“_Citoyenne_, it is impossible. I cannot buy even your love with my dishonour. Your father has committed a crime against the Republic--but you have committed none.”
She shrugged her shoulders in calm indifference. An insulting smile came into her face.
“Then I will do so!” She turned toward the prisonful of victims with the exultant gesture of a martyr who demands the stake, and cried, evidently with full lungs: “_Vive le Roi! À bas la République!_”
“_Vive le Roi!--À bas la République!_” came like a murmured echo from somewhere beyond defined space, in defiant mockery of all that he craved.
He watched her turn away from him, an immense despair submerging him, and went slowly, head down, toward the door as though himself condemned.
She turned for one last look at him as he disappeared, a strange wild ecstasy in her face--and then flung herself face downward upon the straw in a paroxysm of hysteric sobs.
Whence came those murmured words, charged with unutterable passion, with the intensity of a soul that gathers its essence for its leap into the infinite dark?
“Now--now I can love him! Death, death! come quickly!--now I have the right to love!”
There was a glimpse of a face suddenly radiant through its tears--and then again blackness, a suspense of thought.
He stood with his back to the room, looking out upon the square filled with a surging mob. In the middle, upon a raised scaffold, stood the terrible red-painted uprights with the gleaming knife under the linking beam, poised ready for the swift fall of its diagonal edge. The mob swirled in a sudden turbulence under the windows. He knew what it meant.
There, forcing its slow passage through the maddened crowd, came the fatal cart--a rough vehicle filled with hatless men and women whose necks were bare and whose hands were bound, men and women who seemed deaf to the vociferations of the bloodthirsty mob that raved about them. He shuddered--slipped his right hand into his pocket, held it there, his gaze fastened in horrible fascination upon that slowly moving cartload of already almost lifeless human beings. He saw, clearly, only one figure, a girl in white, and he waited--in an agony which held him rigid.
The cart lurched its slow way to the scaffold, stopped. The victims began to descend. He saw the figure in white mount the steps to the machine, saw it turn its head at the last moment toward his window--and, as though it were the signal expected, he whipped the pistol from his pocket, glimpsed the dark hole of its barrel, and fired.