Meantime Ryder was playing with her master's anguish like a cat with a mouse.
Upon the pretence of some petty discovery or other, she got him out day after day into the Grove, and, to make him believe in her candour and impartiality, would give him feeble reasons for thinking his wife loved him still; taking care to overpower these reasons with some little piece of strong good sense and subtle observation.
It is the fate of moral poisoners to poison themselves as well as their victims. This is a just retribution, and it fell upon this female Iago. Her wretched master now loved his wife to distraction, yet hated her to the death: and Ryder loved her master passionately, yet hated him intensely, by fits and starts.
These secret meetings on which she had counted so, what did she gain by them? She saw that, with all her beauty, intelligence, and zeal for him, she was nothing to him still. He suspected, he sometimes hated his wife, but he was always full of her. There was no getting any other wedge into his heart.
This so embittered Ryder that one day she revenged herself on him.
He had been saying that no earthly torment could equal his: all his watching had shown him nothing for certain. "Oh," said he, "if I could only get proof of her innocence, or proof of her guilt! Anything better than the misery of doubt. It gnaws my heart, it consumes my flesh. I can't sleep, I can't eat, I can't sit down. I envy the dead that lie at peace. Oh, my heart! my heart!"
"And all for a woman that is not young, nor half so handsome as yourself. Well, sir, I'll try and cure you of your doubt, if that is what torments you. When you threatened that Leonard, he got his orders to come here no more. But she visited him at his place again and again."
"'Tis false! How know you that?"
"As soon as your back was turned she used to order her horse and ride to him."
"How do you know she went to him?"