“I shall never touch you, nor go near you!” she said. “There is no bargain between us. I would rather die than to be your wife! I know what you are, I say. I have been to Hester Hodder’s, to-night! I have seen her. I know what you are!”
Randolph took hold of his lip and pinched it viciously. He glared at the girl in silence, for a moment. “This has nothing to do with me,” he said. “You have made some mistake.”
“I made a terrible mistake when I first submitted to this loathsome plan,” said Garde, gaining courage as she spoke. “I always distrusted you, despised you. Do you think I would trust a man to save our charter who wouldn’t save a woman’s honor—who would do what you have done? You may go—you may go away! I loathe you! I scorn you! Oh, I have found you out in time!”
“This is silly talk, Mistress Merrill,” said the man. “I know nothing of your Hester Hodder.”
Garde made a gesture expressive of disgust and impatience.
“But all this has no bearing on anything one way or the other,” Randolph continued. “You must not forget that I have as much power over the charter and the colony as ever—in fact, more. I have become the friend of these people, but you can make me their enemy with a very little of your nonsense. Come, now, let us be two sensible beings and not begin our union by quar——”
“If you have had any power to do us injury,” interrupted Garde, “we will find it done. You wouldn’t dare to trust yourself. I have a fear, such as I never had before, of the harm you have doubtless done this colony, darkly, in the year just passed.”
Garde had a way, fairly uncanny, of saying terrible truths, as if from some sort of inspiration, which came upon her unawares. Randolph had his pockets full of documents, at that moment, which lay there like a mine of explosives, ready to shatter the charter and government, almost at his whisper of command. His mind could conceive of nothing so exquisite in treachery, to these people that he hated, and in vengeance against Garde, for the attitude she had always assumed toward him, as to marry her first and then to destroy the charter afterward. This had been his dream for more than the year. He had waited for its climax as patiently as a cat will wait before a hole till the mouse shall reappear. Garde’s words were as so many poignards, only that they failed to strike him in a fatal spot. They stung him to greater fury than he had ever felt and to a hotter determination to humble the girl and to reduce Massachusetts to abject servility and despair.
The man saw that this was an ill time to threaten Garde. She was not made of the wax which his sophistries had substituted for the metal once in David Donner’s composition.
“You have entertained some strange ideas of me, Mistress Merrill, for which I am at a loss to account,” he said, more quietly. “I feel sure we merely misunderstand each other. Have I not shown, for a year, that my one wish is to prove myself a staunch friend of these good people and worthy of your esteem? I am willing to do anything further, if you can think of anything you would like to suggest, before we are married.”