Page:Walpole--portrait of man with red hair.djvu/233

 body but his father. His father mocked him, despised him, scorned him, but he didn't care. He follows his father like a dog. At first you know I thought I could make a job of it, carrying it through. And then I began to understand.

"First one little thing, then another. The elder Crispin was always talking, floods of it. He was always looking at me and smiling at me. After two days in the house with him I hated him as I hadn't known I could hate any one. When he touched me I trembled all over. It became a kind of duel between us. He was always talking nonsense about making me love him through pain—and his eyes never said what his mouth said. They were like the eyes of another person caught there by mistake.

"Then one day I came into the library upstairs and found him with a dog. A little fox-terrier. He had tied it to the leg of the table and was flicking it with a whip. He would give it a flick, then stand back and look at it, then give it another flick. The awful thing was that the dog was too frightened to howl, too terrified to know that it was being hurt at all. He was smiling, watching the dog very carefully, but his eyes were sad and unhappy. After that there were many signs. I knew then two things, that he was raving crazy mad and that I was a prisoner in that house. They watched me night and day. I had no money. My only hope