Hey, is it not so?"
I nodded assent as well as I could. He paused, with a pinch between
finger and thumb, to nod back to me. Though his eyes were now
blazing with madness, his demeanour was formally, even affectedly,
polite.
"My wife never came back: naturally, sir--for she was dead."
He shifted a little on the boulders, slipped the snuff-box back into
his waistcoat pocket, then crossing his legs and clasping his hands
over one knee, bent forward and regarded me fixedly.
"I murdered her," he said slowly, and nodded.
A pause followed that seemed to last an hour. The stone which he had
strapped in my mouth with his bandanna was giving me acute pain; it
obstructed, too, what little breathing my emotion left me; and I
dared not take my eyes off his. The strain on my nerves grew so
tense that I felt myself fainting when his voice recalled me.
"I wonder now," he asked, as if it were a riddle--"I wonder if you
can guess why the body was never found?"
Again there was an intolerable silence before he went on.
"Lydia was a dear creature: in many respects she made me an admirable
wife. Her affection for me was canine--positively. But she was fat,
sir; her face a jelly, her shoulders mountainous. Moreover, her
voice!--it was my cruciation--monotonously, regularly, desperately
voluble. If she talked of archangels, they became insignificant--and
her themes, in ordinary, were of the pettiest.
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