“I— I was mistaken. I know it now. Yet, at the time . . . surely, Aline, that morning when you came to beg me not to keep my engagement with him in the Bois, you were moved by concern for him?”
“For him! It was concern for you,” she cried, without thinking what she said.
But it did not convince him. “For me? When you knew — when all the world knew what I had been doing daily for a week!”
“Ah, but he, he was different from the others you had met. His reputation stood high. My uncle accounted him invincible; he persuaded me that if you met nothing could save you.”
He looked at her frowning.
“Why this, Aline?” he asked her with some sternness. “I can understand that, having changed since then, you should now wish to disown those sentiments. It is a woman’s way, I suppose.”
“Oh, what are you saying, Andre? How wrong you are! It is the truth I have told you!”
“And was it concern for me,” he asked her, “that laid you swooning when you saw him return wounded from the meeting? That was what opened my eyes.”
“Wounded? I had not seen his wound. I saw him sitting alive and apparently unhurt in his caleche, and I concluded that he had killed you as he had said he would. What else could I conclude?”
He saw light, dazzling, blinding, and it scared him. He fell back, a hand to his brow. “And that was why you fainted?” he asked incredulously.
She looked at him without answering. As she began to realize how much she had been swept into saying by her eagerness to make him realize his error, a sudden fear came creeping into her eyes.
He held out both hands to her.
“Aline! Aline!” His voice broke on the name. “It was I . . . ”
“O blind Andre, it was always you — always! Never, never did I think of him, not even for loveless marriage, save once for a little while, when . . . when that theatre girl came into your life, and then . . . ” She broke off, shrugged, and turned her head away. “I thought of following ambition, since there was nothing left to follow.”
He shook himself. “I am dreaming, of course, or else I am mad,” he said.
“Blind, Andre; just blind,” she assured him.
“Blind only where it would have been presumption to have seen.”
“And yet,” she answered him with a flash of the Aline he had known of old, “I have never found you lack presumption.”
M. de Kercadiou, emerging a moment later from the library window, beheld them holding hands and staring each at the other, beatifically, as if each saw Paradise in the other’s face.
CAPTAIN BLOOD
Table of Contents
Chapter III: The Lord Chief Justice
Chapter IX: The Rebels-Convict
Chapter XIV: Levasseur’s Heroics
Chapter XXI: The Service of King James
Chapter XXV: The Service of King Louis
Chapter XXVIII: The Honour of M. de Rivarol
Chapter XXIX: The Service of King William
Chapter XXX: The Last Fight of the Arabella
Chapter XXXI: His Excellency the Governor
CHAPTER I.
THE MESSENGER
Peter Blood, bachelor of medicine and several other things besides, smoked a pipe and tended the geraniums boxed