‘And you—oh, tell me a lie rather—tell me a lie! You!’ cried Isabel, ‘struck an old man, a defenceless man, when he was down——?’
‘Who told you that?’ he cried, sharply. And then with another flash of fury, ‘How much more evil had he done to me?’ he exclaimed, throwing himself into his chair again with great drops of moisture standing like beads upon his forehead. And there was a pause like a lull in a storm.
Then the gust rose again, menacing and sudden. ‘You think I am making a confession,’ he said, ‘but I am doing nothing of the sort. You cannot harm me. I am safe, at least from the wife of my bosom. You can’t bear witness against your husband, though you had ten thousand proofs. Thank the law for that. If all this passion were not a pretence to start with! Was there ever a woman that quarrelled with her lover for anything he could do for her sake?’
‘For my sake!’ said Isabel, with a low cry of horror.
‘Yes, for what else? for your beauty and your love? Did I know what a cold-blooded phantom you were? I swore to have you when I saw you by his side! Curse him! And I have had you. Do what you will, you can’t alter that—you are my wife now, and not his.’
‘Oh, don’t make me loathe myself more than I do,’ she cried, wildly. ‘Don’t make me more hateful than I am to myself.’
‘But it is true,’ he said, once more approaching her; ‘you are mine, and you are harmless against me. I have had my desire, and I have disarmed my enemy. And look here, Isabel, you may as well hear reason,’ he added, coming up to her and grasping her shoulder, ‘you need not think of putting it into other hands. If I did that for your sake, what do you think I should be capable of for my own?’
She looked up and their eyes met, and they gazed at each other for one awful moment—he like a tiger ready to spring—she pale and resolute as an image of death.
‘Of killing me,’ she said, never turning her eyes from him, ‘as you would kill a fly.’
‘Yes,’ he said; ‘you are right—as I would kill a fly; if you put me in danger, or threaten my life.’