Would you have dared
show your face to me again had you been capable of shame even? And you
judged my heart as shallow as your own, and, after treating me in that
way, thought to win my forgiveness, and admiration even, by parading
before me with a sword! Leave me, I can feel nothing but contempt for
you. Go; you are a disgrace to the cause you have espoused!"
I had sat utterly crushed and humiliated, not daring even to raise my
sight to her face, for I felt that my own unspeakable weakness and
folly had brought this tempest upon me! But there is a limit to
patience, even in the most submissive mood; and when that was
overpassed, then my anger blazed out all the more hotly for the
penitential meekness I had preserved during the whole interview. Her
words from the first had fallen like whip-cuts, making me writhe with
the pain they inflicted; but that last taunt stung me beyond endurance.
I, an Englishman, to be told that I was a disgrace to the Blanco cause,
which I had joined, in spite of my better judgment, purely out of my
romantic devotion to this very woman! I too was now upon my feet, and
there face to face we stood for some moments, silent and trembling.
At length I found my speech.
"This," I cried, "from the woman who was ready yesterday to shed her
heart's blood to win one strong arm for her country? I have renounced
everything, allied myself with abhorred robbers and cut-throats, only
to learn that her one desire is everything to her, her divine, beautiful
country nothing.
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