I sat up in bed and answered my brother back with, I could feel, ashen and quivering lips.
“What do you mean?” I said. “How dare you say such a thing?”
“I dare anything,” he said, “where I have a particular object in view.” He never took his eyes off me, and the cold devil in them froze my blood that had only now run so hotly.
“For yourself,” he went on, “I don’t care much whether you hang or live. You can come to terms with your own conscience I dare say, and a fat brother more or less may be a pure question of fit survival. That’s as it may be—but the girl here is another matter.”
“I didn’t kill him,” I could only say, dully.
Still keeping his eyes on me he sought for and drew from his jacket pocket a twist of dry and shrunken water weed. A horrible shudder seized me as I looked upon it.
“You didn’t think to see that again?” he said. “Do you recognize it? Of course you do. It was the rope you twisted round his foot, and that I found round his foot still, after dad had carried him upstairs, bundled round with those sacks, and I was left alone in the room with him a minute.”
My heart died within me. I dropped my sick, strained eyes and could only listen in agonized silence. And he went on quite pitilessly.
“You shouldn’t have left such evidence, you know—least of all for me to see. I had not forgotten the murder in your eyes when I spoke to you that morning and the evening before.”
He struck the weed lightly with his right hand.