I haf seen it in mans before.It is she who eats you op--your evil thinkings of her.It serve you right.Your eyes look mad."He himself, at times, suspected that they did, and cursed himself because he could not keep cool.It was part of his horrors that he knew his internal furies were worse than folly, and yet he could not restrain them.The creeping suspicion that this was only the result of the simple fact that he had never tried to restrain any tendency of his own was maddening.His nervous system was a wreck.He drank a great deal of whisky to keep himself "straight" during the day, and he rose many times during his black waking hours in the night to drink more because he obstinately refused to give up the hope that, if he drank enough, it would make him sleep.
As through the thoughts of Mount Dunstan, who was a clean and healthy human being, there ran one thread which would not disentangle itself, so there ran through his unwholesome thinking a thread which burned like fire.His secret ravings would not have been good to hear.His passion was more than half hatred, and a desire for vengeance, for the chance to re-assert his own power, to prove himself master, to get the better in one way or another of this arrogant young outsider and her high-handed pride.The condition of his mind was so far from normal that he failed to see that the things he said to himself, the plans he laid, were grotesque in their folly.The old cruel dominance of the man over the woman thing, which had seemed the mere natural working of the law among men of his race in centuries past, was awake in him, amid the limitations of modern days.
"My God," he said to himself more than once, "I would like to have had her in my hands a few hundred years ago.
Women were kept in their places, then."
He was even frenzied enough to think over what he would have done, if such a thing had been--of her utter helplessness against that which raged in him--of the grey thickness of the walls where he might have held and wrought his will upon her--insult, torment, death.His alcohol-excited brain ran riot--but, when it did its foolish worst, he was baffled by one thing.
"Damn her!" he found himself crying out."If I had hung her up and cut her into strips she would have died staring at me with her big eyes--without uttering a sound."There was a long reach between his imaginings and the time he lived in.America had not been discovered in those decent days, and now a man could not beat even his own wife, or spend her money, without being meddled with by fools.He was thinking of a New York young woman of the nineteenth century who could actually do as she hanged pleased, and who pleased to be damned high and mighty.For that reason in itself it was incumbent upon a man to get even with her in one way or another.High and mightiness was not the hardest thing to reach.It offered a good aim.
His temper when he returned to Stornham was of the order which in past years had set Rosalie and her child shuddering and had sent the servants about the house with pale or sullen faces.Betty's presence had the odd effect of restraining him, and he even told her so with sneering resentment.
"There would be the devil to pay if you were not here," he said."You keep me in order, by Jove! I can't work up steam properly when you watch me."He himself knew that it was likely that some change would take place.She would not stay at Stornham and she would not leave his wife and child alone with him again.It would be like her to hold her tongue until she was ready with her infernal plans and could spring them on him.Her letters to her father had probably prepared him for such action as such a man would be likely to take.He could guess what it would be.They were free and easy enough in America in their dealings with the marriage tie.Their idea would doubtless be a divorce with custody of the child.He wondered a little that they had remained quiet so long.There had been American shrewdness in her coming boldly to Stornham to look over the ground herself and actually set the place in order.It did not present itself to his mind that what she had done had been no part of a scheme, but the mere result of her temperament and training.He told himself that it had been planned beforehand and carried out in hard-headed commercial American fashion as a matter of business.The thing which most enraged him was the implied cool, practical realisation of the fact that he, as inheritor of an entailed estate, was but owner in charge, and not young enough to be regarded as an insurmountable obstacle to their plans.He could not undo the greater part of what had been done, and they were calculating, he argued, that his would not be likely to be a long life, and if --if anything happened--Stornham would be Ughtred's and the whole vulgar lot of them would come over and take possession and swagger about the place as if they had been born on it.As to divorce or separation--if they took that line, he would at least give them a good run for their money.They would wish they had let sleeping dogs lie before the thing was over.