The Historical Nights' Entertainment: First Series. Rafael Sabatini

      “A gift!” She laughed. “To Sancho Gordo! So the washerwoman's child is Eboli's son!”

      And again she laughed on a note of deep contempt.

      “Madame!” I cried, appalled and full of pity, “I assure you that you assume too much. The Prince—”

      “Let be,” she interrupted me. “Do you dream I care what rivals I may have had, however lowly they may have been? The Prince, my husband, is dead, and that is very well. He is much better dead, Don Antonio. The pity of it is that he ever lived, or else that I was born a woman.”

      She was staring straight before her, her hands fallen to her lap, her face set as if carved and lifeless, and her voice came hard as the sound of one stone beating upon another.

      “Do you dream what it can mean to have been so nurtured on indignities that there is no anger left, no pride to wound by the discovery of yet another nothing but cold, cold hate? That, Don Antonio, is my case. You do not know what my life has been. That man—”

      “He is dead, madame,” I reminded her, out of pity.

      “And damned, I hope,” she answered me in that same cold, emotionless voice. “He deserves no less for all the wrongs he did to me, the least of which was the great wrong of marrying me. For advancement he acquired me; for his advancement he bartered and used me and made of me a thing of shame.”

      I was so overwhelmed with grief and love and pity that a groan escaped me almost before I was aware of it. She broke off short, and stared at me in haughtiness.

      “You presume to pity me, I think,” she reproved me. “It is my own fault. I was wrong to talk. Women should suffer silently, that they may preserve at least a mask of dignity. Otherwise they incur pity—and pity is very near contempt.”

      And then I lost my head.

      “Not mine, not mine!” I cried, throwing out my arms; and though that was all I said, there was such a ring in my choking voice that she rose stiffly from her seat and stood tense and tall confronting me, almost eye to eye, reproof in every line of her.

      “Princess, forgive me!” I cried. “It breaks my heart in pieces to hear you utter things that have been in my mind these many years, poisoning the devotion that I owed to the late Prince, poisoning the very loyalty I owe my King. You say I pity you. If that were so, none has the better right.”

      “Who gave it you?” she asked me, breathless.

      “Heaven itself, I think,” I answered recklessly. “What you have suffered, I have suffered for you. When I came to Court the infamy was a thing accomplished—all of it. But I gathered it, and gathering it, thanked Heaven I had been spared the pain and misery of witnessing it, which must have been more than ever I could have endured. Yet when I saw you, when I watched you—your wistful beauty, your incomparable grace—there was a time when the thought to murder stirred darkly in my mind that I might at least avenge you.”

      She fell away before me, white to the very lips, her eyes dilating as they regarded me.

      “In God's name, why?” she asked me in a strangled voice.

      “Because I loved you,” I replied, “always, always, since the day I saw you. Unfortunately, that day was years too late, even had I dared to hope—”

      “Antonio!” Something in her voice drew my averted eyes. Her lips had parted, her eyes kindled into life, a flush was stirring in her cheeks.

      “And I never knew! I never knew!” she faltered piteously.

      I stared.

      “Dear Heaven, why did you withhold a knowledge that would have upheld me and enheartened me through all that I have suffered? Once, long, long ago I hoped—”

      “You hoped!”

      “I hoped, Antonio—long, long ago.”

      We were in each other's arms, she weeping on my shoulder as if her heart would burst, I almost mad with mingling joy and pain—and as God lives there was more matter here for pain than joy.

      We sat long together after that, and talked it out. There was no help for it. It was too late on every count. On her side there was the King, most jealous of all men, whose chattel she was become; on mine, there was my wife and children, and so deep and true was my love for Anne that it awakened in me thoughts of the loyalty I owed Juana, thoughts that had never troubled me hitherto in my pleasure-loving life—and this not only as concerned Anne herself, but as concerned all women. There was something so ennobling and sanctifying about our love that it changed at once the whole of my life, the whole tenor of my ways. I abandoned profligacy, and became so staid and orderly in my conduct that I was scarcely recognizable for the Antonio Perez whom the world had known hitherto.