“There is rat poison in the house,” I said, and saw my lips curving in the bitter gleaming smile of a Medusa as he blenched and shook under my words.
“My God!—you are cruel—crueller than death. It costs more to stand here and face you than to go and die like a rat in a hole. You are right, it is the only death I am fit for—but speak to me first, Deirdre—give me one kind word—just one word.”
“Words!—what do they do for you? A hundredth part of the words I have flung at you in my misery would have put manhood into a baboon, and driven a real man mad with shame—but you!”
“I know—I am a coward, a skunk, a liar, a drunkard. I will die to-night if it will please you.”
“Nothing you can do will please me.”
“My God.—let me tell you how it happened,—she scratched my hand trying to get away to you, and I went mad for a few moments—for a few moments I saw red—before God I did not know what I was doing—afterwards I saw her lying on the ground all battered to bits, and found the bloody boot-jack in my hand—”
“Ah!”
“Oh, God! don’t look at me like that—I never meant it, Deirdre—I swear I never meant it—I put her outside—she must have crept away into the bush to die.”
“She lay there three days suffering the hells of hunger and thirst and wounds—too broken to crawl home—while you whistled, and lied! Maurice Stair you are an unspeakable brute. Be very sure you will answer to God for this.”
I threw down my revolver, and turned on him the implacable Medusa face of the stone image in the mirror.