For either you take that oath, or I rouse the
servants and have you dealt with as one who has intruded here
unbidden for an evil end." She backed away from him as she spoke,
and threw wide the door. Then, confronting him from the
threshold, she admonished him again, her voice no louder than a
whisper. "Quick now! Resolve yourself. Will you die here with
all your sins upon you, and so destroy for all eternity the
immortal soul that urges you to this betrayal, or will you take
the oath that I require?"
He began an argument that was like a sermon of the Faith. But she
cut him short. "For the last time!" she bade him. "Will you
decide?"
He chose the coward's part, of course, and did violence tomb fine
conscience. With the cross in his hand he repeated after her the
words of the formidable oath that she administered an oath which
it must damn his immortal soul to break. Because of that, because
she imagined that she had taken the measure of his faith, she
returned him his dagger, and let him go at last. She imagined
that she had bound him fast in irrefragable spiritual bonds.
And even on the morrow, when her father and all those who had
been present at that meeting at Susan's house were arrested by
order of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, she still clung to
that belief.
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