The Tyranny of Weakness

by Charles Neville Buck

Then straightening up, he gazed down on her, loathing all the beauty which had once allured him and which now dedicated itself, in death, to the benediction of a smile turned toward her lover.

Already mad, his lunacy became a perversion of deviltry. He lifted the unstirring body and posed it in a relaxed attitude of ease upon the broad couch that stood at one side of the hearth. Back of the bared shoulders, he heaped cushions, so that she seemed the voluptuous figure of a woman who abandons herself to as irresponsible a gratification of sense as a purring tigress. The fire, playing on the ivory of her cheeks and the bosom more softly white than the checks, seemed to awaken a ghost of flickering mockery about her smiling lips.

Then, drawing upon his unwonted strength of the hour, Eben Tollman moved the other figure until what had been Stuart Farquaharson sat beside what had been Conscience Tollman in lover-like proximity.

As he staged this ghastly pantomime, he gloated wildly. That was the scene which a bolted door had prevented him from surprising! That was the inexpressible and iniquitous devotion which they had hidden in innocent smiles! Their eyes were closed, but each face was turned toward the other, and in death the woman's seemed to take on a deeper tenderness.

Tollman lifted one of her arms, from which the drapery fell back, and laid it across the shoulder of the man at her side, and about him the world rocked in the quake of mania.

He stood off and contemplated them from a greater distance—and having, in his madman's saturnalia, burned out even the augmented forces of his fever, a feeling of weakness overcame him. Then it was that his eyes caught the corner of an envelope protruding from the pocket of Stuart Farquaharson's bath robe. Hurriedly he tore it out and ripped off the end. It was in Conscience's hand—doubtless another proof of iniquity.

But as he read, the fires of his brain were swept back, under the quenching force of undeniable conviction. This letter had not been meant for his eyes. It could hold no motive of deceiving him.

Only treatment in confinement could ever again set up the fallen and shattered sanity of this man, but like rents in a curtain there came to him flashes of the rational. They came fitfully under the tremendously sobering effect of what he read. What Stuart Farquaharson had never read.

"It was my fault.... I have been absolutely true to him in act ... but perhaps ... I could ... have been true in a larger sense. I have been thinking of his great generosity and of what unfaltering trust he has in me ... he has always been above jealousy. We know that there has been no taint of guilt. Even now I think I have a fighting chance of winning. If I have I owe it to you...." These words spelled out a document which could not be doubted, which even the perversion of a jealousy gone mad could no longer doubt.

He, Eben Tollman, the righteous, had built the whole horrible structure of abomination—out of jealous fabrications! He had made the hideous mistake and capped it with murder!