“Stop!” she screamed. “Stop, or I vow to Heaven I’ll fire!”
He faced her again, and his frenzy was comparable only with that of the distracted girl who threatened him.
“If you want to shoot me you must reload your gun,” he said, and his face grew livid, though not with fright. “Do you imagine that an old man like me fears death? Shoot, I tell you, and see if my last curse does not part you and Power. Test his love by telling him you are a murderess—that you have killed your own father. Ask him to help in hiding my body, and then cower in hourly terror, both of you, till a New York bank sends to my lawyer the letter I have left in its charge. Shoot me now, and I’ll die happy in the knowledge that Power and you will be tried for my murder.”
She dropped the gun, and burst into a tempest of weeping; but her tears seemed but to harden Willard into an even more callous and determined mood.
“Don’t you forget that I am watching for the coming of that canoe,” he said, sinking his voice to a note of sinister meaning. “If Power and I meet, nothing that you can do will save him. It is possible, of course, that he may avoid me this time. You can scream a warning, and he may, or may not, skulk off out of range. But, as sure as there is a sun shining in the sky, so surely will I follow and kill him. Each moment you hesitate brings him nearer the grave. You can save him, if you like; but you must buy his life on my terms, now. It will be too late in a few minutes.”
She threw herself on her knees, and raised her swimming eyes in humblest pleading.
“Father, think what you are doing!” she sobbed, clutching at his hands in a heartbroken way. “I am your own little daughter, the girl you used to be so proud of, the girl who once loved you dearly, and who is ready to forget the past and love you again. You would not condemn me to the degraded life of a woman who loathes and has been unfaithful to her husband, and yet permits him to regard her as his wife? I may be the meanest of God’s creatures in your sight; but you are asking me to act as no decent-minded woman can act, and live. Ah, no! Do not speak yet! Listen, I implore you! God give me words to touch your heart! Have you blotted from your mind all recollection of our long years together on the ranch? Does it count for nothing that I rejoiced with you when times were good, and sorrowed with you when misfortunes came? Have you forgotten my mother? Ah, dear Heaven, my mother! You loved her, did you not? You have said you loved me, not alone for my own sake, but because I reminded you of her. She, at least, was good and pure, and perhaps her spirit is with us now, grieving for my sin, it may be, but surely not content with the dreadful lot you would impose on one who is your child and hers. Oh, father dear, do not turn away from me! Is there nothing I can promise that will soften your heart? I will leave Derry. Yes, I swear it! To save him, and you, I’ll go away and never see him again, writing him some cruel lie in order to assuage his misery; but you shall not, you must not, make my return to Hugh Marten the price of my obedience to your will!”
Willard wrenched himself free, and took a sheet of notepaper, an envelop, and a pencil from a pocket. He placed them on the rough table, and stood in the doorway, watching the sunlit lake. His expression was dour, implacable, malignant in its ferocious joy; for he held Power in the hollow of his hand, and would relinquish naught of his vengeful scheme.
“I’m glad to see you are convinced that I mean what I have said,” he announced, speaking in a cold, balanced way that Nancy knew of old, and recognized now as sounding the knell of her hopes. “Unless I am mistaken, the canoe is putting off from the hotel. It will be here in twenty minutes. You have just five minutes to make up your mind, and to write a farewell message to Power. I don’t care what you say to him, so long as the break is final. You are going with me to Newport, and straight from there to London, where Marten will join us in response to a cablegram from me, telling him that you are ill. You had better stop crying. Nothing that you can say or do, short of loading that gun again and blowing a hole in me, will change either my purpose or my terms. I’ll keep my word with regard to Power if you keep yours where Marten is concerned. He must never know. He must never see any change in you. The moment he casts you off because of Power, and I am still alive, you sign Power’s death-warrant.”
Nancy rose. She was deathly white, and the tears still coursed silently down her cheeks; but despair had benumbed her emotions, and she spoke calmly.