"With, with—" but Van Maeren hesitated in abject fear, for Westhove had collared him by the waistcoat, as he groveled on the floor, and shook him again and again.
"By thunder, you villain, you bribed him with my money—-with my own money! Tell me— speak, or I'll kick it out of you!"
"Yes."
"With my money?"
"Yes, yes, yes." Frank flung him down with a yell of contempt, of loathing of such a thing as he.
But Van Maeren was experiencing a reaction from his self-abasement. The world was so stupid, men were stupid, Frank was stupid. He did not understand that a man should be such as he, Bertie, was; he could not understand; he bellowed out in his brutal rage, like some wild beast without brains or sense. He, himself, had brains; happier was he who had none; he envied Frank his lack of them!
He sprang up with one leap.
"Yes, if you will have it! Yes, yes, yes!" he hissed it hard. "If you don’t understand, if you are too idiotic to take it in— Yes, I say! Yes, yes, yes! I bribed him with your money, that you were so kind as to give me the very last day when we were leaving London. You gave me a hundred pounds, to pay William—do you remember? To pay William!— You do not understand? Well— you don't understand! You are a stupid brute without brains. Ay, and I envy you for having none. There was a time when I had none; and do you know how I came by them? Why, through you. There was a time when I toiled and worked, and never thought and never cared. I ate all I earned, and when I earned nothing I went hungry. And I was happy! It was you—you who fed me on dainties, and gave me w4ne to drink; and it was you who clothed me, so that I had not to work, but had nothing to do but to think, think, in my contemptible idleness all day long. And now I only wish I could crack my skull open and throw my brains in your face for having made me what I am, so finikin and full of ideas! You don't understand? Then perhaps you will not understand that at this moment I feel no gratitude for all you have done for me—that I hate you for it all, that I despise you, and that you have made my life infinitely more wretched than I have made yours! Do you understand that much, at any rate, eh? That I despise you and hate you, hate you?"
He had entrenched himself behind a table, sputtering out this volley of words in a paroxysm of nervous excitement; he felt as though every fibre of his frame was ready to crack like an overstrained cord. He had got behind the table, because Westhove was standing before him, at the other side now, his eyes staringly white and bloodshot in his purple face; his nostrils dilated, his shoulders up, his fists clenched, ready, as it seemed, to spring upon him. Westhove was waiting, as it appeared, till Van Maeren had spit out in his face all the foul words he could find.
"Yes, I hate you!" Bertie repeated, "I hate you!" He could find nothing else to say.
Then Frank let himself go. With a bellow like a wild beast, a sound that had nothing human in it, he sprang over the table, which tilted on its side, and came down with all the weight of his impetus on Bertie, who fell under him like a reed. He seized his foe by the throat, dragged him over the legs of the table, into the middle of the room, dropped him with a crack on the floor, and fell upon him, with his bony, square knee on Bertie's chest, and his left hand holding his neck like a vise. And a hard, dry feeling, like a thirst for sheer brutality, rose to Westhove's throat; with a dreadful smile on his lips he swallowed two or three times, fiendishly glad that he had him in his power, in the clutch of his left hand, under his knee. And he doubled his right fist and raised it like a hammer, with a tigerish roar.
"There, there, there!" he growled; and each time a sledge-hammer blow fell on Bertie. "There, there, there!"—on his nose, his eyes, his mouth, his forehead—and the blows resounded dully on his skull, as if on metal. A red mist clouded Westhove's sight; everything was red—purple, scarlet, vermilion. A blood-stained medley circled round him like whirling wheels, and through that strange crimson halo a distorted face grinned up at him under the pounding of his fist. The corners of the room swam in red, as if they were full of tangible red terror, whirling, whirling round him—a purple dizziness, a scarlet madness, a nightmare bathed in blood; and his blows fell fast and steadily—"there!—there!—there!"—and his left hand closed tighter on the delicate white throat below that face—
The door flew open, and she, Eva, rushed up to him through the red mist, parting it, dispelling it by the swift actuality of her appearance.
"Frank, Frank!" she screamed. "Stop, I entreat you! Stop! You are murdering him!"
He let his arm drop, and looked at her as in a dream. She tried to drag him back, to get him away from the battered body, to which he clung in his fury like a vampire.
"Leave him, Frank, I beseech you; let him stand up. Do not kill him. I was outside, and I was frightened.
