De Rochefort was considered a capable man, and
certainly if treachery and cruelty could have upheld his authority he
would have maintained his ascendency without difficulty. But the
absinthe demon had gripped him with resistless strength, and all his
shrewdness had long since been drained away.
Day by day he plunged deeper into the vice that was destroying him, and
Stephanie could but stand by and watch the gradual gathering of a storm
that was bound to overwhelm them both.
There was no love between them. They were bound together by circumstance
alone. She had gone to the place to be with her dying mother, and had
remained there at that mother's request. Madame de Rochefort's belief in
her husband had never been shaken, and, dying, she had left her English
daughter in his care.
Stephanie had accepted a position that there was no one else to fill,
and then had begun the long martyrdom that, she now saw, could have only
one ending. She and the Governor were doomed. Already the great wave of
revolution towered above them. Very soon it would burst and sweep both
away into the terrible vortex of destruction.
It was only of late that she had come to realise this, and the horror of
the awakening still at times had power to appal her. For she knew she
was utterly unprotected. She had tried in vain to rouse the Governor to
see the ever-growing danger, had striven desperately to open his eyes to
the unmistakable signs of the coming change.
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