He merely stood upon the threshold of the drawing-room. This was what he said, and his face was entirely white and his eyes appalling.
“My coming back to speak to you is—superfluous—and the result of pure fury. I allow it to myself as mere shameless indulgence. More is known against you than this—things which have gone farther and fared worse. You are not young and you are facing years of life in prison. Your head will be shaved—your hands worn and blackened and your nails broken with the picking of oakum. You will writhe in hopeless degradation until you are done for. You will have time, in the night blackness if of your cell, to remember—to see faces—to hear cries. Women such as you should learn what hell on earth means. You will learn.”
When he ended, the woman hung with her back to the wall she had staggered against, her mouth opening and shutting helplessly but letting forth no sound.
He took out an exquisitely fresh handkerchief and touched his forehead because it was damp. His eyes were still appalling, but his voice suddenly dropped and changed.
“I have allowed myself to feel like a madman,” he said. “It has been a rich experience—good for such soul as I own.”
He went downstairs and walked home because his carriage had taken Robin and Mademoiselle back to the slice of a house.
CHAPTER XXIV
Von Hillern made no further calls on Mrs. Gareth-Lawless. His return to Berlin was immediate and Fräulein Hirsch came no more to give lessons in German. Later, Coombe learned from the man with the steady, blunt-featured face, that she had crossed the Channel on a night boat not many hours after Von Hillern had walked away from Berford Place. The exact truth was that she had been miserably prowling about the adjacent streets, held in the neighbourhood by some self-torturing morbidness, half thwarted helpless passion, half triumphing hatred of the young thing she had betrayed. Up and down the streets she had gone, round and round, wringing her lean fingers together and tasting on her lips the salt of tears which rolled down her cheeks—tears of torment and rage.
There was the bitterness of death in what, by a mere trick of chance, came about. As she turned a corner telling herself for the hundredth time that she must go home, she found herself face to face with a splendid figure swinging furiously along. She staggered at the sight of the tigerish rage in the white face she recognized with a gasp. It was enough merely to behold it. He had met with some disastrous humiliation!
As for him, the direct intervention of that Heaven whose special care he was, had sent him a woman to punish—which, so far, was at least one thing arranged as it should be. He knew so well how he could punish her with his mere contempt and displeasure—as he could lash a spaniel crawling at his feet. He need not deign to tell her what had happened, and he did not. He merely drew back and stood in stiff magnificence looking down at her.