“You distress me, Herbert, more than words can say.”
“Give me a glass of wine. I’ve been walking--I don’t know where. A long distance; I’m dead beat.”
He drank the wine greedily. Whatever reviving effect it might otherwise have produced on him, it made no change in the threatening gloom of his manner. In a man morally weak, calamity (suffered without resisting power) breaks its way through the surface which exhibits a gentleman, and shows the naked nature which claims kindred with our ancestor the savage.
He put down the empty glass, taking no notice of his brother’s question. “Randal,” he said, “you know where Sydney is.”
“Give me her address. My mind’s in such a state I can’t remember it; write it down.”
“You won’t write it? and you won’t give it?”
“I will do neither the one nor the other. Go back to your chair; fierce looks and clinched fists don’t frighten me. Miss Westerfield is quite right in separating herself from you. And you are quite wrong in wishing to go back to her. There are my reasons. Try to understand them. And, once again, sit down.”
He spoke sternly--with his heart aching for his brother all the time. He was right. The one way is the positive way, when a man who suffers trouble is degraded by it.
The poor wretch sank under Randal’s firm voice and steady eye.
“Don’t be hard on me,” he said. “I think a man in my situation is to be pitied--especially by his brother. I’m not like you; I’m not accustomed to live alone. I’ve been accustomed to having a kind woman to talk to me, and take care of me. You don’t know what it is to be used to seeing a pretty creature, always nicely dressed, always about the room--thinking so much of you, and so little of herself--and then to be left alone as I am left, out in the dark. I haven’t got my wife; she has thrown me over, and taken my child away from me. And, now, Sydney’s taken away from me next. I’m alone. Do you hear that? Alone! Take the poker there out of the fireplace. Give me back Sydney, or knock out my brains. I haven’t courage enough to do it for myself. Oh, why did I engage that governess! I was so happy, Randal, with Catherine and little Kitty.”
He laid his head wearily on the back of his chair. Randal offered him more wine; he refused it.