Count Hannibal could not have said why he did not speak to her at once.
Warned by an instinct vague and ill-understood, he remained silent, his
eyes riveted on her, until she rose from the floor. A moment later she
met his gaze, and he looked to see her start. Instead, she stood quiet
and thoughtful, regarding him with a kind of sad solemnity, as if she saw
not him only, but the dead; while first one tremor and then a second
shook her frame.
At length "It is over!" she whispered. "Patience, Monsieur; have no
fear, I will be brave. But I must give a little to him."
"To him!" Count Hannibal muttered, his face extraordinarily, pale.
She smiled with an odd passionateness. "Who was my lover!" she cried,
her voice a-thrill. "Who will ever be my lover, though I have denied
him, though I have left him to die! It was just. He who has so tried me
knows it was just! He whom I have sacrificed--he knows it too, now! But
it is hard to be--just," with a quavering smile. "You who take all may
give him a little, may pardon me a little, may have--patience!"
Count Hannibal uttered a strangled cry, between a moan and a roar. A
moment he beat the coverlid with his hands in impotence. Then he sank
back on the bed.
"Water!" he muttered. "Water!"
She fetched it hurriedly, and, raising his head on her arm, held it to
his lips. He drank, and lay back again with closed eyes. He lay so
still and so long that she thought that he had fainted; but after a pause
he spoke.
"You have done that?" he whispered; "you have done that?"
"Yes," she answered, shuddering. "God forgive me! I have done that! I
had to do that, or--"
"And is it too late--to undo it?"
"It is too late." A sob choked her voice.
Tears--tears incredible, unnatural--welled from under Count Hannibal's
closed eyelids, and rolled sluggishly down his harsh cheek to the edge of
his beard.
"I would have gone," he muttered. "If you had spoken, I would have
spared you this."
"I know," she answered unsteadily; "the men told me."
"And yet--"
"It was just. And you are my husband," she replied. "More, I am the
captive of your sword, and as you spared me in your strength, my lord, I
spared you in your weakness."