He turned towards the door, but in the same instant Hélène leaned to whisper something in her mother’s ear.
“Ah! …”
At the cry that broke from his wife, the General trembled as if he had seen Moïna lying dead. There stood Hélène, and the murderer had turned instinctively, with something like anxiety about these folk in his face.
“What is it, dear?” asked the General.
“Hélène wants to go with him.”
The murderer’s face flushed.
“If that is how my mother understands an almost involuntary exclamation,” Hélène said in a low voice, “I will fulfil her wishes.” She glanced about her with something like fierce pride; then the girl’s eyes fell, and she stood, admirable in her modesty.
“Hélène, did you go up to the room where—?”
“Yes, father.”
“Hélène” (and his voice shook with a convulsive tremor), “is this the first time that you have seen this man?”
“Yes, father.”
“Then it is not natural that you should intend to—”
“If it is not natural, father, at any rate it is true.”
“Oh! child,” said the Marquise, lowering her voice, but not so much but that her husband could hear her, “you are false to all the principles of honor, modesty, and right which I have tried to cultivate in your heart. If until this fatal hour you life has only been one lie, there is nothing to regret in your loss. It can hardly be the moral perfection of this stranger that attracts you to him? Can it be the kind of power that commits crime? I have too good an opinion of you to suppose that—”
“Oh, suppose everything, madame,” Hélène said coldly.
But though her force of character sustained this ordeal, her flashing eyes could scarcely hold the tears that filled them. The stranger, watching her, guessed the mother’s language from the girl’s tears, and turned his eagle glance upon the Marquise. An irresistible power constrained her to look at this terrible seducer; but as her eyes met his bright, glittering gaze, she felt a shiver run through her frame, such a shock as we feel at the sight of a reptile or the contact of a Leyden jar.
“Dear!” she cried, turning to her husband, “this is the Fiend himself. He can divine everything!”
The General rose to his feet and went to the bell.
“He means ruin for you,” Hélène said to the murderer.
The stranger smiled, took one forward stride, grasped the General’s arm, and compelled him to endure a steady gaze which benumbed the soldier’s brain and left him powerless.
“I will repay you now for your hospitality,” he said, “and then we shall be quits. I will spare you the shame by giving myself up. After all, what should I do now with my life?”
“You could repent,” answered Hélène, and her glance conveyed such hope as only glows in a young girl’s eyes.
“I shall never repent,” said the murderer in a sonorous voice, as he raised his head proudly.
“His hands are stained with blood,” the father said.
“I will wipe it away,” she answered.
“But do you so much as know whether he cares for you?” said her father, not daring now to look at the stranger.
The murderer came up a little nearer. Some light within seemed to glow through Hélène’s beauty, grave and maidenly though it was, coloring and bringing into relief, as it were, the least details, the most delicate lines in her face. The stranger, with that terrible face still blazing in his eyes, gave one tender glance to her enchanting loveliness, then he spoke, his tones revealing how deeply he had been moved.
“And if I refuse to allow this sacrifice of yourself, and so discharge my debt of two hours of existence to your father; is not this love, love for yourself alone?”
“Then do you too reject me?” Hélène’s cry rang painfully through the hearts of all who heard her. “Farewell, then, to you all; I will die.”
“What does this mean?” asked the father and mother.
Hélène gave her mother an eloquent glance and lowered her eyes.
Since the first attempt made by the General and his wife to contest by word or action the intruder’s strange presumption to the right of staying in their midst, from their first experience of the power of those glittering eyes, a mysterious torpor had crept over them, and their benumbed faculties struggled in vain with the preternatural influence. The air seemed to have suddenly grown so heavy, that they could scarcely breathe; yet, while they could not find the reason of this feeling of oppression, a voice within told them that this magnetic presence was the real cause of their helplessness. In this moral agony, it flashed across the General that he must make every effort to overcome this influence on his daughter’s reeling brain; he caught her by the waist and drew her into the embrasure of a window, as far as possible from the murderer.
“Darling,” he murmured, “if some wild love has been suddenly born in your heart, I cannot believe that you have not the strength of soul to quell the mad impulse; your innocent life, your pure and dutiful soul, has given me too many proofs of your character. There must be something behind all this. Well, this heart of mine is full of indulgence, you can tell everything to me; even if it breaks, dear child, I can be silent about my grief, and keep your confession a secret. What is it? Are you jealous of our love for your brothers or your little sister? Is it some love trouble? Are you unhappy here at home? Tell me about it, tell me the reasons that urge you to leave your home, to rob it of its greatest charm, to leave your mother and brothers and your little sister?”
“I am in love with no one, father, and jealous of no one, not even of your friend the diplomatist, M. de Vandenesse.”
The
