“I believe you’re exaggerating absurdly,” she said at last. “As a matter of fact, I’ve often been surprised at your self-control, seeing that I know you have a temper concealed about you somewhere. I think that is why your anger this afternoon took me so aback. It seemed unlike you to be so fearfully annoyed over practically nothing at all. I don’t believe”—half smiling—“that really you’re anything like bad-tempered as a Tormarin ought to be—to support the family tradition!”
He was looking, not at her but beyond her, as she spoke, as though his thoughts dwelt with some past memory. His expression was inscrutable; she could not interpret it. Presently he turned back to her, and though he smiled there was a deep, unfathomable sadness in his eyes.
“I’ve had one unforgettable lesson,” he said quietly. “The Tormarin temper—the cursed inheritance of every one of us—has ruined my life just as it has ruined others before me.”
The words seemed to fall on Jean’s ears with a numbing sense of calamity, not alone in that past to which they primarily had reference, but as though thrusting forward in some mysterious way into the future—her future.
She was conscious of a vague foreboding that that “cursed inheritance” of the Tormarins was destined, sooner or later, to impinge upon her own life.
At night, when she went to bed, her mind was still groping blindly in the dark places of dim premonition. Single sentences from the afternoon’s conversation kept flitting through her brain, and when at last she slept it was to dream that she had lost her way and was wandering alone in a wild and desolate region. Presently she came to a solitary dwelling, set lonely in the midst of the interminable plain. Three wretched-looking scrubby little fir trees grew to one side of the house, all three of them bent in the same direction as though beaten and bowed forward by ceaseless winds. While she stood wondering whether she should venture to knock at the door of the house and ask her way, it opened and Geoffrey Burke came out.
“Ah! There you are!” he exclaimed, as though he had been expecting her. “I’ve been waiting for you. Will you come into my parlour?”
He smiled at her as he spoke—she could see the even flash of his white teeth—but there was something in the quality of the smile which terrified her, and without answering a word she turned to escape.
But he overtook her in a couple of strides, catching her by the hand in a grip so fierce that it seemed as though the bones of her fingers must crack under it.
“Come into my parlour,” he repeated. “If you don’t, you’ll be stamped forever with the mark of the beast. It’s too late to try and run away.”