"Well? And now?" he asked, for the young girl had paused, as if ashamed of her excitement.
"And now she stays in the house, on and on, day after day," continued Anne Mie, speaking more quietly, though with no less intensity. "Why does she not go? She is not safe in France. She belongs to the most hated of all the classes--the idle, rich aristocrats of the old régime. Paul has several times suggested plans for her emigration to England. Madame Déroulède, who is an angel, loves her, and would not like to part from her, but it would be obviously wiser for her to go, and yet she stays. Why?"
"Presumably because--"
"Because she is in love with Paul?" interrupted Anne Mie vehemently. "No, no; she does not love him--at least--Oh! sometimes I don't know. Her eyes light up when he comes, and she is listless when he goes. She always spends a longer time over her toilet when we expect him home to dinner," she added, with a touch of naïve femininity. "But--if it be love, then that love is strange and unwomanly; it is a love that will not be for his good--"
"Why should you think that?"
"I don't know," said the girl simply. "Isn't it an instinct?"
"Not a very unerring one in this case, I fear."
"Why?"
"Because your own love for Paul Déroulède has blinded you--Ah! you must pardon me, mademoiselle; you sought this conversation and not I, and I fear me I have wounded you. Yet I would wish you to know how deep is my sympathy with you, and how great my desire to render you a service if I could."
"I was about to ask a service of you, monsieur."
"Then command me, I beg of you."
"You are Paul's friend--persuade him that that woman in his house is astanding danger to his life and liberty."
"He would not listen to me."
"Oh! a man always listens to another."
"Except on one subject--the woman he loves."
He had said the last words very gently but very firmly. He was deeply, tenderly sorry for the poor, deformed, fragile girl, doomed to be a witness of that most heartrending of human tragedies, the passing away of her own scarce-hoped-for happiness. But he felt that at this moment the kindest act would be one of complete truth. He knew that Paul Déroulède's heart was completely given to Juliette de Marny; he too, like Anne Mie, instinctively mistrusted the beautiful girl and her strange, silent ways, but, unlike the poor hunchback, he knew that no sin which Juliette might commit would henceforth tear her from out the heart of his friend; that if, indeed, she turned out to be false, or even treacherous, she would, nevertheless, still hold a place in Déroulède's very soul, which no one else would ever fill.
"You think he loves her?" asked Anne Mie at last.
"I am sure of it."
"And she?"
"Ah! I do not know. I would trust your instinct--a woman's sooner than my own."
"She is false, I tell you, and is hatching treason against Paul."
"Then all we can do is to wait."
"Wait?"
"And watch carefully, earnestly, all the time. There! shall I pledge you my word that Déroulède shall come to no harm?"
"Pledge me your word that you'll part him from that woman."
"Nay; that is beyond my power. A man like Paul Déroulède only loves once in life, but when he does, it is for always."
Once more she was silent, pressing her lips closely together, as if afraid of what she might say.
He saw that she was bitterly disappointed, and sought for a means of tempering the cruelty of the blow.
"It will be your task to watch over Paul," he said; "with your friendship to guard and protect him we need have no fear for his safety, I think."
"I will watch," she replied quietly.
Gradually he had led her steps back towards the Rue Ecole de Médecine.
A great melancholy had fallen over his bold, adventurous spirit. How full of tragedies was this great city, in the last throes of its insane and cruel struggle for an unattainable goal. And yet, despite its guillotine and mock trials, its tyrannical laws and overfilled prisons, its very sorrows paled before the dead, dull misery of this deformed girl's heart.
A wild exaltation, a fever of enthusiasm lent glamour to the scenes which were daily enacted on the Place de la Révolution, turning the final acts of the tragedies into glaring, lurid melodrama, almost unreal in its poignant appeal to the sensibilities.
But here there was only this dead, dull misery, an aching heart, a poor, fragile creature in the throes of an agonized struggle for a fast-disappearing happiness.
Anne Mie hardly knew now what she had hoped when she sought this interview with Sir Percy Blakeney. Drowning in a sea of hopelessness, she had clutched at what might prove a chance of safety. Her reason told her that Paul's friend was right. Déroulède was a man who would love but once in his life. He had never loved--for he had too much pitied--poor, pathetic little Anne Mie.
Nay; why should we say that love and pity are akin?
Love, the great, the strong, the conquering god--Love that subdues a world, and rides roughshod over principle, virtue, tradition, over home, kindred, and religion--what cares he for the easy conquest of the pathetic being, who appeals to his sympathy?
Love means equality--the same height of heroism or of sin. When Love stoops to pity, he has ceased to soar in the boundless space, that rarefied atmosphere wherein man feels himself made at last truly in the image of God.
Chapter IX
Jealousy
At the door of her home Blakeney parted from Anne Mie, with all the courtesy with which he would have bade adieu to the greatest lady in his own land.
Anne Mie let herself into the house with her own latch-key. She closed the heavy door noiselessly, then glided upstairs like a quaint little ghost.
But on the landing above she met Paul Déroulède.
He had just come out of his room, and was still fully dressed.
"Anne Mie!" he said, with such an obvious cry of pleasure that the young girl, with beating heart, paused a moment on the top of the stairs, as if hoping to hear that cry again, feeling that indeed he was glad to see her, had been uneasy because of her long absence.
"Have I made you anxious?" she asked at last.
"Anxious!" he exclaimed. "Little one, I have hardly lived this last hour since I realized that you had gone out so late as this, and all alone."
"How did you know?"
"Mademoiselle de Marny knocked at my door an hour ago. She had gone to your room to see you, and, not finding you there, she searched the house for you, and finally, in her anxiety, came to me. We did not dare to tell my mother. I won't ask you where you have been, Anne Mie, but another time, remember, little one, that the streets of Paris are not safe, and that those who love you suffer deeply when they know you to be in peril."
"Those who love me!" murmured the girl under her breath.
"Could you not have asked me to come with you?"
"No; I wanted to be alone. The streets were quite safe, and--I wanted to speak with Sir Percy Blakeney."
"With Blakeney?" he exclaimed in boundless astonishment. "Why, what in the world did you want to say to him?"
The girl, so unaccustomed to lying, had blurted out the truth, almost against her will.
"I thought he could help me, as I was much perturbed and restless."
"You went to him sooner than to me?" said Déroulède in a tone of gentle reproach, and still puzzled at this extraordinary action on the part of the girl, usually so shy and reserved.