“Poor Keyork!” exclaimed the Wanderer, half pitying him. “Your big thoughts have cracked your little brain at last.”
“Poor Keyork? You call me poor Keyork? You boy! You puppet! You ball, that we have bandied to and fro, half sleeping, half awake! It drives me mad to see you standing there, scoffing instead of helping me!”
“You are past my help, I fear.”
“Will you not move? Are you dead already, standing on your feet and staring at me?”
Again Keyork threw himself upon the huge old man, and stamped and struggled and tried to move him backwards. He might as well have spent his strength against a rock. Breathless but furious still, he desisted at last, too much beside himself to see that he whose sudden death he feared was stronger than he, because the great experiment had succeeded far beyond all hope.
“Unorna has done this!” he cried, beating his forehead in impotent rage. “Unorna has ruined me, and all,—and everything—so she has paid me for my help! Trust a woman when she loves? Trust angels to curse God, or Hell to save a sinner! But she shall pay, too—I have her still. Why do you stare at me? Wait, fool! You shall be happy now. What are you to me that I should even hate you? You shall have what you want. I will bring you the woman you love, the Beatrice you have seen in dreams—and then Unorna’s heart will break and she will die, and her soul—her soul——”
Keyork broke into a peal of laughter, deep, rolling, diabolical in its despairing, frantic mirth. He was still laughing as he reached the door.
“Her soul, her soul!” they heard him cry, between one burst and another as he went out, and from the echoing vestibule, and from the staircase beyond, the great laughter rolled back to them when they were left alone.
“What is it all? I cannot understand,” the Wanderer said, looking up to the grand calm face.
“It is not always given to evil to do good, even for evil’s sake,” said the old man. “The thing that he would is done already. The wound that he would make is already bleeding; the heart he is gone to break is broken; the soul that he would torture is beyond all his torments.”