Chapter XXXV. The Tidal Wave - Page 2

sneered at such women--taking it for granted that each was merchandise of his or her kind and beneath contempt. I am not a foul-mouthed man, but I have used gross words and rough ones to describe them."

"I have heard you."

Mount Dunstan threw back his head with a big, harsh laugh. He came out of the shadow and stood still.

"Well," he said, "I am in love--as much in love as any lunatic ever was--with the daughter of Reuben S. Vanderpoel. There you are--and there I am!"

"It has seemed to me," Penzance answered, "that it was almost inevitable."

"My condition is such that it seems to me that it would be inevitable in the case of any man. When I see another man look at her my blood races through my veins with an awful fear and a wicked heat. That will show you the point I have reached." He walked over to the mantelpiece and laid his pipe down with a hand Penzance saw was unsteady. "In turning over the pages of the volume of Life," he said, "I have come upon the Book of Revelations."

"That is true," Penzance said.

"Until one has come upon it one is an inchoate fool," Mount Dunstan went on. "And afterwards one is--for a time at least--a sort of madman raving to one's self, either in or out of a straitjacket--as the case may be. I am wearing the jacket --worse luck! Do you know anything of the state of a man who cannot utter the most ordinary words to a woman without being conscious that he is making mad love to her? This afternoon I found myself telling Miss Vanderpoel the story of Red Godwyn and Alys of the Sea-Blue Eyes. I did not make a single statement having any connection with myself, but throughout I was calling on her to think of herself and of me as of those two. I saw her in my own arms, with the tears of Alys on her lashes. I was making mad love, though she was unconscious of my doing it."

"How do you know she was unconscious?" remarked Mr. Penzance. "You are a very strong man."

Mount Dunstan's short laugh was even a little awful, because it meant so much. He let his forehead drop a moment on to his arms as they rested on the mantelpiece.

"Oh, my God!" he said. But the next instant his head lifted itself. "It is the mystery of the world--this thing. A tidal wave gathering itself mountain high and crashing down upon one's helplessness might be as easily defied. It is supposed to disperse, I believe. That has been said so often that there must be truth in it. In twenty or thirty or forty years one is told one will have got over it. But one must live through the years--one must live through them--and the chief feature of one's madness is that one is convinced that they will last forever."

"Go on," said Mr. Penzance, because he had paused and stood biting his lip.