She could indeed, for she repeated the word—fiercely, feverishly. "Sign!" she cried. And then, "If you will," she said, "I will give you—see! See! You shall have this. You shall eat and drink; only sign! For God's sake, sign what they want, and eat and drink!"
And, with fingers that trembled with haste, she drew from a hiding-place in her cloak, bread and milk and wine. "See what I have brought," she continued, holding them before his starting eyes, his cracking lips, "if you will sign."
He gazed at them, at her, with anguish of the mind as well as of the body. How he had mistaken her! How he had misread her! Then, with a groan, "God forgive you!" he cried, "I cannot! I cannot!"
"You will not sign?" she retorted.
"Cannot, and will not!" he said.
"And why? Why will you not?"
On that his patience, sorely tried, gave way; and, swept along by one of those gusts of rage, he spoke. "Why?" he cried in hoarse accents. "You ask me why? Because, ungrateful, unwomanly, miserable as you are—I will not rob you or the dead! Because I will not be false to an old man's trust! I will not give to the forsworn what was meant for the innocent—nor sell my honour for a drink of water! Because,"—he laughed a half-delirious laugh—"there is nothing to sign, nothing! I have burned your parchments these two days, and if you tempt me two more days, if you make me suffer twice as much as I have suffered, you can do nothing! If your heart be as hard as—it is, you can do nothing!" He held out hands which trembled with passion. "You can do nothing!" he repeated. "Neither you, who—God forgive you, are no woman, have no woman's heart, no woman's pity!—nor he who would have killed me in the bog to gain that which he now starves me to get! But I foiled him then, as I will foil him to-day, ingrate, perjured, accursed, as he is, accursed——"
He faltered and was silent, steadying himself by resting one hand against the wall. For a moment he covered his eyes with the other hand. Then "God forgive me!" he resumed in a lower tone, "I know not what I say! God forgive me! And you—Go! for you too—God forgive you—know not what you do. You do not know what it is to hunger and thirst, or you would not try me thus! Nor do you know what you were to me, or you would not try me thus! Yet I ought to remember that—that it is not for yourself you do it!"
He turned his back on her then, and on the window. He had taken three steps towards the middle of the room, when she cried, "Wait!"
"Go!" he repeated with a backward gesture of the hand. "Go! and God forgive you, as I do!"