To so pay it was the instant choice of her high code of honor,
and of her generosity that would not be outrun. Moreover, she pitied
him unspeakably, though her heart had no tenderness for him; she had
dismissed him with cold disdain, and he had gone from her to save the
only life she loved, and was stretched a stricken, broken, helpless
wreck, with endless years of pain and weariness before him!
At midnight, in the great, dim magnificence of the state chamber where
he lay, and with the low, soft chanting of the chapel choir from afar
echoing through the incensed air, she bent her haughty head down over
his couch, and the marriage benediction was spoken over them.
His voice was faint and broken, but it had the thrill of a passionate
triumph in it. When the last words were uttered, he lay a while,
exhausted, silent; only looking ever upward at her with his dark, dreamy
eyes, in which the old love glanced so strangely through the blindness
of pain. Then he smiled as the last echo of the choral melodies died
softly on the silence.
"That is joy enough! Ah! have no fear. With the dawn you will be free
once more. Did you think that I could have taken your sacrifice? I
knew well, let them say as they would, that I should not live the night
through. But, lest existence should linger to curse me, to chain you, I
rent the linen bands off my wounds an hour ago. All their science will
not put back the life now! My limbs are dead, and the cold steals up!
Ah, love! Ah, love! You never thought how men can suffer! But have no
grief for me.
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