"He was not doing it because he was a poet. It seems he had to pay some debt, or thought he had. The poor chap talked about it when he was delirious. Oh—let me open that window."
"Thank you. You say he was delirious. Were you with him then?"
Maddox leapt to his conclusion. Miss Lucia Harden had something to conceal. He gathered it from her sudden change of attitude, from her interrogation, from her faintness and from the throbbing terror in her voice. That was why she desired the suppression of the Sonnets.
"Were you with him?" she repeated.
"No. God forgive me!"
"Nobody was with him—before they took him to the hospital?"
"Nobody, my dear lady, whom you would call anybody. He owes his life to the charity of a drunken prostitute."
She was woman, the eternal, predestined enemy of Rickman's genius. Therefore he had determined not to spare her, but to smite her with words like sledge-hammers.
And to judge by the look of her he had succeeded. She had turned away from him to the open window. She made no sign of suffering but for the troubled rising and falling of her breast. He saw in her a woman mortally smitten, but smitten, he imagined, in her vanity.
"Have I persuaded you," he said quietly, "to give up those Sonnets?"