Commanding his laboring breath, Scoland shook his uninjured hand at the shrinking girl.
"Curse you!" he cried, his voice rising into an unnatural screech. "Curse you and your devil-brute! May your heart rot in loneliness, waiting for your wild man. He'll never find his way back from where I left him. He'll die hard, for he is strong. He will starve and wander and go blind and mad—as I am going mad, and then he'll freeze—very slowly, and die—and come and haunt me—"
"What are you saying!" Rose Emer sprang toward him. She forced her unwilling eyes to look upon that terrible face. "You left him, you say? Alive?"
Scoland threw back his head and laughed—the shrill, terrifying laughter of a maniac.
"Yes, I left him," he croaked hoarsely, "left him, alive, he and the doddering old man. Ha! ha! ha! I reached Sardanes and found them there, and they didn't see me. Ha! ha! I came away again, and they didn't know I left them, with a dead man to keep them company—in frozen, dead Sardanes—"
He caught sight of his face in a mirror, and his voice broke.
"My God!" he whispered. He held his arms out toward his reflection in the glass. "God!" he repeated, and collapsed on the floor in a fit of convulsions.
Combe and other servants brought ropes and tied him.
A little later men came and took Captain James Scoland away.
Like a far-flung, radiant ray of dazzling sunshine, one fact penetrated through all the horror of the moment to the heart of Rose Emer. Polaris, her Polaris, was alive! Alive, and living, might be saved—must be saved! She left the horrors of the hall on flying feet.