Sheppard stamped a furious foot. He was getting up his fury; and suddenly she saw that he had been drinking. The knowledge came upon her in a flash of understanding, and with it a disgust so complete that it overwhelmed every other consideration.
She pointed to the door. "Go!" she said, in tense, frozen accents. "Go at once! How dare you come in here in this state?"
Before her withering disdain he drew back, as it were involuntarily. He even half turned to obey. Then, suddenly some devil prompted him, and he swung back again. With one gigantic stride he reached the sofa; and before either brother or sister knew what he intended to do he had roughly seized upon the boy’s slight body and lifted it in his great arms.
Bunny’s agonized outcry at the action mingled with his sister’s, but it ceased almost immediately. He collapsed in the giant grip like an empty sack, and Sheppard, now wrought to a blind fury that had no thought for consequences, carried him from the room and along the passage to the stairs, utterly unheeding the fact that he had fainted.
Maud, nearly beside herself, went with him, striving to support the limp body where long experience had taught her support was needed. They went up the stairs so, flight after flight, Sheppard savage and stubborn, the girl in a dumb agony of anxiety, seeking only to relieve the dreadful strain that had bereft Bunny of his senses.
They reached at length a room at the top of the house, a bare garret of a place with sloping ceiling and uncarpeted floor. There was a bed under the skylight, and on this the man deposited his burden.
Then he turned and looked at Maud with eyes of cruel malevolence. "This is good enough for you and yours," he said.
Over Bunny’s body she flung her fruitless defiance. "You drunken brute!" she said. "You loathsome coward! You hateful, tipsy bully!"
The words pierced him like the stabs of a dagger too swift to evade. He was sober enough to be cowed.
From the door he looked back at her, where she stood at the bedside, upright, quivering, a dart-like creature full of menace despite her delicacy of form and fibre. Again he knew himself to be at a disadvantage. He had not drunk enough to be intrepid. Swearing and malignant, he withdrew like a savage beast. But as he went, the madness of hatred rose in a swirl to his brain. She had defied him, had she? Her bitter words rang again and again in his ears. She had proclaimed him a drunkard, a coward, a bully! And she thought he would put up with it. Did she? Did she? Thought she could insult him with impunity in his own house! Thought he would tamely endure her impertinences for all time! He ground his teeth as he went down to the bar. He would have a reckoning with her presently. Yes, there should be a reckoning. He had borne with her too long--too long! Now matters had come to a head. She would either have to humble herself or go.