“Why, indeed?” echoed she, fixing her eyes upon his face; “what should your motives be to me, who have only devoted ten years of my life to your service? What should you be to me, Jacob Wynne?”
“Well,” he said. “I will no longer require such a sacrifice at your hands. Ten years are quite enough to satisfy me. Henceforth you shall be at perfect liberty to devote yourself to whom you will. I will promise not to interfere.”
Margaret pressed her hand upon her heart as if to still its tumultuous throbbing, at this cruel taunt from one whom she had so much loved, and for whom, despite the discovery she had made of his baseness and unworthiness, she could not altogether stifle the old affection.
“You say this because you are irritated, Jacob,” she returned. “You do not, you cannot mean it. Tell me so. Tell me that you have been only trying me all this time, and though it has made me very, very wretched, although it has thrown me into a fever and rendered me as weak as you now see me, I will forget it all, and will once more devote myself to you with the same loving devotion as in the old times when we were young, and—and happier than we are now, Jacob.”
In her earnestness she rose, and going towards the copyist, placed her hand upon his arm.
“One often says in anger what he does not mean,” she continued, rapidly. “I know that well. I have done so myself; and it is so with you, Jacob, is it not? I knew it must be so when you spoke such cruel words to me at the island so many weeks ago, and yet, Jacob, and yet it hurt me,” she placed her hand upon her heart; “it hurt me here, when you said such words even in jest. I was not strong enough to bear them, and they made me sick. That very night I was attacked with a fever, and from that day to this I have been stretched upon a sick-bed. Look at my face. See how thin and pale it is. I ought not to be out to-day, and only succeeded by an artifice in eluding the vigilance of my mother, who has been my faithful nurse.”
“Why, then, did you come?” asked Jacob, coldly.
“Because I could not bear the intolerable weight of suspense. Those words kept ringing in my ears, and I could not cease from anxiety until I could see you and have them explained.”
Margaret looked imploringly in the face of the scrivener, as she finished her appeal. She had spoken more confidently than she felt. There was little in the sullen, cruel face before her to give her encouragement. She felt that she had staked all her happiness upon a single throw,—that the answer which he gave her then and there would determine once and forever her future happiness or misery, and it might be his.
Jacob regarded the anxious face before him with the triumph that a low mind always feels when it has by any means gained an ascendency over a stronger one. The nature of Margaret was superior to his, and he knew it. It was the uneasy feeling of inferiority produced by this circumstance, that led to a mean jealousy on his part which found its gratification in any humiliation to which it was in his power to subject her.