"Stop smiling, you leaden-jawed Jewess," he said softly.
The glass flew in jingling showers in every direction, but the strong, quiet face remained on the wall in its frame; and though the mouth was full of splintered glass, the eyes smiled gravely on—the eyes of a woman who had seen many such violent scenes come and go.
There was a tiny bronze bust of Daniel O'Connell, standing on a little cedar-wood shelf, which Abinger caught up and flung with a calm, sure aim at the long gilt-edged mirror, making a great white radiating asterisk full in the centre of it.
All vases and flower-bowls he took from their places and dropped upon the floor. The sound of their breaking was not unmusical.
He still continued to hum. At last there was nothing left to destroy except the books arranged in their shelves round the room. A few he pulled from their cases and tore them across, but the sound of their tearing was tame and had no charm for him after so much exciting noise. Leisurely he left them at last and came to the foot of the bed and stood looking down upon the girl lying there. She met his eyes with a calm and quiet glance, though the soul within her was apprehensive enough.
The smile on his mouth was like the carved smile on the mouth of some hideous Japanese mask, and his eyes resembled the eyes of a gargoyle. He was in full evening-dress and very immaculate, and his fair hair lay as smooth and sleek upon his head as a sleeping child's.
"Awake?" he asked, with continual and unfailing pleasantness.
"You hardly expected me to have remained asleep?" asked Poppy equably. She saw very well now that he had not lost his reason. His eyes were not an insane man's eyes, though they were lit by some frightful emotion, and he was plainly in the grip of one of his extraordinary rages: the worst she had ever witnessed. It did not occur to her that she could in any way be the cause of his anger, and she felt wearily indignant that it should be obtruded upon her at this time. She did not mind much about all her beautiful things with which he had made such holocaust, though her possessions had always had for her that pathetic value and meaning which the lonely attach to inanimate things. But her whole life was bouleversé now, and she understood that such things mattered little.
Abinger was looking at her with a tinge of something that might have been expectancy in his fury. Was he waiting for her to demand what he meant by this unprecedented outrage on her privacy? Ill and careless of life as she felt, she still had strength to rebel against this new form of tyranny, and to meet it with courage and disdain. It seemed to her that it would be more insolent not to ask him what he meant, but to simply take such vile and brutal conduct as a matter of course. So she stared back calmly at him from her pillows, not knowing what a strange picture she presented, lying there. Her arms wide from her, revealing the long, curved line of her boyish young form; her subtle face, pale, with strong ivory tints in it against the whiteness of the pillows, the blue scornful light of her eyes, and her drowned black hair lying like gorgon ropes about her. Passion-racked and pale as Magdalene, she was a sight to kindle the fires of pity and chivalry in any good man; but the lust of Luce Abinger's eyes was for the grace and bloom and beauty of her, that even misery and fatigue could not rub out, and these things kindled his blood to such a fury of savagery and desire that he scarce knew what he did. With one quick movement he had left the foot of the bed and was sitting beside her with an iron hand on each of hers. So she lay there, like a pinioned bird, with his tormented face above her.
"Harlot!" he whispered, still smiling; and the word leapt from his lips like a shrivelling flame and scorched across her face.