“Mistress, you are an old woman, and you may say your say. If you were a man it would be different. I would cut out your lying tongue, or make it eat its own words.”
With railing and insolence she defied him to the act, and David stood looking at her with his hands in his pockets. As for Nanna, she had thrown off her cloak and seated herself on Vala’s couch. She was trying to control her temper; but the little room was already impregnated with Matilda’s personality, and Nanna could not escape from those indirect but powerful influences that distil from an actively evil life.
“I wish, Matilda Sabiston, that you would leave my house,” she said. “I think that you have brought the devil in with you.”
Then Matilda turned in her chair and looked at Nanna. Her face, handsomely prominent in youth, had become with sin and age like that of a bird of prey; it was all nose and two fierce, gleaming eyes.
“Do you talk of the devil?” she screamed. “You, who drove your husband to sin, and sent your baby to hell!”
Then Nanna, with a pitiful cry, buried her face in Vala’s pillow; and David, full of anger, said:
“I will take you from this house, mistress. You were not asked to come here, and you cannot stay here.”
“I will stay until I have said what you shall listen to. The child of this woman has been taken for your father’s sin. The mother will go next. Then you will bite the last morsel of Kol’s curse. I am living only to see this.”
“I fear not the curse of any man,” said David, in a passion. “There is no power in any mortal’s curse that prayer cannot wither. Keep it to yourself–you, who believe in it. As for me–”
“As for you, I will give you some advice. When the new minister is placed, go and tell him what Liot Borson told you at his death-hour. For I know well he did not die without boasting of his revenge on Bele Trenby. Death couldn’t shut Liot’s mouth till the words were out of it. Make the confession your father ought to have made, and let me hear it. I have said it, and fools have laughed at me, and wise men have hid the words in their hearts; and I will not die till my words are made true. And if you will not make them true, then the dead will have their satisfaction, and love will go to the grave and not to the bridal. Now, then, do what is before you. I have set you your task.”