With that we looked at one another: and I saw that her face was white. "Was it a coward saved your life--in the Square?" I muttered at last.
"No," she answered. "But it was a coward played the sneak for Ferguson. And a coward played the rogue for Smith! It was a coward lost Fenwick--because he dare not look behind! And a coward who will now sacrifice his benefactor, to save his own skin. And you only know in how many other things you have played the craven. But the rather for that, up, now, and play the man! You have a chance now! Do this one brave thing and all will be forgiven. Oh, Dick, Dick!" she continued--and with a sudden blaze in her face she stooped and threw her arms round me, "if you love me, do it! Do it for us both! Do it--or if you cannot, God knows it were better we were hung, than married!"
I cannot hope to describe the fervour, which she threw into these last words, or the effect which they wrought on me, weakened as I was by long illness. In a voice broken by tears I conjured her to give me time--to give me time; a few days in which to consider what I would do.
"Not a day!" she answered, springing from me in fresh excitement, and as if my touch burned her. "I will give you no time. You have had a lifetime, and to what purpose? I will give you no time. Do you give me your word."
"To go to England?"
"Yes."
I was ashake from head to foot; and groaned aloud. In truth if I had known the gallows to be the certain and inevitable end of the road, on which I was asked to enter, I could not have been more sorely beset; between rage and fear, and shame of her and desire for her. But while I hung in that misery, she continuing to stand over me, I looked, as it happened, in her face; and I saw that it was no longer hot with anger, but sad and drawn as by a sharp pain. And I gave her my word, trembling and shaking.
"Now," said she, "are you a brave man; and perhaps the bravest."
[CHAPTER XLI]
That the arrest of Sir John Fenwick, reported in London on the 13th of June, was regarded by all parties as an event of the first magnitude, scarce exceeded in importance by a victory in Flanders or a defeat in the Mediterranean, is a thing not to be denied at this time of day; when men, still in their prime, can recall the commotion occasioned by it. The private animosity, which was believed to exist between Sir John and the King, and which dated, if the gossip of Will's and Garraway's went for anything, not from the slight which he had put upon the late Queen, but from a much earlier period, when he had served under William in Flanders, aroused men's curiosity, and in a sense their pity; as if they were to see here the end of a Greek drama.