Prisoners of Chance

It seems strange any man should deliberately venture life for one he had never seen; one whom, moreover, he hated with an intensity of passion seldom experienced between man and man. I have not been of revengeful disposition, nor often indulged in grave personal dislike, yet it would be wrong in this simple narrative for me to attempt concealment of my own impulses. So it is impossible to deny that, from the first moment when she called Charles de Noyan husband, I felt toward him a degree of animosity deeper than I had before supposed it possible for me to entertain relative to any human being. It was bitter memory of the past, a belief that I had once won the heart of this fair girl, only to be balked of reward by spectral hands of religion, which swayed me thus strongly. To my thought this stranger was one who had purchased, from priests at the altar, what was mine by divine decree; what would remain mine forever from the mandate of love unchangeable, eternally sealed by higher power than any priestly ritual.

Yet I had already passed through a day and night of intense excitement, of grave peril, endeavoring to preserve the life of this man whom I would more gladly see die than any one I ever knew. I stood now in the open jaws of my own destruction, where the slightest false movement, or ill-judged word, upon his part or my own, must mean betrayal; where an awakening of suspicion in the simple mind of the sentry without, or of his captain in the corridor; the return to consciousness, or chance discovery, of the bound priest upon the upper deck, would ruin every hope, sentencing me to a fate no less speedy or certain than that which now awaited him I sought to serve. All this had I risked that I might aid in the escape of the one and only man in all the wide world who stood between me and the woman I loved.

It was an odd position, a heartless caprice of fate. I felt the full measure of its strangeness, yet the thought never occurred to me of shrinking back from duty, nor slightest dream of realizing a personal victory through any act of baseness. I was not there for his sake, or my own, but to redeem my pledged word to her whose slightest wish was law, whose pleading face forever rose before me. Nevertheless, as I stood fronting him for the first time, there was little except bitter hatred in my heart--hatred which, no doubt, burned for the instant within my eyes,--but a hatred which never returned, to curse my memory, from that day unto this. I may have found much to test my patience, much to dislike about him in those weary weeks which followed, much of weakness and of fickle spirit, but naught ever gave birth anew to the deep resentment I buried there.