“Besides, you dare not keep her!” he said, gathering courage from her silence; fancying, perhaps, it was a sign of relenting. “The officers of the law would find you out; and a worse fate than your son’s would be yours.”
It was an unfortunate allusion. Her brow grew black as a thunder-cloud; but she only laughed scornfully.
“Find me?” she repeated. “Yes, if they can find last year’s snow, last year’s partridges, or last summer’s rain. Let them find me. Why, if it came to that, I could dash its brains out in one instant, before its very mother’s eyes.”
“Oh, worst of fiends! does there linger a human heart in your body?”
“No; it turned to stone the night I groveled in vain at your feet.”
“Take any other revenge you like; haunt me, pursue me, as you will, but restore that child! She never injured you; if there is guilt anywhere, it rests on my head. Let me, therefore, suffer, and give back the child.”
She smiled in silence.
“You will relent; you are a woman, and not a devil. Consent to what I ask, and if wealth be any object, you shall have the half—the whole of my fortune. Tell me you consent, and all I have in the world, together with my everlasting gratitude, will be yours.”
“You should have thought of this the night you refused to grant my prayer, my lord. Will your wealth and ‘every-lasting gratitude’ restore my son from the dead?”
“God knows, were it in my power, I would willingly give my life to restore him and cancel the past. All that remains for me to do I will do, if you restore the child.”