She stood firmly with her back against the door, panting a little, her jaw fallen loosely down, her eyes luminous with their animal-like fire.
“Then, by God, you will!” said MacNutt in his raucous guttural, with his limbs beginning to shake as he glared at her.
She stood there motionless, trying to think out the first moves in that grim game for which freedom and love and life itself were the stakes.
“Then, by God, you will!” repeated MacNutt, with the sweat coming out in beads on his twitching temples.
CHAPTER XXXI
Frances Durkin knew the man she had to face. She knew the pagan and primordial malevolence of the being, the almost demoniacal passions that could sweep through him. More than once she had seen his obsessions tremble on the verge of utter madness. She had come to know the rat-like pertinacity, the morbid, dementating narrowness of mind, that made him what he was. In his artful and ruthless campaign against Penfield, in his relentless crushing of old-time confederates, in each and all of his earlier underground adventures, she had seen the sullen, bulldog, brutal contumacy of the man.
She expected nothing from him, neither mercy nor quarter. And yet, she told herself, she was in no way afraid of him. As she had felt before, time and time again, in moments of great danger, a vague sense of duality of being took possession of her, as if mind stood detached from body, to flutter and dodge through the darkness before her, freed from its sheath of flesh.
She felt that she might kill him now, if the chance came, quite easily and calmly. Yet she still diffidently half-hoped that the chance would be denied her. It was not that she would be cowardly about it, but it seemed to her the darker and more dubious way out of it all.
No; it was he who must do the killing, she told herself, with a sudden pang of half-delirious abnegation.
That was the utter and ultimate solution of the tangled problem; it would be over and done with in a minute. She had lived by the sword and she could die by the sword; from that moment, too, would be counted the days of MacNutt’s own doom, the release and the deliverance of Durkin!