"Let us say," she replied a trifle wearily, her eyes going back to the river, "that I was lonely; and that I was prepared to like you, Mr. Drennen."
He found himself in a sudden flaring anger. The anger was unreasonable, but it but burned the hotter for all that. He had sought to take a joy out of being brutal to the girl, just why he was very far from understanding. Now the joy did not come as he had expected it. In his anger there was a sense of insane resentment against her that she was just a girl, not a man as he would have her now so that he might give her the lie and make her suffer physically by beating at her with his hard fists. In the blind rage upon him he blamed her for having come into his life at all even though she were merely a passing figure through a little corner of it. The years, while they had brought no happiness to him, had at least given him a calm indifference to all things; now for many days and nights she had broken that calm. In his heart he cursed her, his emotion rising toward a fierce, passionate hatred.
"In hell's name," he cried abruptly, his voice ringing with a new menace in it, "what are you doing here? Why don't you go on? What are you staying here for? Is the world so damned small that you've got to come and preen yourself under my eyes?"
For a moment she did not answer. The expression in the eyes turned upon him changed swiftly. There was a quick fear, gone in a flash in pure wonder. All this he saw clearly as too he saw a flicker of amusement. And back of the amusement which maddened him were other things, emotions hinted darkly, baffling him.
"The other day," she said steadily in the face of his rage, "you contented yourself by commanding me to take myself off of the mountain back there. Now you request me to get out of Canada? Or out of America? Or the western hemisphere, which is it? And, kind sir, why is it?"
Looking up at him, to show him how little he moved her, to make him doubt if he had read aright when he had thought it was fear in her eyes, she laughed. The laughter, welling up softly, musically, from deep in the round white throat, the defiant posture, head thrown back, something of the vague, sweet intimacy in it, affected him strangely. His face reddened. His hands shut spasmodically, clenching hard, lifting a little from his sides. Instinctively she drew back, her own hand slipping into her bosom, a quick flutter of fear in her heart that he was actually going to strike her.
"Why?" His lips were drawn back from his teeth; his face was more evil in the grip of the passion upon him than she had ever seen it before; his voice harsh and ugly. "Because you come when you do now, a thousand years too soon or a dozen years too late! Because I hate you as I have never learned how to hate a man no matter what thing he had done! I don't know what there is in me that is stronger than I am and that makes me keep my hands off your throat. Do you know what you have done, Ygerne, with the infernal witchery of you? You have made me love you, me, David Drennen, who knows there is no such thing as love in a rotten world! I want you in my arms; I want to kiss that red mouth of yours; I want to kill any man who so much as looks at you! My life was as I would have it; in a few days I would be a rich man with all of the power of a rich man; … and then you came. Why do I hate you, your eyes, your mouth, your body and your brain? Why?" He broke off in a laugh which showed what his wounds, his sickness, his passion had done for him, and she drew still further back from him, shuddering. "I hate you.… By God! because you've made of me a fool like the others! because you have made me love you!"
A frenzy of delirium was upon him. She did not know whether the man were sane or not; he did not care. But he knew that he spoke the truth. Twice had he yielded to her, and he was not the man to yield easily. Once, and he had thought it a passing light mood, when he had let down the bars for her to come in. Now that recklessly he flung open the flood gates which had dammed his own emotions, allowing the headlong torrent to sweep away everything with it. It was madness; it was folly; it was insanity for a man like David Drennen to let his heart be snared out of him by the girl upon whom he had looked so few times. And yet, be it what else it might be, it was the simple truth.
"Laugh at me, why don't you?" snarled the man, little beads of perspiration gathered on his forehead. "Or blush and stammer any of the idiotic things which a woman says to the man at the moment of his supreme idiocy. Or flatter yourself with the vanity of it. Are you a good woman or a bad? I don't know. Are you generous or mean? I don't know. Are you loyal and stanch and true—or treacherous and contemptible? I don't know. I don't know a thing about you, and yet I let you slip into my life one day and the next rile up all of the mud which was settling to the bottom. Go and brag of it to your two hangdogs. But, by heaven," and his fist smashed down into an open palm, "you and your dogs keep out of my way. If the three of you are here another twenty-four hours I'll drive them out and with them any other man you so much as look at!"
He stared at her for a moment, grown suddenly silent and white faced. He lifted his arms as though he would sweep her up into them. Then he dropped them so that they fell to his side like dead weights and swung about, turning his back upon her, going swiftly upstream toward the Settlement.