After those four last words, he listened for no more. The merciless spirit was roused in him again the moment he heard them.
“Spare you the disgrace?” he repeated, starting to his feet. “Did you spare her?—Not you!”
Once more the hands dropped; once more the ghastly face slowly and horribly confronted him. But this time he never recoiled from it. There was no mercy in him—none in his looks, none in his tones—as he went on.
“What! it would disgrace you, would it? Then disgraced you shall be! You’ve kep’ it a secret, have you? You shall tell that secret to every soul that comes about the house! You shall own Mary’s disgrace, Mary’s death, and Mary’s child before every man who’s put his name down on that bit of paper!—You shall, as soon as to-morrow if I like! You shall, if I have to bring your child with me to make you; if I have to stand up, hand in hand along with her, here on your own hearthstone.”
He stopped. The cowering figure was struggling upward from the chair: one of the withered hands, slowly raised, was stretching itself out towards him; the panic-stricken eyes were growing less vacant, and were staring straight into his with a fearful meaning in their look; the pale lips were muttering rapidly—at first he could not tell what; then he succeeded in catching the two words, “Mary’s child?” quickly, faintly, incessantly reiterated, until he spoke again,
“Yes,” he said, pitiless as ever. “Yes: Mary’s child. Your child. Haven’t you seen her? Is it that you’re staring and trembling about? Go and look at her: she lives within gunshot of you. Ask Zack’s friend, the Painter-Man, to show you the deaf and dumb girl he picked up among the horse-riders. Look here—look at this bracelet! Do you remember your own hair in it? The hands that brought up Mary’s child, took that bracelet from Mary’s pocket. Look at it again! Look at it as close as you like—”
Once more he stopped. The frail figure which had been feebly rising out of the chair, while he held up the Hair Bracelet, suddenly and heavily sank back in it—he saw the eyelids half close, and a great stillness pass over the face—he heard one deep-drawn breath: but no cry now, no moaning, no murmuring—no sound whatever, except the steady splash of the fast-falling rain on the pavement outside.
Dead?
A thought of Zack welled up into his heart, and troubled it.
He hesitated for a moment, then bent over the chair, and put his hand on the bosom of the deathly figure reclining in it. A faint fluttering was still to be felt; and the pulse, when he tried that next, was beating feebly. It was not death he looked on now, but the swoon that is near neighbor to it.