took my hand into yours to press with your lips. How all this is changed!"
"Enough, Regine."
"How it is strange! While you were so good, so tender to me, I cared nothing. I shrank from you. Shall I say it? I despised you; there was something girlish in your love—a gentleness that was hateful to me. How lost I was to all that was honest and pure, and true in it. Now, when you are brusque with me, savage almost, Monsieur Wilford, when it seems that a little, and you would strike me, woman though I am; now, when you do strike me, cruelly, most cruelly, with your words and your looks; now, my heart beats for you, as it never throbbed before, and I love you now—"
"I will not hear you, Regine."
"Why were you not so of old! Why did you not change my nature as the keeper tames the tigress at the Jardin des Plantes, by cruelty, by oaths and blows, till she crouches at his feet, frightened, docile, faithful, ay, and loving in her wild-beast way? Would tenderness tame her, do you think!—Bah: did it avail with me! could it avail with me? Why did you not lash me then into right thinking, into right doing!—not now—not now, when it is too late, too late, when I can be no more to you; when I am nothing—nothing—nothing—when you love me no more; when you despise, scorn, hate me—" her passion could no longer find expression in words. She flung herself on her knees, weeping piteously.
Wilford looked with sad eyes at the woman crouching on the floor. He moved about impatiently.
"This is folly," he said hoarsely. "Can this alter the past? Can you forget how we parted years ago?"
"No," she answered in a calmer tone, "I do not forget—I shall never forget. Yet, as I have said, there may be pleas to be urged on my behalf, though you will never-shall never—hear them. Forgive me if my emotion makes me forget myself. I can never forbear. I give way, like an insane person, when I am troubled. Forgive me—my regrets are not so wholly unreasonable as they may seem to be; they are less weak and foolish than you think. (Jan 1 but be sorry—passionately sorry—when I think it was in your power to change me—to work great good in me. Wrong had already been done, heaven knows, and enough of it; but there was some future for me then. I was very young. My thoughts had not taken their present ugly forms to keep for ever; they might then have been moulded otherwise; there was at least hope of such a thing, and you let the hour go by—you flung away the chance. If, instead of kneeling to me, suing and imploring—humouring my every foolish whim—you had beaten me down to your feet, as I am now,—humbled me and made me weep, then, as I am humbled and weeping now—"
"This is not penitence, Regine, it is simply passion. Half that you say is unintelligible to me; for the rest, it is without reason. It is not for me to treat the woman I loved—or believed I loved cruelly, as though I hated her. Change, reform must come from within, not from without. I did not come here to hear complaints of this kind—no, nor to make them, though perhaps I have cause to complain."
"You have cause," she said, interrupting him.
"As you have said, the past is past; let us not disinter it. It has been sad enough, and shameful, and wicked; let us heap earth upon it, and not lay it bare to taint the present. Do you think it is you only who have suffered? Have I no regrets? Have I no misdeeds—no cruel errors—to lament, to make such atonement for as is now possible?"
"Forgive me."
"I had forgiven you, believing you to be dead."
"And now that I am 1iving—"
"I will pray to be able to forgive you, Regine, as I will pray for aid to act rightly in my present great perplexity. For this money—"
"It shall not be paid—I say it shall not. You may trust me in that, Monsieur Wilford. Show me that you trust me in that. You are free—safe on that subject."
"But Madame Boisfleury—"
"I will deal with her. Without my aid she is powerless."
"And for the future Regine?"
"For the future?" the tears came into her eyes. "I see you now for the last time. It shall be as you thought it before. We shall not meet again on this side of the grave. You shall treat me as dead; and I shall be really dead to you. I will never set foot in this country again. For France, I may not go there, but in some other land—does it matter where? I shall some day drop down and die, and they shall bury me, unknown, nameless;—nothing to them or to you, or to anyone more. Will this do? Will this please yon? Will this make amends? Will this be the best? "
She tried to take his hand, but he shrunk back from her. The action wounded her terribly, yet she bore up against it.
"And if I do all this—and I will, you may trust me—will you then forgive me?—will you then think kindly of me again, pityingly? Oh, if you could do this!—if you could try to think over again one of your old good thoughts in regard to me! You are going? I may not detain you. Adieu, Monsieur Wilford."
She would not now be denied. She seized his hand and pressed it passionately to her fevered lips. Another moment and he was gone. The door closed—she shivered as she heard it shut.
"I shall never see him more—never, never! " She abandoned herself to a paroxysm of grief; the tears streamed from her eyes; she sobbed violently. "I shall never see him more—never, never! and—and I love him!"
She hid her face in her hands.
For some time she remained so, bowed down by her sorrow. Suddenly a slight noise startled her. She looked up: Monsieur Alexis was leaning in the doorway watching her, a malicious grin upon his face.
"You are très malade, this time, are you not, Mademoiselle Regine? You must be near your end, I should think. I never saw you cry before.