His Kingdom

"Water!" he muttered. "Water!"

She fetched it hurriedly, and, raising his head on her arm, held it to
his lips. He drank, and lay back again with closed eyes. He lay so
still and so long that she thought that he had fainted; but after a pause
he spoke.

"You have done that?" he whispered; "you have done that?"

"Yes," she answered, shuddering. "God forgive me! I have done that! I
had to do that, or--"

"And is it too late--to undo it?"

"It is too late." A sob choked her voice.

Tears--tears incredible, unnatural--welled from under Count Hannibal's
closed eyelids, and rolled sluggishly down his harsh cheek to the edge of
his beard.

"I would have gone," he muttered. "If you had spoken, I would have
spared you this."

"I know," she answered unsteadily; "the men told me."

"And yet--"

"It was just. And you are my husband," she replied. "More, I am the
captive of your sword, and as you spared me in your strength, my lord, I
spared you in your weakness."

"Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu, Madame!" he cried, "at what a cost!"

And that arrested, that touched her in the depths of her grief and her
horror; even while the gibbet on the causeway, which had burned itself
into her eyeballs, hung before her. For she knew that it was the cost to
her he was counting. She knew that for himself he had ever held life
cheap, that he could have seen Tignonville suffer without a qualm. And
the thoughtfulness for her, the value he placed on a thing--even on a
rival's life--because its was dear to her, touched her home, moved her as
few things could have moved her at that moment. She saw it of a piece
with all that had gone before, with all that had passed between them,
since that fatal Sunday in Paris. But she made no sign. More than she
had said she would not say; words of love, even of reconciliation, had no
place on her lips while he whom she had sacrificed awaited his burial.