“Oh, Zyp, don’t say that!”
“He did—he did. Jason was sitting by an open window in the dark, and a tumbler of spirit and water was on the table by him. He was leaning back in his chair, as if asleep, but he was really looking all the time from under his eyelids. A hand came very gently through the window, pinched something into the glass, and went away again quite softly.”
“Why didn’t Jason seize it—call out—do anything that wasn’t abject and contemptible?”
“You don’t know how the long strain has told upon him. Sometimes in the beginning he thought he must face it out, for life or death, and end the struggle. But he isn’t really brave, I think.”
“No, Zyp, he isn’t.”
“And now it has gone too far. All his spirit is broken. He clings to me like a child. He sits with his hand in mine, staring and listening and dreadfully waiting. And that other doesn’t mean to kill him now, I think—not murder him, I mean. He sees he can do it more hideously by following—by only following and looking, Renny.”
In a moment she bowed her head upon my arm and burst into a convulsive flood of crying. I waited for the first of it to subside before I spoke again. These, almost the only tears I had ever known fall from her, were eloquent of her change, indeed.
“Oh!” she cried, presently, in a broken voice. “He didn’t treat me well at first—my husband—but this piteous clinging to me now—something chokes——” she flung her head back from me and wrenched with her hands at the bosom of her dress, as if the heart underneath were swollen to breaking. Then she tossed up her arms and, drooping her head, once more fell to a passion of weeping.
“Zyp,” I said, quietly, when she could hear me, “what is it you want me to do?”
“We want money, Renny——” she gasped, still with fluttering sobs, drying her eyes half-fiercely as if in resentment of that brief self-abandonment. “He has no spirit to make it now as he used. We have escaped to Southampton, intending to go abroad somewhere, and lose ourselves and be lost. We fled in a fright, unthinking, and now we can get no further. You’ll help us, Renny, won’t you?”