“Do you hear? I shall break in the door.”
“You may do what you wish. But if you come in here I will kill you.”
My voice was very low and quiet, but the hatred in it carried through the door like a dagger aimed at his heart, and he drew away as if it had reached him. A moment later he laughed—a coward’s laugh—uncertain at the beginning, then, taking courage from its own loud sound, blustering at the end. Afterwards he sought in more champagne courage to fulfil his threat: but he found what was better for him at that time—oblivion.
As for me, I lay on the great white bed with crushed face and clenched hands, and asked God for death. At first I was a woman in agony, a tortured and tricked woman whose sorrows were too many for her, whose right was death as the only solution of the sordid problem. But afterwards I was only a weeping child, sobbing over the wreckage of my life, and crying out in the words of my childhood’s prayers:
“Oh, gentle Jesus!... Oh, Mary!... have pity on me!”
Chapter Eighteen.
What the Dawn Heard.
“The means of a man’s ruin are on his tongue.”