“Augustine, you are deceiving me,” said the girl, anguished and bewildered. “Do you tell me that you will not set him at liberty?”
“Oh, no, I cannot. If God should come in human form to ask of me the freedom of him who sold our heroic peasants, delivered them up to the French sword, I would not do it. It is a supreme duty, in which one cannot fail. The innumerable victims immolated by his treachery, the city surrendered, the national honor outraged, are things which weigh too strongly upon my conscience.”
“My father cannot have done this deed of treachery,” she said, passing at once from grief to an exalted and nervous anger; “these are calumnies of his enemies. They lie who call him traitor, and you, more cruel and more inhuman than all, you lie also! It is not possible that I have loved you! It causes me shame to think of it. You say you will not free him? Then of what good are you? Do you hope to gain favor by your bloody cruelty of those inhuman barbarians who have destroyed the city, imagining that they were defending it? To you the life of the innocent is of no consequence, nor the desolation of an orphan. Miserable, ambitious egoist, I abhor you more than I have ever loved you! You thought that you would be able to present yourself before me with your hands stained with the blood of my father? No, he is not a traitor. You are traitors, all of you. My God, is there no generous hand to help me? Among so many men, is there not even one to prevent this crime? A poor woman runs through all the city looking for a friendly soul, and does not find anything but wild beasts.”
“Mariquilla,” said Augustine, “you are lacerating my soul. You ask the impossible of me, that which I will not do, and cannot do, although you offer me eternal blessedness for payment. I have sacrificed all, and I knew that you would abhor me. Think what it is for a man to tear out his own heart and trample it in the mud. I have done that. I can do no more.”