“I want the girl—you understand? I need not go into particulars. She interests me and that’s enough.”
“Yes,” I said, quietly.
“There must be no more of that sentimental foolery between you and her. I bore it as long as you were ill; but, now you’re strong again, it must stop. If it doesn’t, you know what’ll happen.”
With that he turned abruptly on his heel and began to undress. I listened for the deep breathing that announced him to be asleep with a strained fever of impatience. I felt that I could not think cleanly or collectedly with that monstrous consciousness of his awake in the room.
Perhaps, in all my wretchedness, the full discovery of his baseness of soul was as bitter a wound as any I had received. I had so looked up to him as a superior being, so sunned myself in the pride of relationship to him; so lovingly submitted to his boyish patronage and condescension. The grief of my discovery was very real and terrible and would in itself, I think, have gone far to blight my existence had no fearfuller blast descended to wither it.
Well, it was all one now. Whatever immunity from disaster I was to enjoy henceforth must be on sufferance only.
Had I been older and sinfuller I might have grasped in my despair at the coward’s resource of self-destruction; as it was, I thought of flight. By and by, perhaps, when vigor should return to me, and with it resolution, I should be able to face firmly the problem of my future and take my own destinies in hand.
Little sleep came to me that night, and that only of a haunted kind. I felt haggard and old as I struggled into my clothes the next morning, and all unfit to cope with the gigantic possibilities of the day. Jason had gone early to the fatal pool for a bathe.
At breakfast, in the beginning, Zyp’s manner to me was prettily sympathetic and a little shy. It was the first of my great misery that I must repel her on the threshold of our better understanding, and see her fall away from me for lack of the least expression of that passionate devotion and gratitude that filled my heart to bursting. I could see at once that she was startled—hurt, perhaps, and that she shrunk from me immediately. Jason talked airily to my father all through the meal, but I knew his senses to be as keenly on the alert as if he had sat in silence, with his eyes fixed upon my face.
I choked over my bread and bacon; I could not swallow more than a mouthful of the coffee in my cup, and Zyp sat back in her chair, never addressing me after that first rebuff, but pondering on me angrily with her eyes full of a sort of wonder.