“Trust you!” she cried, and almost laughed in the intensity of her scorn. “Trust you! How can I trust one who is a renegade and worse?”
He controlled himself that he might reason with her, that by cold logic he might conquer her consent.
“You are very unmerciful,” he said. “In judging me you leave out of all account the suffering through which I have gone and what yourself contributed to it. Knowing now how falsely I was accused and what other bitter wrongs I suffered, consider that I was one to whom the man and the woman I most loved in all this world had proven false. I had lost faith in man and in God, and if I became a Muslim, a renegade, and a corsair, it was because there was no other gate by which I could escape the unutterable toil of the oar to which I had been chained.” He looked at her sadly. “Can you find no excuse for me in all that?”
It moved her a little, for if she maintained a hostile attitude, at least she put aside her scorn.
“No wrongs,” she told him, almost with sorrow in her voice, “could justify you in outraging chivalry, in dishonouring your manhood, in abusing your strength to persecute a woman. Whatever the causes that may have led to it, you have fallen too low, sir, to make it possible that I should trust you.”
He bowed his head under the rebuke which already he had uttered in his own heart. It was just and most deserved, and since he recognized its justice he found it impossible to resent it.
“I know,” he said. “But I am not asking you to trust me to my profit, but to your own. It is for your sake alone that I implore you to do this.” Upon a sudden inspiration he drew the heavy dagger from his girdle and proffered it, hilt foremost. “If you need an earnest of my good faith,” he said, “take this knife with which to-night you attempted to stab yourself. At the first sign that I am false to my trust, use it as you will—upon me or upon yourself.”
She pondered him in some surprise. Then slowly she put out her hand to take the weapon, as he bade her.
“Are you not afraid,” she asked him, “that I shall use it now, and so make an end?”
“I am trusting you,” he said, “that in return you may trust me. Further, I am arming you against the worst. For if it comes to choice between death and Asad, I shall approve your choice of death. But let me add that it were foolish to choose death whilst yet there is a chance of life.”