He would sell it. Sell! That was just what he could never do. But if only he could; if only he might buy himself back.
Sell! He imagined the joy of the buyer—a collector, of course. What pure, undiluted ecstasy he would get out of it—that man who paid with gold and not with his own helpless flesh! No; he could never sell it. Beautiful, devilish, compelling thing! It must stay with him until the end.
He opened the door and smelt the smell—the clinging aroma which had always tantalized and piqued him. He traced with his finger the rude hinges of hammered iron. His face quivered in every muscle with varied emotions. How he loved this thing! How he hated and feared it! What moments of joy it had afforded him! What a fearful league it had lured him into making!
A terrible struggle was passing over him. His freakish brain had suggested a new extravagance. He was possessed with a desire to do this strange, this futile and dastardly act. He lifted his head and looked at the cabinet as he would have looked into human eyes—a long, wistful look; a look embodying a whole gamut of emotions. Then he crossed the room, stooped down to a box in one corner, and came back with a hammer.
“It will hurt you,” he said foolishly, the hammer already uplifted, his eyes drinking in the delicacy of that wonderful thing which had traveled down the past ages and drifted to him and been his tempter, “but not as it hurts me.”
He struck. All night he worked with the hammer, with every tool he had that could help him. He began to break it up, to hack it asunder—his cabinet. He threw it on the fire bit by bit. It blazed and crackled, this old dry wood. The splutter and crackle went to his heart. He thought they were agonized protests. He believed that it suffered as it died. In his long morbid communion with it he had grown to believe it human and something more.
It took him days and nights to kill the cabinet. It was so stoutly built. When he was exhausted he crept to bed, not forgetting to lock the door on that scene of strange disorder. But at last it was done. The wall behind was bare and dirty, festooned with cobwebs. On the floor was dust and chips and splinters. The fire burned with the glowing heat of a sacrificial fire.
Already he was calmer. Although he still belonged to Harrowsmith, although he had madly destroyed the one thing that might have redeemed him, although his days would now hold bitter moments, he was at peace.
He watched it burn. He saw the wondrous handicraft of cunning dead men disappear line by line, and turn to ash.
He was sitting so when his laundress came in at the widely flung door. It was the first time for days that she had been permitted to enter the sitting room. He nervously expected her to exclaim, to inquire. The blank wall was so obvious. The little room was hot like an oven, but she only flung her hands and cried out: