“When you have pledged your word, you keep it, do you not?”
“It is fastened by a key--the key which opens it is attached to a ring, and with that ring, I pledged my word that I would not be released from a promise I had made, until the ring should be brought back and returned to me.”
“Thanks to you, and to my mother, Emanuel, he is too far from us to ask it of him. He is at Cayenne.”
“Before you are married two months,” replied Emanuel, with an ironical smile, “that bracelet will be so irksome to you, that you will be the first to get rid of it.”
“I thought that I had told you it is locked upon my arm.”
“You know what people do when they have lost the key and cannot get into their house--they send for a locksmith.”
“Well! in my case, Emanuel,” replied Marguerite, rasing her voice, and extending her arm with a solemn gesture, “they must send for the executioner then, for this hand shall be cut off before I give it to another.”
“Silence! silence!” cried Emanuel, rising hastily, and looking anxiously towards the door of the inner room.
“And now I have said all I had to say,” rejoined Marguerite: “my only hope was in you, Emanuel; for although you cannot comprehend any deep-seated feeling, you are not cruel. I came to you in tears, look at me and you will see that it is true--I came to you to say, ‘Brother, this marriage is the misfortune, is the misery of my life--I would prefer a convent--I would prefer death to it--and you have not listened to me, or if you have listened, you have not understood me. Well, then, I will address myself to this man--I will appeal to his honor, to his delicacy; if that should not be sufficient, I will tell him all; my love for another, my weakness, my fault, my crime! I will tell him that I have a child; that although he was torn from me, although I have never since seen him, although I am ignorant of his abode, still my child exists. A child cannot die, without his death striking some chord within its mother’s heart. In short I will tell him, should it be necessary, that I still love another, that I cannot love him, and that I never will.”
“Well! tell him all this,” cried Emanuel, irritated by her persistence, “and that evening we will sign the contract, and the next day you will be Baroness de Lectoure.”