“Then how can you take care of me?” she demanded again, for a moment forgetting her despair in her anger at him. “Can you make him let me stay in bed, instead of going out to die in this awful snow? Death—that’s all there’s here for me. And the quicker it comes the better.”
She sobbed again, and he tried in vain to comfort her. “We’ll come through,” he whispered. “I’ll make everything as light as I can——”
But she thrust off his caressing hands. “I don’t want you to touch me,” she told him tragically. “You can’t make things light for me, in this living hell. And until you can protect me from that man, and save me, you can keep your kisses. Oh, why did you ever bring me here?”
“I suppose—because I loved you.”
“You showed it, in taking me into this awful land in an unsafe boat. You can keep your love. I wish I’d never seen you.”
Just a moment his hands dropped to his sides, and he showed her the white, drawn visage of utter despair. Yet he must not hold these words against her. Surely she had cause for them; perhaps she would find him some tenderness when she saw how hard he had tried to serve her, to ease her lot. Her last words recalled his own that he had spoken to Bess aboard the Charon: if he had railed as he had to Bess for such little cause, at least he must not blame Lenore, even considering the fact of their love, in such a moment as this. He had brought her from her home and to this pass. Save for him, she would be safe in her native city, not a slave to an inhuman master on this godless island.
He looked down at her steadfastly. “I can’t keep my love,” he told her earnestly. “I gave it to you long ago, and it’s yours still. That love is the one thing I have left to live for here; the one thing that’s left of my old life. I’m going to continue to watch over you, to help you all I can, to do as much of your work as possible; to stand between you and Doomsdorf with my own life. I’ve learned, in this last day, that love is a spar to cling to when everything else is lost, the most important and the greatest blessing of all. And I’m not going to stop loving you, whether you want me to or not. I’m going to fight for you—to the end.”
“And in the end I’ll die,” she commented bitterly.
Doomsdorf reëntered the room then, gazing at them in amused contempt, and Ned instinctively straightened.
“I trust you’re not hatching mutiny?” the sardonic voice came out.