"And I shall stay up to speak to Luce when he returns from the Club." What she could mean by this Poppy neither knew nor cared. Revived a little by the wine and food, but with a body and mind demanding rest, she closed her eyes and fell into dead slumber.
When the candles which Kykie had lighted in the tall silver sticks on the dressing-table had burnt far down from their scarlet shades, Poppy awakened to the fact that someone was moving about her bedroom. She opened her eyes, but did not stir or make a sound.
A man was standing by her writing-table humming softly to himself while he took up each little ornament and article upon it, and gently broke it between his hands. There were several paper-knives of wood and silver and tortoise-shell; quaint pens, and two gold-set rose-glasses. He broke them all gently between his hands, and the snapping of them was like the snapping of little bones. He then tore up some photographs, and a black-and-white etching of the Bay of Naples, and piled the pieces into two little heaps. As he walked away from the writing-table towards the lighted dressing-table, the candles gleamed on his profile, and Poppy saw that it was, as she supposed, the profile of Luce Abinger. He was humming between his teeth, a little tune—an odd noise resembling much the sort of monotonous hum made by black fighting ants when they go out seeking battle with other ant tribes.
Something resembling panic stole over the girl as she listened, and once she saw his distorted mouth smiling terribly, and could have cried aloud, but she controlled herself and continued to lie still with half-closed eyes, watching his strange proceedings. From the dressing-table he took up her two beautiful ivory brushes with her name written in silver across their backs, and bending them in his hands, snapped off their handles, laying the broken bits down. Then carefully and methodically he broke every one of the silver articles on the table. The sound of them snapping seemed to give him acute pleasure. Even two tall vases of silver and cut-glass were not too strong for his skilful hands; nor was a little porcelain trinket-tray, with a scene from the Tokaido inlaid upon it (for which he had paid thirty pounds at Yokohama), spared.
A handful of rings and bracelets, which Kykie had removed from her fainting mistress and placed in a little heap upon the table, he dropped upon the floor and ground his heel upon.
With no look towards the bed where Poppy lay, he left the table then, and sauntered to the walls, from which he stripped the wonderful chalk drawings and flung them in ribbons to the floor. His eye caught the silver and ivory crucifix.
"Ah, Christ! I had forgotten you," said he, speaking for the first time, in a soft and pleased tone, and picking up a boot-tree left carelessly by a chair he approached, and struck a ringing blow upon the beautiful ivory face, shattering it. Again and again he struck until it lay in a hundred tiny splinters on the ground. Poppy's eye had sought the door and found it closed; the lock gleamed and there was no key to be seen. She came to the conclusion that she was locked in with a man who had gone mad. The house was absolutely silent.
"If he chooses to kill me, he can; no one will hear my calls," she thought, and she continued to lie very still.
In smashing the crucifix Abinger had for the first time made a noise louder than the gentle cracking and crunching of bones; but he had now awakened to the charm of breaking things with a crash. He beat the boot-tree full into the smiling face of Monna Lisa.