Richard’s face went colder, and he tried to disengage his hand. But the dying man clasped him with suddenly strong fingers.
“No, no,” he said fiercely. “Don’t leave me now. You must stay with me. I shan’t be long—and I need you to be there.”
There ensued a long silence. The corpse—for such it seemed—lay immobile and obstinate. Yet it did not relax into death. And Richard could not go, for it held him. He sat with his wrist clasped by the clammy thin fingers, and he could not go.
Then again the dark, mysterious, animal eyes turned up to his face.
“Say you love me, Lovat,” came the hoarse, penetrating whisper, seeming even more audible than a loud sound.
And again Lovat’s face tightened with torture.
“I don’t understand what you mean,” he said with his lips.
“Say you love me.” The pleading, penetrating whisper seemed to sound inside Somers’ brain. He opened his mouth to say it. The sound “I—” came out. Then he turned his face aside and remained open-mouthed, blank.
Kangaroo’s fingers were clutching his wrist, the corpse-face was eagerly upturned to his. Somers was brought to by a sudden convulsive gripping of the fingers around his wrist. He looked down. And when he saw the eager, alert face, yellow, long, Jewish, and somehow ghoulish, he knew he could not say it. He didn’t love Kangaroo.
“No,” he said, “I can’t say it.”