“Bah!” he flung out angrily. “What absurd nonsense it all is! We’ve been living too long in this place, we Renshaws, that’s what’s the matter with us! We ought to sell the confounded house and clear out altogether! I will too, when mother dies. Yes, I will—brewery or no brewery—and go off with Tassar to one of his foreign places. I’ll sell the whole thing, the land and the business! It’s begun to get on my nerves. It must have got on my nerves, mustn’t it, when that simple break, break, break, as mother’s absurd poem says of this damned sea, sounds to me like the beating heart of something, of something whose heart ought to be stopped from beating!”
His voice which had risen to a loud pitch of excitement died away in a sort of apologetic murmur.
“Sorry,” he muttered, “only don’t look at me like that, you girl. There, clear off and sit further away! It’s that look of yours that makes me talk in this silly fashion. God help us! I don’t blame that foreign fellow for getting queer in his head. You’ve got something in those eyes of yours, Philippa, that no living girl ought to be allowed to have! Bah! You’ve made me talk like an absolute fool.”
Instead of moving away as she had been bidden, Philippa touched her brother with a light caress. Never had she looked so entirely a creature of the old perverse civilizations as she looked at that moment.
“Mother thinks you’re going to marry that girl,” she whispered, “but I know better than that, and I’m always right in these things, am I not, Brand darling?”
He fell back under her touch and the shadowy lines of his face contracted. He presented the appearance of something withered and crumpled. Her mocking smile still divided her curved lips, curved in the subtle, archaic way as in the marbles of ancient Greece. Whatever may have been the secret of her power over him, it manifested itself now in the form of a spiritual cruelty which he found very difficult to bear. He made a movement that was almost an appeal.
“Say I’m right, say I’m always right in these things!” she persisted.
But at that moment a diversion occurred, caused by the sudden entrance of a large bat. The creature uttered a weird querulous cry, like the cry of a newborn babe and went wheeling over their heads in desperate rapid circles, beating against the book-case and the picture frames. Presently, attracted by the light, it swooped down upon the flame of the candle and in a moment had extinguished it, plunging the room into complete darkness.
Philippa, with a low taunting laugh, ran across the room and wrapped herself in one of the window curtains.
“Open the door and drive it out,” she cried. “Drive it out, I say! Are you afraid of a thing like that?”