He stamped on the floor.
“Take your choice, or go piecemeal to hell. An ear and a nose and a lip for the stone, and if they don’t serve, every member of your cursed carcass for token to the fat wench I gave you for mistress.”
Tuke wrenched himself free, and, butting with his shoulder, flung himself at the scoundrel with all his force. He felt himself spun round—a fiery tooth crossed his wrist, and he stumbled and went his length on the floor. Looking up as he lay, momentarily expecting to feel the deadlier plunge of the blade that had already slashed at him, he saw to his surprise Fern raving and struggling in the grasp of his more powerful fellow-rogue.
“Let go!” he was shrieking—“you fool, d’you think to baulk me in my blood-lust!”
“Yes!” cried Brander fiercely. “You kill the goose—you kill the goose, you madman! Come out—by God, you shall! I’ve another test to propose!”
His own face was white with fury as he held back the dribbling and snarling animal, and had his better strength failed to master it, it is likely he would have driven his knife into the swollen throat under him. But he prevailed in a moment, and dragged the other in a patter of curses from the room.
As the key turned in the lock, Tuke collapsed upon himself in a half-faint.
CHAPTER XLV.
To a sane and humane soul there is no revelation so shocking as that of the scorn in which its rectitude is held by the prevailing beasts of the world. To the most of us at some time comes this bitter realization of the force that keeps humanity low. High as our sense of justice and of decency may be—serene as may figure the outlook from our lofty chambers of self-respect, we have only to descend into the plain to find manifest the brutal ruggedness of life that our hitherto aloofness has idealized. The impotence of honesty to enforce itself in any question of might; the impotence of morality to convince self-interest of its baseness—these are the first lessons in the despair of being. And when, for climax, actual bodily violence shakes us out of all the uses of dignity, we are fain to wonder what creative incongruity seeks to leaven all these seething continents of devils with a finger-pinch of just men, and how the end has justified the means of blazing Sodom and the Deluge.
To the fainting and battered prisoner in the lodge something in the nature of such reflections was conveyed through his sufferings. He had been beaten and mastered, it seemed, by the force that was merely brutal. Such a situation for himself he had never remotely conceived. His vagabondage was to have been of the picturesque sort that aims at nothing more definite than a scorn of conventions. That which gives or receives a blow—sings with the birds or plays with the prison rats, with an equal philosophy, or an equal bluntness of perception, was outside his scope, and certainly outside his knowledge. If asked, he would have said the condition was not possible to him, inasmuch as all his experience led him to such a confidence in his innate capacity for finesse, in his own masterfulness and sense of what was due to himself, as would carry the most difficult situation. That any, no matter who, should dare to treat him with the contempt of the strong for the weak, he had not dreamed could be; and waking to the realization that it was, a bitter stubborn hatred of those who had taught him his lesson stung in his veins like poison.