She watched him narrowly as he prepared his drink. The decanter was so low that she thought he must be feeling what he had taken, and she wondered if it might not have softened him, released some generosity in his poor soul.
"You must have suffered, Randall, in all this. But won't it hurt you still more, doing what you mean to do—when you make him suffer?"
"His suffering!" He waved a deprecating hand. "What can he suffer compared to me? Disgust I've suffered, yes, and mortification. He could feel nothing approaching that if I flayed him here. Why, Nell, I pulled a rose from its bush this morning in Neville's garden, and crushed a worm crawling on its stem. A poor, tiny green thing, yet it had lived, and had its successes and failures after a fashion. But you can't imagine its actual suffering in death to equal my own mere disgust at crushing it."
The brandy had not softened him, she thought. Could it have made him cautious?
"Have you never suspected, Randall, that there may be a sleeping fighter in him?" There was a glitter in her tormented eyes, a sudden fierce wish to behold battle between this puny insulter and Ewing aroused to his might.
"Bah! a fighter!" He snapped contemptuous fingers. "There's the look in his eye sometimes, but I've disarmed him. He can't fight me, his benefactor, his best friend. Never fear; he'll wilt, wither, shrivel up. Oh, trust me for that. And suppose the impossible, suppose the worm turns in some fit of wormish desperation. I've the coup, have I not? You know what his mother is to him, a damned romantic memory of pure womanhood and all that rot. Suppose him capable of so much as an eye-flash of defiance. Why, then, my child, he'll know who—he'll know what—his mother was; and he'll know my right to describe her. He'll know what he is. And the words won't puzzle him: he'll need no lexicon—crisp, Anglo-Saxon words. Do you think that will leave any fight in him—her shame and his? By Gad! Nell, it's too good to keep from him. He shall have it anyway, though I'd meant to keep it back for my own sake. But that shall be the clincher. Before her face there I'll tell him what she was."
"Not that, Randall, surely not that!" Her veil of calmness had flown on the wind of his hate. She knew she must reveal herself. Her words had been so near a cry that he turned on her in amazement.
"Listen, Randall, don't—don't do that. Let him off. I promise to take him away. It's all true; you've handled him well, and you can break him now—but don't. Please, please let him go. I'll take him away, I tell you. I promise he shall never bother you again."
He looked at her, incredulous.
"You're asking me to consider him—really?"