so; your people say so; race and
all manner of good custom say so; and I, who love you better--yes,
a hundred times better than he--say so."
She made a hasty, deprecating gesture with her hand. "Oh, carry
this old song elsewhere," she said, "for I am sick of it." There
were now both scorn and weariness in her tone.
He had a singular patience, and he resented nothing. "I understand,"
he went on, "what it was sent your heart his way. He came to you
when you were yet a child, before you had learnt the first secret
of life. He was a captive, a prisoner, he had a wound got in fair
fighting, and I will do him the credit to say he was an honest man;
he was no spy."
She looked up at him with a slight flush, almost of gratitude.
"I know that well," she returned. "I knew there was other cause
than spying at the base of all ill treatment of him. I know that
you, you alone, kept him prisoner here five long years."
"Not I; the Grande Marquise--for weighty reasons. You should not
fret at those five years, since it gave you what you have cherished
so much, a husband--after a fashion. But yet we will do him
justice: he is an honourable fighter, he has parts and graces of a
rude order. But he will never go far in life; he has no instincts
and habits common with you; it has been, so far, a compromise,
founded upon the old-fashioned romance of ill-used captive and
soft-hearted maid; the compassion, too, of the superior for the
low, the free for the caged.
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