Page:The Breath of Scandal (1922).djvu/151

 black, harrowed fields edged by grass and bushes budding green, over which the April sun was rising; and he tried to think about what he had done.

This was, after all, a good deal what he had hoped for, though it had proved worse,—harder and more savage and brutal than he had expected; and yet he should have known that it would be. But, however revolting to him, it had to be done; there was no other way he knew, short of actually killing Russell, which would save Marjorie from the shameful shadow of blackmail as the alternative to open, published disgrace and scandal spread before all the world. There was no end to blackmail, once you started paying it; each payment, instead of clearing you, only got you deeper in the toils of the blackmailer; and to think of Marjorie paying Russell to keep silent, of him coming to her with demands which she dared not refuse—no, horrible as this had been to Gregg, he was glad he had done it.

All but exhausted as he was, yet a new exhilaration sustained him and surprised him. He had beaten up Russell so that Russell would never be the same again without thinking that he, from the inflicting of that same beating, also must change; he had roused and loosed from within him a power of passion which he had not suspected he possessed and which now he could not down; nor would down if he could.

He thought of the Gregg Mowbry of a few days ago almost as a stranger to this bruised, aching, spent man clutching to the side of the freight car; and he thought what a boy he had been when he had imagined that he could take on this fight for Marjorie and, when he had finished it, feel satisfied to have done something for her. He was never so unsatisfied in all his life as now, never