“And you can do it?”
“And I can do it—a hundred times. And worse than that, if you tempt me. Take your price, and go—back to England, if you are wise. Do you see this in my hand? It’s my last mercy.”
He drew away from her, where she lay, cast upon her face and moaning.
“I am going,” he said. “But I shall return in the afternoon at three o’clock. If then I find you still here—understand what I say—your chance to save yourself is past. I’ll kill you on our bed—I mean it.”
A wild desolate scream broke from her throat. He threw the purse down beside her on the floor, and left the house without another word.
At three o’clock to the minute he returned. Not till he had searched into every corner of the villa, would he question the red-eyed cameristas, huddled awaiting him in their kitchen. Then he learned that she had gone indeed. They would have besieged his heart with tearful clamour, telling of the scene—its rending piteousness; but he stopped them peremptorily, paid them their wages, double and treble, and dismissed them.
He had already seen that the purse of gold lay untouched where he had thrown it down upon the floor. For all his gripping will, that gave his heart a wrench. He stooped and took it in his hand—hesitated—then, with a curse at his own weakness, thrust it into his breast. He went from room to room, bolting the windows. In one upstairs he paused—so long that ghosts began to stir and whisper in the empty house. Something, he thought, was moving the curtains of the bed to which his back was turned. Little slippers stole from underneath a chair and walked without sound upon the floor. He heard a sigh—it was himself sighing. With a mad oath, he turned and tramped downstairs, resolutely, making all the noise he could. The next moment he had clapped to the door behind him, and was in the open air.
That night, pacing the streets, he passed a hospital for Magdalens. A box, beseeching charity, was in the wall. He stopped, and taking the purse from his breast, dropped the coins from it, one by one, into the slit.
Then he turned and disappeared into the darkness.