She turned and caught at his arm, with a sudden inward surrender that left her dazed and tottering. She struggled in vain to keep down her tears, once more torn by that old and costly and compromising hunger to be loved and sustained by him. She could not live in the face of his anger; she could not endure his hate. And the corroding bitterness, the gnawing tragedy, of her life lay in the fact that the arm to which she must turn for support was the very arm that would forever drag and hold her down.
Yet she was inarticulate, in the face of it all. She could not plead; she could not explain. She could only break out with a sudden unreasoning and passionate cry of: “You are not kind to me!”
Durkin had already shaken her hand from his arm, and was on the point of a second outburst. Then he stopped, and the gathering anger and revolt ebbed out of his face, for at that tearful and passionate cry from her he knew that the battle between them had come to an end. He knew, with an exultation in which even pity and cruelty were strangely entangled, that it was a sign of her inward capitulation, that he had won her over.
“Frank!”
He swung about, suddenly, and with one clasp of his arms let wide the flood-gates of her strained emotions.
“Good God!” he cried. “You know I hate it, as much as you do! But can’t you see it’s too late now, to quibble and vacillate? Can’t you see that I’m getting nothing more out of it than you?”
He pleaded with her, hotly, impetuously. He showed her how he needed her, how he was helpless without her. He held her, and kissed the tears from her unhappy eyes—he could see them droop, pitifully, as with a narcotic, at his first intimate and tender touch. He would have to sway her now, he felt, not through her judgment, not by open attack, but only by those more circuitous and subterranean approaches of feminine feeling. And still he expostulated and pleaded, unnerving and breaking her will with his cruel kindnesses of word and caress.
“Oh, I’ll do it!” she cried, at last, mopping her stained face. “I’ll do it, Jim, if I have to!”
“But there’s nothing so terrible in it, Dear Heart,” he assuaged. “We’ve been through worse things together. And it will be made right again, every penny of it!”
“Jim,” she said slowly, as she grew calmer once more; “Jim, I want you to give me your word of honor that it will be made right! I’m—I’m too cowardly, yet, to do a thing that’s wickedness, through and through. I’ve got to see some glimmer of right in it, I’ve got to feel that it will end right, even—”