It is the best virtue that you
have. Well, he is of your people. Will you go away in your negligent
indifference, and leave him to eat his heart out in bitterness and
misery? He was your brother's friend; he was known to you in his early
time; you said so. And are you cold enough and cruel enough, Milady,
not to make one effort to redeem him out of bondage?--to go back to your
palaces, and your pleasures, and your luxuries, and your flatteries, and
be happy, while this man is left on bearing his yoke here?--and it is
a yoke that galls, that kills!--bearing it until, in some day of
desperation, a naked blade cuts its way to his heart, and makes its
pulse cease forever? If you do, you patricians are worse still than I
thought you!"
Venetia heard her without interruption; a great sadness came over her
face as the vivid phrases followed each other. She was too absorbed in
the subject of them to heed the challenge and the insolence of their
manner. She knew that the Little One who spoke them loved him, though
so tenacious to conceal her love; and she was touched, not less by the
magnanimity which, for his sake, sought to release him from the African
service, than by the hopelessness of his coming years as thus prefigured
before her.
"Your reproaches are unneeded," she replied, slowly and wearily. "I
could not abandon one who was once the friend of my family to such a
fate as you picture without very great pain.
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