He was so splendidly magnificent,
so masterful and unrivalled, and he came thus to lay his being,
as it were, in homage at her feet. It touched her a little, who
knew so little of the real man. It cost her an effort to repulse
him, and the effort was not very convincing.
"Hush, monsieur, for pity's sake! You must not talk so to me. It
. . . it hurts."
O fatal word! She meant that it was her dignity as Queen he
wounded, for she clung to that as to the anchor of salvation. But
he in his egregious vanity must of cours e misunderstand.
"Hurts!" he cried, and the rapture in his accents should have
warned her. "Because you resist it, because you fight against the
commands of your true self. Anne!" He seized her, and crushed her
to him. "Anne!"
Wild terror gripped her at that almost brutal contact, and anger,
too, her dignity surging up in violent outraged rebellion. A
scream, loud and piercing, broke from her and rang through the
still garden. It brought him to his senses. It was as if he had
been lifted up into the air, and then suddenly allowed to fall.
He sprang away from her, an incoherent exclamation on his lips,
and when an instant later Monsieur de Putange came running up in
alarm, his hand upon his sword, those two stood with the width of
the avenue between them, Buckingham erect and defiant, the Queen
breathing hard and trembling, a hand upon her heaving breast as
if to repress its tumult.
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