‘O God!’ he exclaimed, in an agony like a man writhing under a death-blow. ‘Have pity--have pity! Anything but this--any disgrace, any punishment, any ordeal. But oh! think of the forlorn, despairing prayer, “Entreat me not to leave thee!”’
The tears dropped fast from her eyes, and the beautiful face quivered in its struggle to be firm. What was that to him? He could only think her hard, unfeeling as the seaboard rock. She yielded not an inch.
‘It _must_ be so,’ she repeated; ‘loyal and true, you will not fail me at last!’
His eyes flashed with anger. Man’s nature can scarce endure great sorrow without a tinge of resentment.
‘Loyalty and truth are soon forgotten in the absent,’ said he, bitterly. ‘Lip-service and flattery are more welcome to princes. I cannot refuse to make room for a newer favourite!’
She smiled on him gentle and forgiving through her tears.
‘You are unjust,’ she said, ‘and unkind; you know it is not so; and when you are far off it will be your punishment to think that you could have spoken such words to me to-day.’
The reaction of his feelings was frightful: he put his hand to his throat as if he was choking, and gasped out in broken syllables--
‘Forgive me! only forgive me before I go out from the light into eternal darkness and despair!’
‘Obedience?’ she asked in her turn, looking wistfully at the shore, which they were now approaching; and on their arrival at which, something perhaps warned her that she must take her last leave of Chastelâr and his unselfish, unexacting devotion.
‘To the death!’ he replied; and even while he spoke the boatmen shipped their oars, and those who were forward leaped out waist-deep in water, to steady the shallop for the disembarkation of the ladies.
This was no such easy task. In these days people walk from a roomy steamer roofed in and glazed like a conservatory, across a platform securely railed on to a substantial stone-built quay that reaches a quarter of a mile out into the Firth, and renders them as independent of tide as the vessel herself does of weather; save for the slight oscillation caused by the motive power, a blind man, unless in a gale of wind, would never know that he had left _terra firma_. But even within the recollection of those now scarce past middle age, the crossing of the Firth was an affair of considerable discomfort, if not a little danger. The state of the tide was of paramount importance; the transit in an open boat, generally of the smallest and craziest description, to the steamer moored half-a-mile off, was in itself a voyage of no slight apprehension to the timid, especially if the wind had been blowing for two or three days steadily from the east: and the disembarkation on the northern side was, if possible, worse; the boat had to be beached with practised dexterity not to capsize altogether, and under the most favourable circumstances the pursuing waves were pretty sure to come dashing in over her stern, wetting to the skin those unwary passengers who had not taken refuge at the prow.