“At nine o’clock, then,” said Brettison hastily. “You are sure you will not mind being left with him?”
“Mind?” said Stratton with a smile. “Yes, I mind it, but it is our duty, old fellow; and we are going to do that duty to the end.”
He wrung his old friend’s hand as he saw him off, and then, with a complete change coming over his countenance, he carefully locked the door, placed the inner key in his pocket, and walked steadily across to where his unwelcome visitor lay back in his seat, with his hand still playing furtively about the red scar behind his ear. His eyes stared in a leaden way at the rich carpet; and, as Stratton followed them he shuddered, and the whole scene of that terrible night came back, for the eyes were fixed upon a stain only partly obliterated, and it was there where his head had lain after he received the shot.
A peculiar sense of shrinking ran through Stratton as he saw himself again passing through the struggle and dragging the man into the bath-closet, while once more he had to fight with the feelings of dread of detection, and recalled how he had argued with himself, upon the necessity for hiding away the wretch whose existence had been as a blight on Myra’s young life, and who, dead, was the great bar to their future happiness.
“And,” he muttered aloud with a bitter sigh, “living—as great a barrier still.”
“If he would but die,” something seemed to say; “and free her.”
But he shook his head directly.
“A vain hope,” he said—“a vain hope.”
He shuddered and clenched his hands, closing his eyes directly after, for a maddening, horrible feeling of temptation had come over him. They were alone in that solitary room—he with this wretch whose existence in his sane moments was a curse; and who now, as he lay back there feeble, vacuous, existing only in body, not in mind, was a mere blot upon the earth, less worthy of the space he occupied than the vilest animal classed as vermin, and which man crushed out of his way without compunction, without a second thought. What sin would it be to quench the flickering life before him? He must give up all hope of ever clasping Myra to his heart, as he had given it up before, and suffer as he had suffered then; but she would be free. There would never then be any possibility of her coming face to face with this horror. And it would be so easy! One firm grasp of his nervous fingers, and the feeble beating of the miserable wretch’s arteries would cease.
And after?