The Tyranny of Weakness

by Charles Neville Buck

"'Even as Sodom and Gomorrah, and the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication and going after strange flesh ... are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.... Likewise also these filthy dreamers defile the flesh ... despise dominion and speak evil of dignities.'"

The madman paused, but only for a moment, then again he thundered out his rabid and distorted prayer. "'Their throat is an open sepulcher: they flatter with their tongue.... Destroy them, O God: let them perish through their own imaginations.'"...

When Tollman's delirium had burned him into a temporary exhaustion he collapsed into a chair and at his feet, forgotten now, fell the envelope which he had flaunted vainly before the eyes of the transgressors. They had escaped, not scourged or harrowed according to their deserts, but smiling like sleepy children, through the door of unconsciousness and oblivion. Gropingly his fingers went again into his pocket and came out holding the envelope out of which he had taken the death tablets. They, too, had betrayed him. Instead of torture they had brought the peace of Nirvana.

From the limp fingers of the demented creature who sat gazing at his two victims, the envelope fluttered down. Except for the mad embers of the eyes, one might have said that the room held three dead bodies.

At least he had sent them on to a judgment from which they could not escape with iniquitous smiles.

Then a sudden doubt assailed him. Were they, after all, dead?

He came to his foot, moving with the spasmodic jerkiness of his condition, but with all the augmented strength of a madman's power.

To his crazed investigation their wrists betrayed no pulse and their lips, no breath. Then they were dead!

With an inarticulate exclamation, like the oath of a man devoid of speech, he ripped the sheer and ribboned silk from his wife's breast, as savagely as though he were tearing the flesh itself, and laid his hand upon the bared bosom. There, too, was the unfluttering stillness of a lifeless heart.