Part 29 (1/2)

”Ah! You think me selfis.h.!.+” she said, catching her breath.

He sat down by her side. ”No,” he answered quietly. ”But I think you have not the least idea how much he spends himself upon you. If you had, you would be shocked.”

She moved restlessly. ”You don't understand,” she said. ”You never understand. Eustace, I wish you would go away.”

”I will go in half an hour,” he made calm rejoinder, ”if you have not moved during that time.”

”You know that is impossible;” she said.

”Very well then. I shall remain.” His jaw set itself in a fas.h.i.+on that brought it into heavy prominence.

”You will stay all night?” she questioned quickly.

”If necessary,” he answered.

Biddy had turned the lamp very low. The faint radiance shone upon him as he sat imparting a certain mysterious force to his dominant outline. He looked as immovable as an image carved in stone.

A great s.h.i.+ver went through Isabel. ”You want to see me suffer,” she said.

”You are wrong,” he returned inflexibly. ”But I would sooner see you suffer than give yourself up to a habit which is destroying you by inches. It is no kindness on Scott's part to let you do it.”

”Don't talk of Scott!” she said quickly. ”No one--no one--will ever know what he is to me--how he has helped me--while you--you have only looked on!”

Her voice quivered. She flung out a restless arm. Instantly, yet without haste, he took and held her hand. His fingers pressed the fevered wrist.

He spoke after a moment while he quelled her instinctive effort to free herself. ”I am not merely looking on to-night. I am here to help you--if you will accept my help.”

”You are here to torture me!” she flung back fiercely. ”You are here to force me down into h.e.l.l, and lock the gates upon me!”

His hold tightened upon her. He leaned slightly towards her. ”I am here to conquer you,” he said, ”if you will not conquer yourself.”

The sudden sternness of his speech, the compulsion of his look, took swift effect upon her. She cowered away from him.

”You are cruel!” she whispered. ”You always were cruel at heart--even in the days when you loved me.”

Sir Eustace's lips became a single, hard line. His whole strength was bent to the task of subduing her, and he meant it to be as brief a struggle as possible.

He said nothing whatever therefore, and so pa.s.sed his only opportunity of winning the conflict by any means save naked force.

To Isabel in her torment that night was the culmination of sorrows. For years this brother who had once been all the world to her had held aloof, never seeking to pa.s.s the barrier which her widowed love had raised between them. He had threatened many times to take the step which now at last he had taken; but always Scott had intervened, s.h.i.+elding her from the harshness which such a step inevitably involved. And by love he had never sought to prevail. Her mental weakness seemed to have made tenderness from him an impossibility. He could not bear with her. It was as though he resented in her the likeness to one beloved whom he mourned as dead.

Possibly he had never wholly forgiven her marriage--that disastrous marriage that had broken her life. Possibly her clouded brain was to him a source of suffering which drove him to hardness. He had ever been impatient of weakness, and what he deemed hysteria was wholly beyond his endurance; and the spectacle of the one being who had been so much to him crushed beneath a sorrow the very existence of which he resented was one which he had never been able to contemplate with either pity or tolerance. As he had said, he would rather see her suffering than a pa.s.sive slave to that sorrow and all that it entailed.

So during the dreadful hours that followed he held her to her inferno, convinced beyond all persuasion---with the stubborn conviction of an iron will--that by so doing he was acting for her welfare, even in a sense working out her salvation.

He relied upon the force of his personality to accomplish the end he had in view. If he could break the fatal rule of things for one night only, he believed that he would have achieved the hardest part. But the process was long and agonizing. Only by the sternest effort of will could he keep up the pressure which he knew he must not relax for a single moment if he meant to attain the victory he desired.

There came a time when Isabel's powers of endurance were lost in the abyss of mental suffering into which she was flung, and she struggled like a mad creature for freedom. He held her in his arms, feeling her strength wane with every paroxysm, till at last she lay exhausted, only feebly entreating him for the respite he would not grant.

But even when the bitter conflict was over, when she was utterly conquered at last, and he laid her down, too weak for further effort, he did not gather the fruits of victory. For her eyes remained wide and gla.s.sy, dry and sleepless with the fever that throbbed ceaselessly in the poor tortured brain behind.

She was pa.s.sive from exhaustion only, and though he closed the staring eyes, yet they opened again with tense wakefulness the moment he took his hand from the burning brow.