The old dogged ferocity gathered over her countenance, chasing away the softened perplexed radiance that had been newly wakened there.
"I say nothing," she answered.
"Nothing! nothing!" he echoed after her. "Then we will find a way to make thee speak. Nothing!—when three of the clock should have seen thee back hither at latest, and five hours since then have gone by without account. You have spent it in brawling and pleasure—in shame and iniquity—in vice and in violence, thou creature of sin!"
"Since you know, why ask?"
She spoke with steady contemptuous calm. She disdained to seek refuge from his fury by pleading the injuries that the townsfolk had wrought her; and of the house by the river she would not have spoken though they had killed her. The storm of his words raged on uninterrupted.
"Five hours, five mortal hours, stolen from me, your lawful work left undone that you may riot in some secret abomination that you dare not to name. Say, where you have been, what you have done, you spawn of hell, or I will wring your throat as I wring a sparrow's!"
"I have done as I chose."
She looked him full in the eyes as she spoke, with the look in her own that a bull's have when he lowers his head to the charge and attack.
"As you choose! Oh-ho! You would speak as queens speak—you!—a thing less than the worm and the emmet. As you choose—you!—who have not a rag on your back, not a crust of rye bread, not a leaf of salad to eat, not a lock of hay for your bed, that is not mine—mine—mine. As you choose. You!—you thing begotten in infamy; you slave; you beggar; you sloth! You are nothing—nothing—less than the blind worm that crawls in the sand. You have the devil that bred you in you, no doubt; but it shall go hard if I cannot conquer him when I bruise your body and break your will."
As he spoke he seized, to strike, her; in his hand he already gripped an oak stick that he had brought in with him from his timber-yard, and he raised it to rain blows on her, expecting no other course than that dumb, passive, scornful submission with which she had hitherto accepted whatsoever he had chosen to do against her.