Her hand was pressed suddenly in his; his eye glittered, his
lip seemed still speaking; he awaited his doom.
The countenance of Venetia was quite pale, but it was disturbed. You
might see, as it were, the shadowy progress of thought, and mark the
tumultuous passage of conflicting passions. Her mind, for a moment,
was indeed a chaos. There was a terrible conflict between love and
duty. At length a tear, one solitary tear, burst from her burning
eye-ball, and stole slowly down her cheek; it relieved her pain. She
pressed Cadurcis hand, and speaking in a hollow voice, and with a look
vague and painful, she said, 'I am a victim, but I am resolved. I
never will desert her who devoted herself to me.'
Cadurcis quitted her hand rather abruptly, and began walking up and
down on the turf that surrounded the fountain.
'Devoted herself to you!' he exclaimed with a fiendish laugh, and
speaking, as was his custom, between his teeth. 'Commend me to such
devotion. Not content with depriving you of a father, now forsooth
she must bereave you of a lover too! And this is a mother, a devoted
mother! The cold-blooded, sullen, selfish, inexorable tyrant!'
'Plantagenet!' exclaimed Venetia with great animation.
'Nay, I will speak. Victim, indeed! You have ever been her slave.
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