"I speak to him?" she cried. "I couldn't!"
"But it'll be you'll have to!" he replied roughly. "Wasn't it so arranged?"
"I couldn't," she replied, in the same tone of trouble. "Some one else—if you like!"
"But it's not some one else will do," James retorted.
"But why should I be the one—to go?" she wailed. She had Colonel John's face before her, haggard, sunken, famished, as, peering into the gloomy, firelit room, she had seen it that afternoon, ay, and as she had seen it later against the darkness of her bedroom. "Why should I," she repeated, "be the one to go?"
"For a very good reason," her brother retorted with a sneer. And he looked at Asgill and laughed.
That look, which she saw, and the laugh which went with it, startled her as a flash of light startles a traveller groping through darkness. "Why?" she repeated in a different tone. "Why?"
But neither her tone nor Asgill's warning glance put James McMurrough on his guard; he was in one of his brutal humours. "Why?" he replied. "Because he's a silly fool, as I'm thinking some others are, and has a fancy for you, Flavvy! Faith, you're not blind!"—he continued, forgetting that he had only learned the fact from Asgill a few days before, and that it was news to the younger men—"and know it, I'll be sworn, as well as I do! Any way, I've a notion that if you let him see that there is no one in the house wishes him worse than you, or would see him starve, the stupid fool, with a lighter heart—I'm thinking it will be for bringing him down, if anything will!"
She did not answer. And outwardly she was not much moved. But inwardly, the horror of herself and her part in the matter, which she had felt as she lay upstairs in the darkness, thinking of the starving man, whelmed up and choked her. They were using her for this! They were using her because the man—loved her! Because hard words, cruel treatment, brutality from her would be ten times more hard, more cruel, more brutal than from others! Because such treatment at her hands would be more likely to break his spirit and crush his heart! To what viler use, to what lower end could a woman be used, or human feeling be prostituted?
Nor was this all. On the tide of this loathing of herself rose another, a newer and a stranger feeling. The man loved her. She did not doubt the statement. Its truth came home to her at once, although, occupied with other views of him, she had never suspected the fact. And because it placed him in a different light, because it placed him in a light in which she had never viewed him before, because it recalled a hundred things, acts, words on his part which she had barely noted at the time, but which now took on another aspect, it showed him, too, as one whom she had never seen. Had he been free at this moment, prosperous, triumphant, the knowledge that he loved her, that he, her enemy, loved her, might have revolted her—she might have hated him the more for it. But now that he lay a prisoner, famished, starving, the fact that he loved her touched her heart, transfixed her with an almost poignant feeling, choked her with a rising flood of pity and self-reproach.