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She couldn't do the thing he demanded of her here out in the middle of the floor, in her street clothes, without the excuse of music to make it tolerable and before that row of leering faces. "Well?" he asked, turning to her as he finished. He wasn't smiling at all. "I'm not dressed to do that," she said. "I know you're not," he admitted coolly, "but it can be done.
She had kept it out. She had refused to know that it was there. She had been happy in spite of it. But now, when its time was fully come, it made small work of her frail barriers. It blundered in, leering and triumphant. Men have been mistaken before now. Men have turned aside in the very moment of victory. And Benis Spence was not a man who would beg or importune.
Her face seemed plain at first, just as her stature seemed small. She was dark, but not so dark as she appeared on the stage, and her face was thinner, a little careworn, it seemed to him; and her eyes "those leering, wicked eyes" were large and deep and soft. Her figure was firm, compact, womanly, and modest in every line.
The frontal bones of the skull were shattered and twisted by the force of the charge; they gave the rest of the face a ghastly, leering look which turned Bradby physically sick. The other man was evidently troubled by no such qualms, for he loosened the gun from the bony hand that had clung to it so desperately through all those years, and tumbled the skeleton itself on to the plank bed.
He greeted them with his polite but constitutionally leering smile. "Good-evening, mith," he said; "nithe evening!" "He's rather an awful little man," the grey girl said when they had achieved the crossing of the street; "but he's got quite a nice sense of humour." "Ah!" said Thyme. They had turned into a by-street, and stopped before a house which had obviously seen better days.
Only, you see, I myself should never have thought that so extreme a follower of the exploded old doctrine of noblesse oblige, as Sir Philip Bruce-Errington, would have started on such a new line of action at all. But, of course, we are all mortal!" And he shook his round thick head with leering sagacity. "Well!" he continued after a pause. "This shall go in without fail next week, I promise you."
What troubled her was her own apathetic acceptance of it all. Just as her ear seemed to have grown dull to the offenses that nightly were committed against it on the stage, and to the leering response, which was all they ever got from across the footlights, so her spirit submitted tamely to the prospect of failure.
That face that had for all these months been haunting him, at last he had banished it, and with it had gone those other leering faces that had for so long kept him company. His room was dark, and it was always in the dark that they came to him Hogg's, the drunken painter's, that old woman's in the dirty dress. And to-day they did not come. If they came he would treat them as he had treated Hogg.
Moonlight tipped its heavy edges with a pale spectral gleam; and as it swiftly rose higher and higher into the sky, blotting out the stars, it seemed to dominate the entire expanse, hovering over us menacingly, and assuming the shape of some gigantic monster, with leering face and cruel mouth, bending forward as if to smite us with huge uplifted hand.
The deep, rich shadows, the throne, the tiger skin, the sandaled feet of the remorseful king resting on the great fanged and leering head, the eyes of the king looking hungrily out from under his forbidding brows, the cruel lips pressed tightly together, and the lithe, thin hands grasping the carved arms of the throne in fierce restraint, all this in the deep shadows between the majestic carved columns, their bases concealed by the rich carpet covering the dais and their tops lost in the brooding darkness above the lowering darkness of purple gloom that only served to reveal the sinister outlines of the somber, sorrowful, suffering king, while he indulged the one pure passion left him listening gazing from the shadows out into the light, seeing nothing, only listening.
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