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A Question Of Trust
by
He paused. She was listening with eyes downcast, but her face was a very mask of cold disdain.
“Monsieur,” she said, with stately deliberation, “I do not–wholly–understand you. But it would be wasting your time and my own to ask you to explain. As I said before, in the event of a crisis I can secure my own safety.”
“Nevertheless,” said Pierre Dumaresq with a deliberation even greater than her own, “I will explain, since a clear understanding seems to me advisable. I am asking you to marry me, Mademoiselle Stephanie, in order to ensure your safety. It is practically your only alternative now, and it must be taken at once. I shall know how to protect my wife. Marry me, and I will take you out of the city to my home on the other side of the island. My yacht is there in readiness, and escape at any time would be easy.”
“Escape, monsieur!” Sharply she broke in upon him. Her coldness was all gone in a sudden flame of indignation kindled by the sheer arrogance of his bearing. “Escape from whom–from what?”
He was silent an instant, almost as if disconcerted. Then:
“Escape from your enemies, mademoiselle,” he rejoined sternly. “Escape from the mercy of the mob, which is all you can expect if you stay here.”
Her eyes flashed over him in a single, searing glance of the most utter, the most splendid contempt. Then:
“You are more than kind, Monsieur Dumaresq,” she said. “But your suggestion does not recommend itself to me. In short, I should prefer–the mercy of the mob.”
The man’s brows met ferociously. His hands clenched. He almost looked for the moment as though he would strike her. But she did not flinch before him, and very slowly the tension passed. Yet his eyes shone terribly upon her as a sword-blade that is flashed in the sunlight.
“A strange preference, mademoiselle,” he remarked at length, turning to pick up his riding-switch. “Possibly you may change your mind–before it is too late.”
“Never!” she answered proudly.
And Pierre Dumaresq laughed–a sudden, harsh laugh, and turned to go. It was only what he had expected, after all, but it galled him none the less. He uttered no threat of any sort; only at the door he stood for an instant and looked back at her. And the woman’s heart contracted within her as though her blood had turned to ice.
II
When she was alone, when his departing footsteps had ceased to echo along the corridor without, Mademoiselle Stephanie drew a long, quivering breath and moved to a chair by the window. She sank into it with the abandonment of a woman at the end of her strength, and sat passive with closed eyes.
For three years now she had lived in this turbulent island of Maritas. For three years she had watched discontent gradually merge into rebellion and anarchy. And now she knew that at last the end was near.
Her stepfather, the Governor, held his post under the French Government, but France at that time was too occupied with matters nearer home to spare much attention for the little island in the Atlantic and its seething unrest. De Rochefort was considered a capable man, and certainly if treachery and cruelty could have upheld his authority he would have maintained his ascendency without difficulty. But the absinthe demon had gripped him with resistless strength, and all his shrewdness had long since been drained away.
Day by day he plunged deeper into the vice that was destroying him, and Stephanie could but stand by and watch the gradual gathering of a storm that was bound to overwhelm them both.
There was no love between them. They were bound together by circumstance alone. She had gone to the place to be with her dying mother, and had remained there at that mother’s request. Madame de Rochefort’s belief in her husband had never been shaken, and, dying, she had left her English daughter in his care.