“Darling baby,” Sebastian replied, responding to her whim, “don’t you know that a big bogey-man lives behind that door, and you’ll hear his bones rattle through the letter-box?”
But Letty only tugged the harder, up the damp gravel path. “One can never tell,” stopping and facing him, her blue eyes very serious, her soft curls clinging to cheek and forehead, in little wet tendrils, “how soon we may want a house, now that father has grown nice to you.”
She might equally well have said: “Now that you’ve grown nice to me.” For never had she and Sebastian been so happy together, not even in their first days of courtship, as since their quarrel and reconciliation a fortnight ago. He no longer oppressed her with his moody fits, nor snubbed her when she strove to intrude on his remoteness; he even let her minister to one of his headaches, to her great content; moreover, he seemed possessed by a real lover’s craving for her constant companionship; and the note in his voice when he spoke her name, filled her with a tremulous wish to cry and laugh, both at the same time.
—How could she know he was being hounded day and night by an idea, and that he was striving to place her between the idea and himself? striving to stifle his eyes and ears with her, to cram himself with her, to the exclusion of all else. How should she guess that he dared not love her little, lest her presence should prove too feeble for its purpose; dared not love her much, because of the hard bite in a man’s voice saying: “At the height is the time to cut with any credit, my lad!”... Why, then the more he loaded Letty with his tenderness, the nearer he brought their passion to the height where——But he dared not love her less, nor yet more.
Sebastian had not been near Stuart, since the latter had, hornet-wise, stung his brain to a veritable madness of thought. Stung, and stung again, and left the sting within. Sebastian hated Stuart,—and Lord! how one could hate a man who was capable of such ruthless brutality as to treat love like some luxuriant but dangerous growth; cut it away for the sake of ... of what? This was where Sebastian always lost the idea; could sense it, indeed, far-off, taunting him for his lack of understanding:
“You’re not big enough. Not big enough.”
“He’s not human. Not human,” the boy would shout in reply.
He had perpetual nightmares of killing Stuart; actually hacking at him with a knife; searching for some vulnerable spot. But the blade would rebound against a hard invisible resistance.... The nightmare recurred again and again, tiring Sebastian, wearing him to tatters, with its frenzied futility.
—“Ooo! light a match, Sebastian; it’s so dark,” cried Letty, as the front door yielded to her timid pressure.
The blue flicker betrayed the interior of the house as quite new, smelling strongly of paint, completely devoid of furniture; the walls unpapered; the floors sonorous to the tramp of feet. Some boards and pails lying about, and a candle-end stuck into a bottle on the chimney-piece, betokened that the workmen were still employed there during the daytime.