"I will stay," she said. Then she fell helplessly into a chair and sobbed bitterly.
Barton looked at her with a sneer. He went to the side-board for a decanter and a glass. As in a dream she was conscious of his holding wine to her lips, and as in a dream she drank it, and heard him speak to her.
"Remember," he said, "on your implicit obedience depends the future. Thwart me, and——"
"Hush, hush!" she cried, looking round in fear lest already someone should have overheard. "I will do all I can."
"Very good. Now, if you feel better, we will return to the drawing-room."
At the door she laid her hand upon his shoulder.
"One moment, Mr. Barton; you will keep this man—this shadow, as you call him—from doing harm?"
"I will. He is as much my slave as you are."
And Miriam, although she shuddered, did not dare to contradict him. She was indeed his slave. His whispered communication had given her no choice. Again, from that moment, poor Miriam had taken up her burden.
For long after that, the impression left by this extraordinary interview was deep upon her. Circumstances altogether beyond her control compelled her to obey Barton; but she could by no means understand him. He puzzled her completely. She could not reconcile the man's wish to ruin Gerald with his apparently co-existent desire to give him a chance of escape from the trap prepared for him. It was so utterly inconsistent to her mind. She could only surmise that the man had a conscience, and that in this way he strove to quieten it. The desire for vicarious punishment which seemed to have taken possession of him was, to her thinking, as childish as it was reprehensible. She could not reconcile it with either a normal sense of morality or with sanity.