He stood gaping at her whilst a man might count to a dozen, and then abruptly he exploded. “It is enough!” he roared, shaking a clenched fist at the low ceiling of the cabin. “It is enough, as God’s my Witness. If there were no other reason to hang him, that would be reason and to spare. You may look to me to make an end of this infamous marriage within the hour.”
“Ah, if you will but listen to me!” she pleaded.
“Listen to you?” He paused by the door to which he had stepped in his fury, intent upon giving the word that there and then should make an end, and summoning Oliver Tressilian before him, announce his fate to him and see it executed on the spot. “Listen to you?” he repeated, scorn and anger blending in his voice. “I have heard more than enough already!”
It was the Killigrew way, Lord Henry Goade assures us, pausing here at long length for one of those digressions into the history of families whose members chance to impinge upon his chronicle. “They were,” he says, “ever an impetuous, short-reasoning folk, honest and upright enough so far as their judgment carried them, but hampered by a lack of penetration in that judgment.”
Sir John, as much in his earlier commerce with the Tressilians as in this pregnant hour, certainly appears to justify his lordship of that criticism. There were a score of questions a man of perspicuity would not have asked, not one of which appears to have occurred to the knight of Arwenack. If anything arrested him upon the cabin’s threshold, delayed him in the execution of the thing he had resolved upon, no doubt it was sheer curiosity as to what further extravagances Rosamund might yet have it in her mind to utter.
“This man has suffered,” she told him, and was not put off by the hard laugh with which he mocked that statement. “God alone knows what he has suffered in body and in soul for sins which he never committed. Much of that suffering came to him through me. I know today that he did not murder Peter. I know that but for a disloyal act of mine he would be in a position incontestably to prove it without the aid of any man. I know that he was carried off, kidnapped before ever he could clear himself of the accusation, and that as a consequence no life remained him but the life of a renegade which he chose. Mine was the chief fault. And I must make amends. Spare him to me! If you love me. …”
But he had heard enough. His sallow face was flushed to a flaming purple.
“Not another word!” he blazed at her. “It is because I do love you—love and pity you from my heart—that I will not listen. It seems I must save you not only from that knave, but from yourself. I were false to my duty by you, false to your dead father and murdered brother else. Anon, you shall thank me, Rosamund.” And again he turned to depart.
“Thank you?” she cried in a ringing voice. “I shall curse you. All my life I shall loathe and hate you, holding you in horror for a murderer if you do this thing. You fool! Can you not see? You fool!”
He recoiled. Being a man of position and importance, quick, fearless, and vindictive of temperament—and also, it would seem, extremely fortunate—it had never happened to him in all his life to be so uncompromisingly and frankly judged. She was by no means the first to account him a fool, but she was certainly the first to call him one to his face; and whilst to the general it might have proved her extreme sanity, to him it was no more than the culminating proof of her mental distemper.
“Pish!” he said, between anger and pity, “you are mad, stark mad! Your mind’s unhinged, your vision’s all distorted. This fiend incarnate is become a poor victim of the evil of others; and I am become a murderer in your sight—a murderer and a fool. God’s Life! Bah! Anon when you are rested, when you are restored, I pray that things may once again assume their proper aspect.”
He turned, all aquiver still with indignation, and was barely in time to avoid being struck by the door which opened suddenly from without.
Lord Henry Goade, dressed—as he tells us—entirely in black, and with his gold chain of office—an ominous sign could they have read it—upon his broad chest, stood in the doorway, silhouetted sharply against the flood of morning sunlight at his back. His benign face would, no doubt, be extremely grave to match the suit he had put on, but its expression will have lightened somewhat when his glance fell upon Rosamund standing there by the table’s edge.
“I was overjoyed,” he writes, “to find her so far recovered, and seeming so much herself again, and I expressed my satisfaction.”
“She were better abed,” snapped Sir John, two hectic spots burning still in his sallow cheeks. “She is distempered, quite.”
“Sir John is mistaken, my lord,” was her calm assurance, “I am very far from suffering as he conceives.”
“I rejoice therein, my dear,” said his lordship, and I imagine his questing eyes speeding from one to the other of them, and marking the evidences of Sir John’s temper, wondering what could have passed. “It happens,” he added sombrely, “that we may require your testimony in this grave matter that is toward.” He turned to Sir John. “I have bidden them bring up the prisoner for sentence. Is the ordeal too much for you, Rosamund?”
“Indeed, no, my lord,” she replied readily. “I welcome it.” And threw back her head as one who braces herself for a trial of endurance.
“No, no,” cut in Sir John, protesting fiercely. “Do not heed her, Harry. She. …”
“Considering,” she interrupted, “that the chief count against the prisoner must concern his … his dealings
