James Branch Cabell

“ Then with a sneer he spoke of Diana Sherley and in such terms as are not bettered by repetition.
I said: "I am the most unlucky man alive, as surely as you are the most ungenerous. For, look you, in my presence you have spoken infamy of Mistress Sherley, though knowing I am in your debt so deep that I have not the right to resent anything you may elect to say. You have just given me my life; and armored by the fire-new obligation, you blaspheme an angel, you condescend to buffet a fettered man—!" ”

“ What is the most precious thing in the world?—why, assuredly, Diana Sherley's welfare. Let me get the keeping of it, then. For I have been entrusted with a host of common and yet precious things,—with youth and health and honor, with a clean conscience and a child's incurious faith, and so on,—and no person alive has squandered them more gallantly. ”

“ I have never wronged any person that I know of, and throughout my quiet, sheltered life I have loved truth and honor most of all. My judgment grants you to be what you are confessedly. And there is that in me more masterful and surer than my judgment, that which seems omnipotent and lightly puts aside your own confession."
"Lackey, impostor, and thief!" ”

“ I have known no happier moment in my life. For you stand within arm's reach, mine to touch, mine to possess and do with as I will. And I dare not lift a finger. I am as a man that hath lain a long while in some bleak dungeon vainly hungering for the glad light of day—who, being freed at last, must hide his faded eyes from the dear sunlight he dare not look upon as yet. ”

“ I remember that when I had made an end of those harsh whisperings she sat for a long while in scrupulous appraisement of the floor. The music was so sweet it seemed I must go mad unless she spoke within the moment.
"You tell me you are not Lord Frederick Mulkenan. You tell me you are instead the late Queen's servitor, the fellow that stole the royal jewels—for whom entire England is searching—" she began at last; and still I could not intercept those huge and tender eyes whose purple made, somehow, the thought of heaven comprehensible.
"Faith, I am indeed that widely hounded Lambert Pierrot. ”

“ Yonder were four little lights, lazily heaving with the water's motion, to show us where the London Merchant lay at anchor. It did not seem that anything mattered.
"It will be nearing dawn by this," I said.
"Ay," said Mr. Sherley, very briefly; and his tone evinced that he desired to hold no conversation with me. I was an unclean thing which he must touch in his necessity, but could touch with loathing only, as a thirsty man takes a fly out of his drink. I conceded it, because nothing would ever matter any more ”

“ My life was tolerably secure. I trusted Arthur Swayne to see to it that one of the ship's boats would touch at Penruan about dawn, according to our old agreement. The crew would convey me aboard at presentation of the settled password; and the savage land of Virginia was a thought beyond the reach of even a king's lamentable curiosity concerning the whereabouts of Queen Anne's jewelry.
For worthless, and far less than worthless, life seemed to me as I thought of Diana Sherley and waited for her messenger. ”

“ I am garrisoned with devils, I am the battered plaything of every vice, and I lack the strength and, it may be, even the will to leave my mire. For always I have betrayed the stewardship of man and God alike that my body might escape a momentary discomfort ”

“ No woman ever loved a man except, at bottom, as a mother loves her child: let him elect to build a nation or to write imperishable verses, and she will only smile to note how breathlessly the boy goes about his playing ”

“ For you are a lady tenderly nurtured and used to every luxury the age affords. There comes to woo you presently a gallant gentleman, not all unworthy of your love, who will presently share with you a many happy and honorable years. Yonder is a lawless naked wilderness where desperadoes cheat offended justice of a mere existence. ”

“ I go into a perilous and an eternal banishment; and in the immediate neighborhood of death a man finds little sustenance for romance. Take the worst of me: a gentleman I was born, and as a wastrel I have lived, and always very foolishly ”