When he ceased speaking, she sighed deeply, and then seemed to become suddenly possessed by a spirit of daring and desperation.
Drawing herself up, and peering closely into his handsome face, she said quickly—
“Sir, sir, you know not how you move me! I have never felt before as I feel in listening to you. You make me hate my own folk, with their villainies and their rough ways, kinswoman and confederate of theirs though I have been! Oh, sir, I feel, I know, that you are better than we, that we are but the nest of robbers and pirates you say, that we deserve no mercy at your hands!”
Passionate, earnest as she was, Tregenna kept his head sufficiently to be skeptical about this sudden appearance of conversion.
He drew back, almost imperceptibly, a little way, and said, in a cooler tone—
“And I fear ’tis little mercy some of you will get, when a stronger force is sent down to ferret your leaders out!”
“But you would make distinctions, sir, would you not?” said she, with tremulous eagerness. “You would not, for sure, deal with the lad Tom, poor Tom that you have lamed for life, as hardly as with some others?”
“Those that have done the worst will be the most harshly dealt with, certainly,” said Tregenna.
“Ay, and none too harshly either, for some of them! villains, thieves, plunderers that they be! See here, sir”—and her tone dropped again to a whisper, as she came quite close to him, and laid one hand almost caressingly on his sleeve—“there’s no sympathy in my heart for them that would have done you harm, no, nor for the man that murdered that poor coastguardsman when first you came hither! I love not such folks, sir, whatever you may think of me! And see, sir, to prove to you how earnestly I do grieve for the ill they have done, I am ready to give you up the murderer of the coastguardsman into your hand, ay, for I know who ’twas that did it, and I can put you in the way of evidence to prove it too!”
Tregenna started and flushed. He had not the least doubt that this woman could indeed do as she offered to do, that she could deliver the murderer into the hands of justice. But he shrank from accepting her suggestion, not only with instinctive mistrust of a woman who was ready to deliver up her own lover, but with not unnatural suspicion that she might be a traitress to both sides.