He moved forward a few steps as if to leave the room, but she cried, “Stop.”
“I’m used to your class,” she said with a frightful sneer, “and I know what’s passing in your mind. You’re saying to yourself, ‘The woman is a liar, and I’d better have nothing to do with her. The police will get the child from her, and then I’ll have a clear start.’ But, my fine gentleman,” leering hideously at him, “don’t you, nor the young lady down yonder set the police on me for your own sakes. I’ll make it lively for you if you do. I’m going to leave this dull little hole soon and go back to Montreal. Not to please you, but to suit myself. I came here for a purpose. I’ve no reason to serve you, but if it’s any good to you to know it, I’ve no intention of meddling with you or the young lady yonder. You let me alone, and I’ll let you alone. But I’m hard up now; you give me a certain sum down, and tell me some place in Montreal where I can go quarterly, and we’ll call it a bargain.”
Dr. Camperdown drew his breath hard and fast. “Is Zeb your lawful child?”
“Yes; Gilberto is the only husband I ever had; a beauty, isn’t he?”
In a few rapid words, for the sight of the woman was so hateful to him that he could hardly endure staying in the room with her, Camperdown concluded the agreement with her. “On the day you leave Halifax,” he said, “come to me and I’ll give you a further sum. The sooner you come, the more you’ll get.”
He turned on his heel, his foot was on the threshold of the door, when he heard in a hissing voice close to his ear, “Did you ever hate any one?”
Looking over his shoulder he saw the nearest approach to a fiend incarnate that it had ever been his bad fortune to behold. The woman had risen from her chair, drawn herself up to her great height, and with hand laid on her breast was staring before her, not at him, her face convulsed by a fierce and diabolical rage.
“You are nothing,” she said wildly, “Zeb is nothing, Gilberto is nothing, the lady nothing, to me; I despise you all, but that man, king of devils, how I hate him! If I could see him burning in torment”—and she broke into a stream of fierce imprecations, compared with which Mammy Juniper’s ravings were but as milk and water complaints.
“It is hell to me here,” she cried, striking her breast violently, “to know how to torture him. I could kill him, but what is that. One pang and all is over. But to see him twist and writhe in suffering. That is what I want. I have been to see him to-day—other days. I said, ‘I starve and freeze.’ What did he say? ‘Woman, who are you? get you gone.’ O Lord, Lord!” and throwing herself in her chair, she rocked to and fro in speechless agony.
The gaudy bonnet slipped over the back of her chair, and as her paroxysm increased, her coarse, light hair fell down, and from the rapid motion of her body to and fro, whipped wildly over her head.