‘You will not pry and peer?’
‘No one shall come near you. I will forbid everyone the hall, lest a step on the pavement should disturb you.’
‘What are you doing there?’
‘Taking away your razor, papa.’
Then he burst into a shrill, bitter laugh—a laugh that shivered through her heart. He said nothing, but remained chuckling in his chair.
‘I dare say Jasper will sharpen them for you, papa, he is very kind,’ said Barbara, ashamed of her dissimulation. So it came about that the old half-crazy squire was left in the gathering gloom entirely alone and unguarded. Nothing could do him more good than a refreshing sleep, Barbara argued, and went away to her own room, where she lit a candle, drew down her blind, and set herself to needlework.
She had done what she could. The pantry adjoined the room of her father. Jane would hear if he knocked or called. She did not know that Jane was gone.
Ignatius Jordan sat in the armchair, biting at his stick, or beating in the air with it at the blots which troubled his vision. These black spots took various shapes; sometimes they were bats, sometimes falling leaves. Then it appeared to him as if a fluid that was black but with a crimson glow in it as of a subdued hidden fire was running and dripped from ledge to ledge—invisible ledges they were—in the air before him. He put his stick out to touch the stream, and then it ran along the stick and flowed on his hand and he uttered a cry, because it burned him. He held his hand up open before him, and thought the palm was black, but with glowing red veins intersecting the blackness, and he touched the lines with the finger of his left hand.
‘The line of Venus,’ he said, ‘strong at the source, fiery and broken by that cross cut—the line of life—long, thin, twisted, tortured, nowhere smooth, and here—What is this?—the end.’
Then he looked at the index finger of his left hand, the finger that had traced the lines, and it seemed to be alight or smouldering with red fire.