'That will not do, M. de Cocheforet,' I said firmly, stopping him with my hand. 'Let me beg you to be more complaisant. It is a small thing I ask, a very small thing; but I swear to you that if Mademoiselle does not grant it, she will repent it all her life.'
He looked at me, his face growing darker and darker.
'Fine words,' he said, with a sneer. 'Yet I fancy I understand them.' And then with a passionate oath he broke out. 'But I will not have it! I have not been blind, M. de Berault, and I understand. But I will not have it. I will have no such Judas bargain made. PARDIEU! do you think I could suffer it and show my face again?'
'I don't know what you mean,' I said, restraining myself with difficulty. I could have struck the fool.
'But I know what you mean,' he replied, in a tone of suppressed rage. 'You would have her sell herself; sell herself to you to save me. And you would have me stand by and see the thing done.
No, sir, never; never, though I go to the wheel. I will die a gentleman, if I have lived a fool.'
'I think that you will do the one as certainly as you have done the other,' I retorted in my exasperation. And yet I admired him.
'Oh, I am not quite a fool!' he cried, scowling at me. 'I have used my eyes.'
'Then be good enough to favour me with your ears!' I answered drily. 'For just a moment. And listen when I say that no such bargain has ever crossed my mind. You were kind enough to think well of me last night, M. de Cocheforet. Why should the mention of Mademoiselle in a moment change your opinion? I wish simply to speak to her. I have nothing to ask from her, nothing to expect from her, either favour or anything else. What I say she will doubtless tell you. CIEL man! what harm can I do to her, in the road in your sight?'
He looked at me sullenly, his face still flushed, his eyes suspicious.
'What do you want to say to her?' he asked jealously. He was quite unlike himself. His airy nonchalance, his careless gaiety were gone.
'You know what I do not want to say to her, M. de Cocheforet,' I answered. 'That should be enough.'
He glowered at me a moment, still ill content. Then, without a word, be made me a gesture to go to her.
She had halted a score of paces away; wondering, doubtless, what was on foot. I rode towards her. She wore her mask, so that I missed the expression of her face as I approached; but the manner in which she turned her horse's head uncompromisingly towards her brother and looked past me was full of meaning. I felt the ground suddenly cut from under me. I saluted her, trembling.
'Mademoiselle,' I said, 'will you grant me the privilege of your company for a few minutes as we ride?'
'To what purpose?' she answered; surely, in the coldest voice in which a woman ever spoke to a man.
'That I may explain to you a great many things you do not understand,' I murmured.
'I prefer to be in the dark,' she replied. And her manner was more cruel than her words.
'But, Mademoiselle,' I pleaded--I would not be discouraged--'you told me one day, not so long ago, that you would never judge me hastily again.'
'Facts judge you, not I,' she answered icily. 'I am not sufficiently on a level with you to be able to judge you--I thank God.'
I shivered though the sun was on me, and the hollow where we stood was warm.
'Still, once before you thought the same,' I exclaimed after a pause, 'and afterwards you found that you had been wrong. It may be so again, Mademoiselle.'
'Impossible,' she said.
That stung me.
'No,' I cried. 'It is not impossible. It is you who are impossible. It is you who are heartless, Mademoiselle. I have done much in the last three days to make things lighter for you, much to make things more easy; now I ask you to do something in return which can cost you nothing.'
'Nothing?' she answered slowly--and she looked at me; and her eyes and her voice cut me as if they had been knives. 'Nothing?
Do you think, Monsieur, it costs me nothing to lose my self-respect, as I do with every word I speak to you? Do you think it costs me nothing to be here when I feel every look you cast upon me an insult, every breath I take in your presence a contamination? Nothing, Monsieur?' she continued with bitter irony. 'Nay, something! But something which I could not hope to make clear to you.'
I sat for a moment confounded, quivering with pain. It had been one thing to feel that she hated and scorned me, to know that the trust and confidence which she had begun to place in me were transformed to loathing. It was another to listen to her hard, pitiless words, to change colour under the lash of her gibing tongue. For a moment I could not find voice to answer her. Then I pointed to M. de Cocheforet.
'Do you love him?' I said hoarsely, roughly. The gibing tone had passed from her voice to mine.
She did not answer.
'Because if you do you will let me tell my tale. Say no, but once more, Mademoiselle--I am only human--and I go. And you will repent it all your life.'
I had done better had I taken that tone from the beginning. She winced, her head dropped, she seemed to grow smaller. All in a moment, as it were, her pride collapsed.
'I will hear you,' she murmured.
'Then we will ride on, if you please,' I said keeping the advantage I had gained. 'You need not fear. Your brother will follow.'
I caught hold of her rein and turned her horse, and she suffered it without demur; and in a moment we were pacing side by side, with the long straight road before us. At the end where it topped the hill, I could see the finger-post, two faint black lines against the sky. When we reached that--involuntarily I checked my horse and made it move more slowly.
'Well, sir?' she said impatiently. And her figure shook as with cold.
'It is a tale I desire to tell you, Mademoiselle,' I answered.
'Perhaps I may seem to begin a long way off, but before I end I promise to interest you. Two months ago there was living in Paris a man--perhaps a bad man--at any rate, by common report a hard man; a man with a peculiar reputation.'
She turned on me suddenly, her eyes gleaming through her mask.
'Oh, Monsieur, spare me this!' she said, quietly scornful. 'I will take it for granted.'
