“Why?”
“I thought that they ought to marry; I was fond of both of them. I wanted them to marry.”
“And now I will kill you.”
He said it without moving; his face seemed to grow more like a beast’s at every moment. His hands stretched across the table; the long fingers were like snakes.
“I must go.” Maradick got up. Panic was about him again. He felt that he ought to make some kind of defence of what he had done, but the words would not come.
“You will see, afterwards, that what I did was best. It was really the best. We will talk again about it, when you feel calmer.”
He moved towards the door; but Morelli was coming towards him with his head thrust forward, his back a little bent, his hands hanging, curved, in mid-air, and he was smiling.
“I am going to kill you, here and now,” he said. “It is not a very terrible affair. It will not be very long. You can’t escape; but it is not because you have done this or that, it is not for anything that you have done. It is only because you are so stupid, so dreadfully stupid. There are others like you, and I hate you all, you fools. You do not understand anything—what I am or who I am, or the world—nothing.”
Maradick said nothing. The terror that had once seized Tony was about him now like a cloud; the thing that was approaching him was not a man, but something impure, unclean. It was exactly as though he were being slowly let down into a dungeon full of creeping snakes.
His breath was coming with difficulty. He felt stifled.