“Yes; what do you want here?”
“I want an explanation. If you do not feel fit to give it to me now, I will come again. But I must have it, and the less delay the better.”
“Ask your wife, then. She has a better head than you, and understands without so much talking. Go to her for your explanations, and leave me in peace.”
“Not yet. I want some reason for your stopping my letters to her and her letters to me, for taking the presents we intrusted to your care to be given to each other, and for giving her money, my flowers, and even her jewelry to a greedy, extravagant, worthless woman whom you couldn’t satisfy if you had gold mines to give her. That is what I want you to answer.”
The cripple had raised himself, his eyes glittering with fury, and he sat frowning maliciously at his cousin until the latter had finished his speech.
“Then I won’t answer you, except to say this; you are very good now, and look upon extravagance and waste as very wicked things. But you haven’t been a saint so very long that you can have forgotten that you yourself were as greedy and worthless as any one I knew once, and that you forged your father’s name to supply your own extravagance, which, it seems to me, is worse than to stoop to meanness for the sake of a woman you love and for whom you would die.”
The last words he spoke in a low voice, looking straight in front of him with his glittering, feverish eyes; and his hand moved restlessly toward his coat-pocket as he finished speaking.
“Look here!” said Harry, in a softer voice. “I don’t want to be hard on you. I know I’ve done as bad things myself, if not worse; and, if I’m a saint now, it’s the first I’ve heard of it. But, if you’re so fond of this woman as you say, I wonder how you could have the heart to play such confoundedly nasty tricks with the love of another man, and to such an angel as Annie, who had always been kind to you too?”
“Your love? Your love was nothing to mine!” Stephen burst out, contemptuously. “A woman may have a place in your heart; but your dogs and your horses fill the rest of it. You are handsome, straight; if one woman will not smile on you, another will; while I, who love sweet eyes and fair faces with a passion you cannot dream of, can only buy kindness from a woman by the ceaseless labor of ministering to all her wants, all her caprices; and then, when at last the time comes when I can give no more, I am cast aside and forgotten for—for one of your sort, with a pair of blue eyes that say nothing, and a head that can’t put two ideas together.”
The passionate bitterness of this speech moved Harry.