Christopher would have liked to kill that man.  He shivered and licked his lips.  He would have liked to do something bloody and abominable to that face with the hollow cheeks, the sunken grey eyes, and the forehead, high, sallow, and moist.  He would have liked to take an ax in his hand and run along the thundering beach and catch that face in a corner somewhere between cliff and water.  The desire to do this thing possessed him and blinded him like the kiss of lightning.

He found himself on the floor at the edge of the moonlight, full of weakness and nausea.  He felt himself weeping as he crawled back to the bed, his cheeks and neck bathed in a flood of painless tears.  He threw himself down, dazed with exhaustion.

It seemed to him that his mother had been calling a long while.  “Christopher!  What is it?  What is it, boy?”

He had heard no footsteps, going or coming; she must have been there all the time, waiting, listening, her ear pressed to the thick, old paneling of the door.  The thought was like wine; the torment of her whispering was sweet in his ears.

“Oh, Chris, Chris!  You’re making yourself sick!”

“Yes,” he said.  He lifted on an elbow and repeated in a voice which must have sounded strange enough to the listener beyond the door.  “Yes!” he said.  “Yes!”

“Go away!” he cried of a sudden, making a wide, dim, imperious gesture in the dark.

“No, no,” the imploring whisper crept in.  “You’re making yourself sick—­Christopher—­all over nothing—­nothing in the world.  It’s so foolish—­so foolish—­foolish!  Oh, if I could only tell you, Christopher—­if I could tell you—­”

“Tell me what?” He shuddered with the ecstasy of his own irony.  “Who that man is?  That ‘caretaker’?  What he’s doing here?  What you’re doing here?—­” He began to scream in a high, brittle voice:  “Go away from that door!  Go away!”

This time she obeyed.  He heard her retreating, soft-footed and frightened, along the hall.  She was abandoning him—­without so much as trying the door, just once again, to see if it were still bolted against her.

She did not care.  She was sneaking off—­down the stairs—­Oh, yes, he knew where.

His lips began to twitch again and his finger nails scratched on the bedclothes.  If only he had something, some weapon, an axe, a broad, keen, glittering axe!  He would show them!  He was strong, incredibly strong!  Five men could not have turned him back from what he was going to do—­if only he had something.

His hand, creeping, groping, closed on the neck of the ’cello leaning by the bed.  He laughed.

Oh, yes, he would stop her from going down there; he would hold her, just where she was on the dark stair nerveless, breathless, as long as he liked, if he liked he would bring her back, cringing, begging.

He drew the bow, and laughed higher and louder yet to hear the booming discord rocking in upon him from the shadows.  Swaying from side to side, he lashed the hollow creature to madness.  They came in the press of the gale, marching, marching, the wild, dark pageant of his fathers, nearer and nearer through the moon-struck night.