“Wayne, Wayne, you don’t know what you are saying!”
“Yes, I know what I am saying. And I know it is blackguardly for a man like me, who has led an evil life and never done a decent thing—who has been a disgrace to his honoured father and to the city he was born in, to be talking so; and I’m only saying it to you because you have already found it out—because we’ve both got to suffer from it. Don’t imagine I’m one of those sickly asses who are always snivelling because they’re misunderstood. I’m a bad lot and everybody knows it. I’ve been understood all right enough. Fanny tried to keep me in social countenance by sticking me down the throats of the people she knows and sees in her own house; but I’m so rotten they won’t have it. The women that have to speak to me in her parlour cut me on the street. Because I was born with wild red blood in me and didn’t settle down into being a fraud like himself, father took that martyr-like tone about me with all his friends. I can hear him now mentioning me to the Brodericks and sighing softly and shaking his head dolefully to get their sympathy. You can be dead sure the Brodericks know about me; the last time I was in Boston I tore up a few trees on the common and all the papers printed our illustrious name in big red type.”
He laughed a little wildly, for he had ceased to be a lover and was a man with a grievance and in his bitterness he forgot the woman before him; and his voice rang out passionately in the room. He had clutched her hand until it hurt and she drew it away, cowering in her chair to escape the wild torrent of his words.
“Please, Wayne, no more of it! You are spoiling the afternoon! It is getting dark and we must be going home.”
He did not heed her but rang the bell and when the servant came he told him to bring whiskey, and to be quick about it. She expostulated while he was gone; she begged him not to throw away the advantage he had gained by his long abstinence; she threatened never to speak to him again if he drank a drop. The man brought a bottle and glasses, and said as he put it down, “That’s the Rosedale special, sir; you put it in yourself four years ago.”
Mrs. Craighill rose as the door closed, and made a motion as though to seize the bottle.
“Just let it alone,” he said: “I want to show you something.”
He filled the whiskey glasses full, and brimmed the water glasses with the liquor, whose odour nipped the air keenly. Then he set the bottle down and folded his arms.
“Addie, every drop of blood in me calls for that stuff; I know every sensation it would give me and three months ago I would have given my immortal soul for a spoonful; but I’m just as safe from it as though it were locked up behind steel doors. No power on earth could make me touch a drop.”
So long as he made love to her she understood; this bit of bravado disturbed and baffled her. But here at least was something that required prompt commendation, and while she had been better satisfied by the first direction of his talk, here was a zone of safety in which they might stand together in security. She rose and placed her hands on his shoulders.