“Safety!” she cried. “Monsieur is too kind. I shall prefer to be killed here—here in the decent privacy of the cabin.”
“Madame,” said he, in impatience, “it is no time for delay. There must be no obstacle to your obedience.”
She looked at him in an angry wonder. If this were mock insult, it had too undisguised a taste to be quite palatable.
“Monsieur,” she said, stamping her foot in a rage, “I go nowhere for you. Nowhere. I will die before I follow you. Battle or no battle, here I shall remain. Am I a lackey or a woman-of-all-work that you order me thus! Safety! If you value my safety, why do you permit them to make war over my very head? No, no. You are transparent—a very tissue of falsities. I read you as an open book, monsieur.”
She paused a moment for the lack of breath.
“I do not believe in you. How do you repay me for what I have done? Refuse me, deny me, and order me about like a willful child with your insolent glare and your cool, puckered brow. What is my safety to you? I do not believe—”
“Madame, you must come at once.”
“Never!” she cried. “Never! No power shall move me from the spot. Nothing—” At this moment a crash ten times more dreadful than the first shook the vessel like a hundred thunderbolts. Cornbury, in blissful ignorance of the battle raging below, had opened the battle above with the entire starboard broadside.
Mistress Barbara stammered, faltered, and fell back towards the table, trembling with fear. She put her hands to her ears as though to blot out the sounds. And then, in a supplicating dependence which set at naught all the hot words that had poured from her lips, she leaned forward listlessly upon the table.
“Take me,” she said, brokenly. “Take me. I am all humility. I will go, monsieur.”