"You'll learn what I know when I've told you. Hold your jaw and keep your ears open. I've not much time to tell you, and I'd be sorry to go without finishing."
"Go on," Tony said quietly; "I shall not interrupt you."
The gleam in the eyes satisfied him that it was only delirium in the man's mind; there was only a coincidence in the fact that he spoke of what Nuggan had hinted at, and what lay nearest to Tony's heart—the question of his parentage and the dissimilarity between himself and the other members of the Taylor family.
"I knew you in a moment, knew you by the likeness," the man went on. "She don't know where you are, but she thinks of me still—me, the man who——but that ain't part of this yarn. The woman—your mother—was married, but she's separated from her husband for many years. Separated, I said, sonny. Separated's good, though you don't know it;" and he laughed unmusically as he watched the set face Tony had turned towards him.
"There were two men and one woman, and the woman was married to one of them, but they both were mad with love for her and mad with hate for each other. Do you know what hate means, you white-faced boy? Do you know what it is to hate a man so that you'd go through hell to grip him by the throat and feel him choking under your hands; so that you'd tear your own heart out twenty times a day to grind his infernal life into grey damnation? Do you know what it's like to hate, waking and sleeping, drunk or sober, always having one object in front of you that you want to reach and kill? Do you? Then you know what I've felt for years and years, day and night; what I've lived for, longed for, worked for."
The eyes that had gleamed before were blazing as though some of the glowing embers had been taken from the fire and placed in the man's head, and the face glistened with sweat as the muscles worked and quivered under the paroxysm of fury that held him.
"That's enough," Tony exclaimed, jumping up.
The man held up his hand.
"You've got to hear it, all of it, and then find her out and tell her—from me who's dying. If you don't take a dying man's message to your own mother——"
He stopped and looked at Tony, his face growing calmer the while.