“I’ve given out a contract for that homestead,” he went on. “Well, I’m going to cancel it. Good-bye, little girl.”
“Oh, Jim, I–––”
But the man shook his head.
“Don’t you be sorry. Get all the happiness you can. Maybe Will will be a real good husband to you.”
He moved away and strode after his horse. The beast was well out on the market-place, and Eve watched him catch it and clamber into the saddle. Then she turned away with a sigh, and found herself looking into the beautiful face of her brother. He had silently crept up to her side.
“You’ve hurt him, sis; you’ve hurt him real bad. Did you see? It was all inside. Inside here;” the boy folded his delicate hands over his hollow breast. “I know it because I feel it here, too. It’s as though you’d taken right hold of a bunch of cords here, and were pulling ’em, tearing ’em, an’ someway they’re fixed right on to your heart. That’s the way you’ve hurt him, an’ it 51 hurts me, because I like him––he’s good. You don’t know what it feels when a man’s hurt. I do. It’s elegant pain. Gee!” His calm face was quite unlit by the emotion he described. “It don’t stop at your heart. It gets right through to your muscles, and they tingle and itch to do something, and they mostly want to hurt, same as you’ve been hurt. Then it gets to the head, through the blood. That’s it; the blood gets hot, and it makes the brain hot, an’ when the brain’s hot it thinks hot thoughts, an’ they scorch an’ make you feel violent. You think hurt for some one, see? It’s all over the body alike. It’s when men get hurt like that that they want to kill. Gee! You’ve hurt him.”
The boy paused a little breathlessly. His tense nerves were quivering with some sort of mental strain. It was as though he were watching something that was going on inside himself, and the effort was tremendous, physically and mentally. But, used as Eve was to his vagaries, she saw none of this. She was thinking only of Jim. Thinking of the suffering which her brother had said she had caused him. Woman-like, she felt she must excuse herself. Yet she knew she had nothing to blame herself with.
“I only told him I had promised to marry Will.”
The boy uttered a little cry. It was a strange sound, unlike anything human. He rushed at her, and his thin hands seized upon her wrists, and clutched them violently.
“You’re goin’ to marry Will? You! You! And you’ve hurt him––to marry Will?” Then, with the force of his clutch upon her wrists, he drew her down toward him till her face was near to his, and his placid 52 eyes looked coldly into hers. “You’ve––hurt––me––too,” he hissed into her face, “and I almost––hate you. No, it’s not you––but I hate Will worse’n I ever hated anything in my life.”