As he now continued his left hand clutched and tightened upon the bedclothes and a dark shadow seemed to grow out of his face.
“I shut her close in the room below. There, with only the voice of the wheel for company, I swore she should remain till she confessed. Each day I brought her food and water, and each day I said, ‘Give me his name,’ but she was always silent. She had been weak and ailing from caring for her baby Modred, and she faded before my eyes. Yet I was merciless. A little more, I thought, and so worthless, fragile a thing must needs yield and answer me. It was will against will, and hers conquered.”
He paused a moment, and I could see drops of sweat freckling his forehead.
“Slowly, hour by hour, the stealth and darkness of her prison wrought madness in her. Still I persisted and she refused. Once she asked to see her children—the little baby I was rearing as best I might, with infinite toil and difficulty—and I laughed and shut her in again. The next morning, going to her, I was dumfounded to hear no booming voice greeting me from the basement. The wheel had stopped. I threw back the door and she was gone. But the cupboard was sprung open and the dammed water spurted and leaped from the motionless blades. A stump of timber was lying near. She had burst the lock with it, and—I rushed and dropped the sluice; hurried back and looked down. I saw her dress tangled in the floats below, and the water heaping into a little mound as it ran over something. Then I raced to the room over above, wrenched up a board, and, fastening a rope to a beam, lowered the slack of it into the pit. It served me well in after days, as you know.
“I can hardly remember how I got her out. I know all my efforts were futile, till I thought of notching a paddle and fixing the rope in the hole. When at last I laid her down on the floor of the room I grew sick with horror. There was that in her staring eyes that made my soul die within me.
“I threw the place open to the authorities. I courted every inquiry. She had been in a delirious state, I said, since the coming of the child, and had thrown herself down in a fit of madness. Only the evidence of the burst lock I suppressed.
“We had been reserved folk, making few friends or none. Our manner of life was known only to ourselves; not a soul suspected the truth and many pitied me in my bereavement. I kept my own counsel. They brought in a verdict of suicide during temporary insanity, and she lies under an old nameless mound in the cemetery yonder.
“Then I shut my heart and my door and made out life in the blackness.
“At first I was whelmed in the horror of the catastrophe, yet my pity was not touched and I soon came to believe in the justice of her fate. ‘I never put hand on her,’ I thought. ‘’Twas God wrought the punishment.’ But soon a terrible hatred woke in my heart for the first author of my misery. One day I descended by the wheel again and nailed the miniature to its axle. ‘Wait you there!’ I cried, ‘till the question is answered. So shall he follow in her footsteps.’ Ah, I have heard talk of the fateful fascination of the wheel! Why has it never drawn him to come and claim his portrait?”
The fevered torrent of speech broke suddenly in him, and silence reigned in the room. The dying heart leaped against my chest as I held him, and my own seemed to flutter with the contact. What could I think or say? I was dazed with the passion of my emotions.