Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v108.djvu/218

206 against the window. He took up his argument passionately:

"You ask me to do this thing deliberately, as a man, and a man of flesh and blood—you ask me to take flight at your cost—you ask me to use your innocence as a ladder for my escape?"

There was a sudden noise as of some piece of furniture falling in the farther room where they had supped. She started back to him and caught up the cloak again, seeking to put it about him.

"Go, quick!" she implored. "The litter waits, and the word is 'Saint Therese.' That is the first halting-place. The men know. Go! You will find it—the litter—at the foot of the Stairway of Honor."

He took the cloak from her and flung it behind him. "You ask me to use your innocence as a ladder for my escape," he repeated—"and I decline so to degrade you and myself. I built this very Stairway to the honor of your house and race. I have mounted it in the spirit of peace and thankful pride. I will not descend it to your dishonor and my own to save my skin."

"Oh!" she whispered, piteously,—"oh, do not waste the minutes—but go."

"Is there no other way?" he answered, ironically.

"Hardly to your honor," she said, piteously.

"Then to yours," he replied. "Tell me that, madam."

She crept away to the window and buried her face in her hand. Thither he followed her.

"You say there is another way, madam," he went on, taking her hand; "then let me take that. If it be to my dishonor, what matter, so that it saves you?"

Suddenly, in the gracious depths of the orchard, the page took up his song again:

To Pietro d'Aranti the cruelty of the love-song in the ears of a man standing upon the threshold of a sordid and unmerited death seemed only sheer insult.

"My God! madam," he said, "show me the way, lest life become too strong and death too cruel."

Still she remained dull and frigid—once more the Ice Woman.

"The litter is there," he urged, passion- ately, again. "Go."

"I will not go," she whispered, doggedly. "Do you know why? Because"—she turned her head away and went on with an effort—"because my brother most desires it. He would give worlds now to see me go. Lately he has tried again and again to marry me to one of his great friends—men who are enemies of Maximilian, as he is,—men who would help him. I would not. And if I had lifted up my finger to the people down there"—she pointed to the sleeping town below—"the people he wants to treat like mongrels and use like mules, they would have set upon him for my sake. He knows it now. But he did not know it when he put you in prison."

All manner of tangled thoughts pressed upon the brain of D'Aranti. He looked at Aloyse, again overcome by the stupefaction of the afternoon. If she had been inscrutable of old, she was now like a very maze of subtlety and contradictions. Torment and suspense maddened him, and brought rage to his head and throat.

"Madam," he said, desperately, "you boast of many things, but you do not fulfil your boast. It seems as if you merely rejoiced passively in the fact of your power; and so you are neither more Christian nor less human than the Duke-Marshal, your brother. If the people would rise now to your bidding, why did you not go free days ago and leave this prison-house?"

"I could not " she said. Her eyes turned to him piteously, as they had done before that night. "I could not," she repeated. His anger blinded him to the helplessness in them, and again his irony was paramount.

"And did the same lack of courage prevent you from helping the Duke-Marshal's other prisoner?" he asked. "Would not this powerful ally"—he pointed to the sleeping town below—"have set me free at your command? Was it needful to let me lie there, and not use so much splendid influence till the last moment?"

She stood, it seemed, at bay then, white and indignant.

"The Duke threatened to kill you at any moment," she said. "If the people had burst into the castle, he would have