“Were you condemned, were you innocent, were you a martyr,” replied Felton, “the greater would be the need of prayer; and I myself will aid you with my prayers.”
“Oh, you are just a man!” cried milady, throwing herself on her knees at his feet. “I can stand it no longer, for I fear I shall be wanting in strength in the moment at which I shall be forced to undergo the struggle and confess my faith. Listen, then, to the supplication of a despairing woman. You are made a tool of, sir; but that is not the question. I ask you only one favour, and if you grant it me, I will bless you in this world and in the world to come.”
“Speak to the master, madame,” said Felton; “happily I am not charged with the power either of pardoning or punishing. God has laid this responsibility on one higher placed than I am.”
“To you—no, to you alone! Listen to me rather than contribute to my destruction, rather than contribute to my ignominy.”
“If you have deserved this shame, madame, if you have incurred this ignominy, you must submit to it as an offering to God.”
“What do you say? Oh, you do not understand me! When I speak of ignominy, you think I speak of some punishment or other, of imprisonment or death! Would to Heaven it were no worse! Of what consequence to me is imprisonment or death?”
“I no longer understand you, madame,” said Felton.
“Or, rather, you pretend not to understand me, sir!” replied the prisoner, with a doubting smile.
“No, madame, on the honour of a soldier, on the faith of a Christian.”
“What! You are ignorant of Lord Winter’s designs on me?”
“I am.”
“Impossible! You are his confidant!”
“I never lie, madame.” “Oh, he makes too little concealment of them for you not to guess them.”
“I seek to guess nothing, madame; I wait till I am confided in; and apart from what Lord Winter has said to me before you, he has confided nothing to me.”
“why, then,” cried milady, with an incredible accent of truthfulness —‘why, then, you are not his accomplice; you do not know that he destines me to a disgrace which all the punishments of the world cannot equal in horror?”
“You are mistaken, madame,” said Felton, reddening; “Lord Winter is not capable of such a crime.”
“Good!” said milady to herself; “without knowing what it is, he calls it a crime!”
Then aloud,
“The friend of the infamous is capable of everything.”
“Whom do you call the infamous?” asked Felton.
“Are there, then, in England two men to whom such an epithet can be applied?”
“You mean George Villiers?” said Felton, and his eyes flashed fire.
“Whom pagans and infidel gentiles call the Duke of Buckingham,” replied milady. “I could not have thought that there was an Englishman in all England who would have required so long an explanation to understand of whom I was speaking.”
“The hand of the Lord is stretched over him,” said Felton; “he will not escape the chastisement he deserves.”
Felton only expressed regarding the duke the execration which all the English felt for a man who the Catholics themselves called the extortioner, the pillager, the profligate, and whom the Puritans styled simply Satan.
“Oh, my God, my God!” cried milady; “when I supplicate Thee to pour on this man the chastisement which is his due, Thou knowest that I pursue not my own vengeance, but that I pray for the deliverance of a whole nation!”
“Do you know him, then?” asked Felton.
“At length he questions me!” said milady to herself, at the height of joy at having obtained so quickly such a great result. “Oh, do I know him? Yes; to my misfortune, to my eternal misfortune!”
And milady wrung her hands, as if she had reached the very paroxy** of grief.
Felton no doubt felt within himself that his strength was deserting him, and he took several steps toward the door; but the prisoner, whose eye was never off him, sprang after him and stopped him.
“Sir,” cried she, “be kind, be clement, listen to my prayer. That knife, which the baron’s fatal prudence deprived me of, because he knows the use I would make of it—Oh, hear me to the end! That knife—give it to me for a minute only, for mercy’s, for pity’s sake! I will embrace your knees! You shall shut the door, that you may be certain I am not angry with you! My God! the idea of being angry with you, the only just, good, and compassionate being I have met with!—you, my saviour perhaps! One minute, that knife, one minute, a single minute, and I will restore it to you through the grating of the door; only one minute, Mr. Felton, and you will have saved my honour.”
“To kill yourself?” cried Felton, in terror, forgetting to withdraw his hands from the hands of the prisoner—“to kill yourself?”
“I have said, sir,” murmured milady, lowering her voice, and allowing herself to sink overpowered to the ground—“I have told my secret! He knows all—My God, I am lost!”
Felton remained standing, motionless and undecided.
“He still doubts,” thought milady; “I have not been sufficiently genuine.”
Some one was heard walking in the corridor. Milady recognized Lord Winter’s step.
Felton recognized it also, and took a step toward the door.
Milady sprang forward.
“Oh, not a word,” said she, in a concentrated voice—“not a word to this man of all I have said to you, or I am lost, and it would be you— you—”
Then as the steps drew near she became silent for fear of being heard, applying, with a gesture of infinite terror, her beautiful hand to Felton’s mouth.
Felton gently pushed milady from him, and she sank into an easychair.
Lord Winter passed before the door without stopping, and they heard the sound of his footsteps in the distance.
Felton, as pale as death, remained some instants with his ear alert and listening; then, when the sound had entirely died away, he breathed like a man awaking from a dream, and rushed out of the apartment.
“Ah,” said milady, listening in her turn to the noise of Felton’s steps, which faded away in a direction opposite to Lord Winter’s—“ah, at length thou art mine!”