The room flared with light. The bedding was torn into strips and scattered about. Every fragile thing the room contained was in ruins and littered the carpet. And in their midst, held down by Mr. Randolph and his servant, Cochrane, was a struggling, gurgling, biting thing which Thorpe guessed rather than knew was the mother of Nina Randolph. Her weak evil face was swollen and purple, its brutality, so decently cloaked in normal conditions, bulging from every muscle. Her ragged hair hung in scant locks about her protruding eyes. Over her mouth was the broad hand of the man, Cochrane. Mrs. Rinehardt, her face flushed and her dress in disorder, stood by the mantel crying and wringing her hands.
Thorpe’s brain received the picture in one enduring flash. He was dimly conscious of a cry from unseen lips, and the vanishing train of a woman’s gown. And then Mr. Randolph looked up. He relaxed his hold and got to his feet. His face was ghastly, and covered with great globes of sweat.
“Thorpe!” he gasped. “You! Oh, go! go!”
Thorpe closed the door, his fascinated gaze returning for a second to the Thing on the floor. It no longer struggled. It had become suddenly quiet, and was laughing and muttering to itself.
He left the house, and walked out of the park and city, and toward the Presidio. It was a long walk, over sand drifts and rocks, and through thickets whose paths he had forgotten. The cold stars gave little light, for the wind drove a wrack aslant them; and when the colder dawn came, greying everything, the flowers that looked so brilliant in the sunlight, the heavy drooping trees, the sky above, he found himself climbing a high sand hill, with no apparent purpose but to get to the top; a cut about its base would have shortened the journey. He reached the summit, and saw the grey swinging ocean, the brown forts in their last sleep.
He sat down, and traced figures on the sand with his stick. Chaos had been in him; but the tide had fallen, and his thoughts were shaping themselves coherently. Nina Randolph was the daughter of a madwoman, and the seeds were in her. Her strange moods, her tragic despair, her hints of an approaching fate, her attitude to himself, were legible at last. And Miss Hathaway knew, and had tried to warn him. Doubtless others knew, but the secret had been well kept.
He was filled with bitterness and dull disgust, and his heart and brain were leaden. The mad are loathsome things; and the vision of Nina, foaming and hideous and shrieking, rose again and again.
That passed; but he saw her without illusion, without idealisation. She had been the one woman whose faults were entrancing, whose genuine temperament would have atoned for as many more. She seemed now a very ordinary, bright, moody, erratic, seductive young person who was making the most of life before she disappeared into a padded cell. He wondered why he had not preferred Miss Hathaway, or Mrs. Earle, or Miss McDermott. He had not, and concluded that her first influence had been her only one, and that his imagination had done the rest.
The sunrise gun boomed from the Presidio. The colours of dawn were on horizon and water. He rose and walked rapidly over the hills and levels; and when he reached his room, he went to bed and slept.