The Devil

Just now, looking down at her, he had felt a sickness of loathing. He hated her for the musical note of her voice, the tragic eloquence of her eyes, and above all he hated her for her nakedness. The almost nude sprawling form seemed to symbolize the unspeakable shame of his sex. This was the disgusting female, round and smooth, white and weak, with tumbling hair and lying lips, the lewd parasite that can drag the noble male down into hell-fire. Now he looked at her with comparative indifference, and felt even pity for the broken and soiled thing that he had believed to be clean and sound.

The fusion of his thoughts was over. One thought had split away from all the rest, and every moment was becoming more definite, more logical, more full of excruciating pain. He thought now only of his enemy, of the human fiend who had destroyed Mavis and himself.

At least she had been innocent once. She was clean and good--really and truly the candid child that she had never ceased to seem to be--when that sliming, crawling reptile first got his coils about her. As he thought of the maddening reality, his imagination made pictures that printed themselves, deep and indelible, on the soft recording surfaces of his brain. Henceforth, so long as blood pumped, nerves worked, and cells and fibers held to their shape, he would see these pictures--must see them each time that chance stirred his memory of the facts for which they stood as emblems.

And with his rage against the man came more and more detestation of the crime itself. At the very beginning it had no possible excuse in honest love. There was nothing belonging to it of nature's grand instinct. It had not the inexorable brutality of primitive passion. Here was an old, or an elderly man, not driven by the force of normal, full-blooded desire, but craftily plotting, treacherously abusing his power, because he was rotten with impure whims--befouling youth and innocence just to obtain a few faint voluptuous thrills.

Then the brain-pictures flashed out with torturing clearness, and Dale saw the criminal renewing the outrage after long years. He was quite old, shaky, infirm, and yet strong enough to consummate the final act of his infinite wickedness. And Dale saw those yellow-white hands, with their nauseating blotches, their glistening blue knobs, and their jeweled rings, as they took possession again of the victim to whom they had once given freedom.

Daylight was coming fast; the flame of the candles had turned so pale that one could scarcely see it. Dale got off the bed heavily and clumsily, blew out one of the candles and carried the other to the fireplace. There he lighted the corners of the three bank-notes and watched them burning in the empty grate till nothing was left of them but black and gray powder. Then he put on his hat and moved to the door.