"Your old flame?" he sneered. "Dead these many years."
"Dead!" I sprang to my feet and stared at him wildly; I remember that he hurriedly pushed his chair back as though to avoid me. "Dead!"
"What is there to get excited about?" he cried. "She couldn't live for ever—and besides, she treated you none too well."
"Dead!" I said again, for that thought had never occurred to me before. I had seen her always young and fresh and unchanged; the curious thing was that I seemed to see her so still, even though this other girl had grown up in her image.
"And the new Barbara—the bit of a girl that our friend Murray Olivant is so interested in—is like the old Barbara come to life again," said Jervis Fanshawe, speaking as if to himself, and with his lips set in a straight bitter line. "I hate her!—I loathe the sight of her. She stands there"—in his excitement he had risen to his feet, and had flung one thin arm above his head—"with the same devilish childish beauty her mother had—that mother that laughed at me, and sent you to rot for twenty years in a prison. I tell you, Charlie"—he dropped into his chair again and leaned across the table, staring at me with wild eyes—"I tell you that I have lain behind a hedge down in that place where she lives—so close to her that I could have risen up and seized her, and crushed the life out of her before she could cry out. Yes—and with these hands!"
"She never harmed you," I reminded him.
"No, but she lives in the image of the woman who laughed at me, and set me aside as something not to be reckoned with. And I've waited, Charlie—by God!—I've waited!"
I did not guess then what was in his mind; I did not realize that the deadly hatred of the man for the one woman he had failed to possess could pass on through all those years, and grow again, stronger for the waiting, and rise up stark and strong against the child. I had not understood that any man could live for that and that only; could wait in the snow outside my prison to seize me as an instrument ready to his hand. I did not even then understand the man.
"The Barbara who died—the Barbara I loved," I said gently—"won't you tell me about her?"
"She died at sea," he replied. "Her child had been born, and they said that the mother was not strong; that she had never been the same woman after her marriage. Perhaps she fretted after you"—this with a grin and a kick at me under the table that was meant to be facetious. "At all events, the husband was persuaded to take her on a sea voyage, and the child went with them. She fell into a sort of fever—the mother, I mean—and they had to watch her constantly, because it almost seemed that she would take her own life. Then one day her cabin was found to be empty; the ship was searched; but she was gone. A little later the husband found a note written by her; she had made up her mind to end her life, and was only watching for an opportunity to throw herself overboard. She commended the child to his care. And that was the end of her."