Schuyler repeated, dully:
"Give me that bottle!"
It was then that Blake came to that which he had mentally intended to be a last resort. Deliberately, not in anger, but in the desperation of a strong man who plays his last card for his ultimate stake, he leaned across the table and deliberately struck Schuyler in the face. It was a hard thing to do; but there are things that so demand. Blake knew that if this time he failed to arouse whatever of latent, atrophied manhood there might be in the breast of the other, that never again, probably, would the shrivelling brain come within call. So he struck; and, following the staggering form, struck again, flat on the face, with open hand, hard, stinging blows. And with these blows he cried, tensely:
"If there's any spirit left in you, I'll arouse it. You pitiful thing that was once a man! You made in God's image? Why, there isn't a swine that wouldn't be ashamed to roll in the same gutter with you!"
With stinging words and stinging blows, he pursued the stumbling figure across the room. Schuyler fell. Blake kicked him, sending foot against body, heavily.
"Get up, you beast!" he ordered. And then, in the horror of it all—in the awful of horror of the hurt of the thing that he was doing: "Great God! Will nothing awaken you?"
Schuyler was scrambling weakly to his feet. In dulled eyes there was a little gleam—the little gleam that Blake had tried so hard, so horribly, to bring. The slobbering lip had set a little and the loose, lax jaw…. There was there the shadow of the John Schuyler that was…. Blake stepped back, gladness in his heart.
He had called him back so far. He would call him back the rest!
[Illustration]