His sudden start, the sudden quickening of his glance told her how shrewdly she had struck home. Fearlessly, then, sure of herself, she continued. “To that end they use you. When you shall have served it you will but cumber them. When they shall have used you to procure their security from me, then they will deal with you as they have ever sought to deal with you—so that you trouble them no more. Ah, at last you understand!”
He came to his feet, his brow gleaming with sweat, his slender hands nervously interlocked.
“Oh, God!” he cried in a stifled voice.
“Aye, you are in a trap, my lord. Yourself you've sprung it.”
And now you behold him broken by the terror she had so cunningly evoked. He flung himself upon his knees before her, and with upturned face and hands that caught and clawed at her own, he implored her pardon for the wrong that in his folly he had done her in taking sides with her enemies.
She dissembled under a mask of gentleness the loathing that his cowardice aroused in her.
“My enemies?” she echoed wistfully. “Say rather your own enemies. It was their enmity to you that drove them into exile. In your rashness you have recalled them, whilst at the same time you have so bound my hands that I cannot now help you if I would.”
“You can, Mary,” he cried, “or else no one can. Withhold the pardon they will presently be seeking of you. Refuse to sign any remission of their deed.”
“And leave them to force you to sign it, and so destroy us both,” she answered.
He ranted then, invoking the saints of heaven, and imploring her in their name—she who was so wise and strong—to discover some way out of this tangle in which his madness had enmeshed them.