“Without her, life has seemed to him not worth the living; and without having first had an opportunity to explain things to her, as they really were, death itself seemed almost impossible. Don’t you understand, that if he had gone away somewhere and killed himself quietly, that all her life Bessie would have thought of him—if she thought of him at all—as a despicable scoundrel?”
“Well, she would have been pretty nearly right.”
“Granted; but not from his standpoint.”
“Well, then——”
“The other side of the picture which he saw was this: He could capture her; he could take her, a captive, aboard the Shadow; he could keep her there, a passenger, a guest, and an unwilling—or, perhaps, a willing—listener to his plea. In either case, she would have heard it. In either case, he would have had an opportunity to explain. In either case, she would be compelled to listen to him, and in either case, she would in the end think not so ill of him as she had thought. He believed that he could prove to her, while she was aboard the pirate cruiser, that he was not all bad; he believed that he could convince her that it was because of true love for her that he had dared to do that thing; he believed that there might be enough romance in her nature to induce her to listen to him under such circumstances, where she would never have done so else; he believed that there was a possibility that she might really love him, and that love would triumph over all obstacles.
“But—and here is the crucial point—he believed that if he failed, that if she refused utterly to listen to him, that is she scorned him, she would at least be led to believe in the purity of his motives, and to think of him after his death as one not so utterly bad as she had pictured him.”
“After his death?”
“Why, yes; for if my idea is at all correct, he means to kill himself at the end of the voyage, if he finds that he cannot win her forgiveness and her love. He is a Frenchman, remember; he is romantic; he has staked his entire fortune, and his life, as well, upon this throw, and if he loses, he will shrug his shoulders and put a bullet through his brains as calmly as he stood upon the deck of the Shadow and told you that if you resisted him, he would shoot.”
“And so, you think——”
“I think—nay, I almost know, that he will take Bessie directly to Anjou—to that château of his. I think he will treat her as an honored guest. I believe that she will suffer no inconvenience, and, least of all do I regard her as in personal danger. And at the end of the cruise of the Shadow, I believe that if she so wills it, he will open wide the way for her to go free.”