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Artois poured out another cup of tea and drank it, considering the little funny situation. Vere and he with a secret from Hermione shared between them! Vere submitting verses to his judgment! He remembered Hermione's half-concealed tragedy, which, of course, had been patent to him in its uttermost nakedness. Even Vere had guessed something of it. Do we ever really hide anything from every one?
For, though she at first professed that she assumed this disguise in order to countenance the woman who should present us with the Lady Hermione's petition, for whom she professed entire affection; yet when we, suspecting anguis in herba, did put her to the very question, she was compelled to own a virtuous attachment for Glenvarlochides, in such a pretty passion of shame and fear, that we had much ado to keep our own eyes from keeping company with hers in weeping.
How absurd that was, and how impossible! A sense of being near a prison door came upon him. He threw Hermione's letter onto the writing-table, and went out into the sun. When Gaspare returned that evening Maurice told him the news from Africa. The boy's face lit up. "Oh, then shall we go to London?" he said. "Why not?" Maurice exclaimed, almost violently. "It will all be different!
"I wish I knew what day Hermione is arriving," he thought, almost fretfully. "I wish she wouldn't keep me hung up in this condition of uncertainty. She seems to think that I have nothing to do but just wait here upon the pleasure of Artois." With that last thought the old sense of injury rose in him again. This friend of Hermione's was spoiling everything, was being put before every one.
Now the hollow mutterings of the rock in Virgil's Grotto seemed to be in his heart, as he realized how permanent was the storm in Hermione's nature. Something for her he had done. And something much more, no doubt Vere had done. But how little it all was! Their helplessness gave him a new understanding of woman.
The night of this second disgrace I went to Hermione's to visit him, where we discoursed what was next to be done. He did not think his pardon was sufficient to secure him, and he was not willing to trust a King who might be convinced, that that tenderness he had for him, was absolutely against the peace and quiet of all France.
Otherwise, his object in picking a large hotel being to avoid notice among a fashionable throng, he might easily have taken his "wife" to the Waldorf-Astoria, in which event certain complications even then hot in the making would not have followed their intricate course, while Hermione's future must have been affected most powerfully.
Such moments in her acting as that of Galatea's mute supplication at the last of earthly life, that of Juliet's desolation after the final midnight parting with the last human creature whom she may ever behold, and that of Hermione's despair when she covers her face and falls as if stricken dead, were the eloquent denotements of power, and in those and such as those with which her art abounded was the fulfilment of every hope that her acting inspired and the vindication of every encomium that it received.
'After this, I remained there undiscovered the whole time the Prince was at Hermione's, till his coming to Court, when I verily believed he would have gained me my pardon, with his own; but the King had sworn my final destruction, if he ever got me in his power; and proclaiming me a traitor, seized all they could find of mine.
He had fine sensibilities, he had quick intuitions, he was capricious and womanly in his ideas. It follows that, in the scale of characters, Hermione held the mean between the two brothers. Compared with Paul's powerful nature, her qualities were those of a woman; in comparison with Alexander's delicate organization of mind, Hermione's character was more like that of a man.
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