"Belike you'll come to learn in time!" says I, beside myself. At this I saw the white hand clench itself, but her voice was tender as ever when she answered: "Sorrow and suffering may lift a man to greatness if he be strong of soul or debase him to the brute if he be weak."
"Why then," says I, "begone to your gallants and leave me to the brutes."
"Nay, first will I do that which brought me!" and she showed the key of my gyves.
"Let be!" I cried, "I seek no freedom at your hands--let be, I say!"
"As you will!" says she, gently. "So endeth my hope of righting a great wrong. I have humbled myself to you to-night, Martin Conisby. I have begged and prayed you to forego your vengeance, to forgive the evil done, not so much for my father's sake as for your own, and this because of the boy I dreamed a man ennobled by his sufferings and one great enough to forgive past wrongs, since by forgiveness cometh regeneration. Here ends my dream--alas, you are but rogue and galley-slave after all. So shall I ever pity you greatly and greatly despise you!"
Then she turned slowly away and went from me, closing and locking the door, and left me once more in the black dark, but now full of yet blacker thoughts.
To be scorned by her! And she--a Brandon!
And now I (miserable wretch that I was) giving no thought to the possibility of my so speedy dissolution, raged in my bonds, wasting myself in futile imprecations against this woman who (as it seemed to me in my blind and brutish anger) had but come to triumph over me in my abasement. Thus of my wounded self-love did I make me a whip of scorpions whereby I knew an agony beyond expression.