Chapter XIII: Book IV: I (2)

One morning she awoke about four o’clock,—that is, her mind awoke; her body was still too full of sleep to move to the right or left. It was one of her favourite sensations, and she lay for a time meditating upon the various pleasures, great and small, which are part of man’s inheritance.

Suddenly she became conscious that it was raining. She had moved into a back room on the second floor. Beside one window was a tin roof upon which the rain poured with heavy reiterance. In the back yard was a large ailanthus tree which lifted itself past her windows to the floor above. A light wind rustled it. The rain pattered monotonously upon its wide leaves, producing a certain sweet volume of sound.

It was long since she had listened to rain in the night. It was associated in her mind with the vague sweet dreams of girlhood and with her life in Carmel Valley. She had loved to wander through the pine woods when the winter rains were beating through the uplifted arms, swirling and splashing in the dark fragrant depths. It said something to her then, she hardly knew what, nor when it roared upon the roof of the old farmhouse, or flung itself through the windows of Carmel tower, as she and Solomon huddled close to the wall.

But when it had beaten upon the roof of her little room in Miss Tremont’s house it had sung the loneliness of youth into her soul, murmured of the great joy to which every woman looks forward as her birthright. Hard worked and absorbed as she may have been during the day, if the rain awoke her in the night, it was to dreams of love and of nothing else, and of the time when she should no longer be alone.

This morning she listened to the rain for a time, then moved suddenly to her side, her eyes opening more widely in the dark. The rain said nothing to her. She listened to it without a thrill, with no longing, with no loneliness of soul, and no vague tremor of passion.

Nothing in her unhappy experience had so forcibly brought home to her the changes which her inner self had undergone in the last few years. Life was a hard clear-cut fact; she could no longer dream. Imagination had taken itself out of her and gone elsewhere, into some brain whose dear privilege it was to have a long future and a brief past.

The tears scalded her eyes. She cursed Beverly Peele. She wished she had remained in Monterey. There, at least, she would never have married any one, for there was no one to marry.

“Even if my life had been a success,” she thought, “if Beverly Peele had been less objectionable, or had died, and I had had the world at my feet, it would be too high a price to pay. Not even to care that one is alone when the rain is sweeping about with that hollow song! To think and dream of nothing beyond the moment! To have accepted life with cynical philosophy, and feel no desire to shake the Universe with a great passion! To be beyond the spell of the rain is to be a thousand years old, and a thousand centuries away from the cosmic sense. I wish I were dead.”

And there were other moods. Sometimes the devil which is an integral part of all strong natures—of woman’s as well as of man’s, and no matter what her creed—awoke and clamoured. There were four or five men in the office whom she liked well enough when absent, and in whom the lightning of her glance would have changed friendship to passion. Why she resisted the temptation which so fiercely assailed her at times she never knew. Conventions did not exist for her impatient mind excepting in so far as they made life more comfortable; she had in full measure youth’s power to know and to give joy, and she owed no one loyalty. And at this time she imaged no future: she had lost faith in ideals. It was only at brief intervals that there came a sudden passionate desire—almost a flash of prophetic insight—for the one man who must exist for her among the millions of men. And this, if anything, took the place of her lost ideals and conquered the primal impulses of her nature. Or was it a mere matter of destiny? Woman is a strange and complex instrument. She is as she was made, and it is not well to condemn her even after elaborate analysis.

X

One morning in May, Hal came in before Patience was out of bed. She sat down on a chair and tapped the floor with her foot.

“I come charged with a message, a special mission, as it were,” she said. “I hardly know where to begin.”

“Well?”

“Don’t look at me like that, or I’ll never have the courage to go on. Bev is desperately ill,—not in bed, but he has the most frightful pains: his disease, which has been threatening for a year, has developed. It may or may not be fatal. The doctor says it certainly will be unless he has peace of mind, and he is fretting after you like a big baby. The grippe seems to have broken the back of his temper, and he is simply a great calf bleating for its parent. It would be ridiculous if it were not serious. You’d better come back to us, Patience.”

“I won’t.”

“I knew you would say exactly that; but when you think it over you will come. Remember that the doctor practically says that you can either save or prolong his life. Mamma is simply distracted. You know she adores Bev, and she broke down completely last night and told me to come and beg you to return. You know what that means: you’ll have nothing to fear from her.”

“Oh, I can’t go back! I can’t! I think I should die if I went back.”

“We don’t die so easily, my dear. Now, I’ll go and let you think it over,” and the diplomat kissed Patience and retired.

Patience endeavoured to put the matter out of her mind, but it harassed her through her day’s duties, and her work was bad. Steele told her as much the next afternoon when she came into the office late, intending to write there instead of at home. Her room was haunted by Beverly’s pallid face and sunken eyes.

“Oh, well,” she said, flinging herself down before a table, “perhaps it’s the last, so it doesn’t matter.”

“Why? What do you mean? You do look pale. Are you ill?”

Patience hesitated a moment, then told him of the complication. He listened, without comment, looking down upon the skurrying throngs.

“I suppose I must go,” she said in conclusion. “Anyway I feel that I shall go, whether I want to or not.”

He came over to the table and regarded her with his preternatural seriousness.

“Yes,” he said, “you will go. It will be like you.”

“Oh, I am no angel. It’s not that—please! It’s—don’t you know there are some good acts you can’t help? Not only do traditions and conventions drive you into them, but your own selfishness—I haven’t the courage to be lashed by my conscience. If I could give that morphine, do you think I’d go?”

He smiled. “Do you analyse everything like that? However, I choose to keep to my illusions. I think that you have magnificent theories, but act very much like other people. Can I go up and see you sometimes? I may have a chance to know you, now.”

She put up her hand and took his impulsively. “Yes, come,” she said. “That is the only thing that will make life supportable.”

XI

She went home and wrote the following letter to Beverly Peele:—

“I will return to Peele Manor and remain while you are seriously
ill, under the following conditions: (1) That you pay me what
you would be obliged to pay a trained nurse; (2) That you will
treat me on that basis absolutely. My feeling toward you has
undergone no change. I am not your wife. But as your physician
holds me responsible for your life, I will be your nurse on the
terms stated above.”

The next day she received this telegram:—

Come. Terms agreed to.

BEVERLY PEELE.

She was received by the various members of the household with infinite tact. Mrs. Peele’s cold blue eyes sheltered an angry spark, but she behaved to her errant daughter-in-law exactly as if matrimonial vacations were orthodox and inevitable. Honora kissed her sweetly, and asked her if the roses were not beautiful. When Mr. Peele came home he said, “Ah, good-evening.” Beverly, who had evidently been coached, did not offer to kiss her, but immediately explained every detail of his disease. Hal and her husband were in the North Carolina mountains.

Beverly was not a good actor, and his eyes followed his wife with kaleidoscopic expression. She frequently encountered hungry admiration and angry resentment; and if he had made up his mind to abide by her decree he as clearly evidenced that he considered her his salaried property: he demanded her constant attendance. He looked so wan and hopeless that Patience was moved to pity, and even to tenderness, and devoted herself to his care.

For the first two weeks she felt hourly as if she must pack her trunk and flit back to the “Day.” She longed for a very glimpse of the grimy men in the composing-room, and felt that the sight of Morgan Steele in his shirt sleeves would give more spiritual satisfaction than the green and grey of the Palisades.

The life at Peele Manor seemed doubly flat after her emancipation. At the breakfast table, Mrs. Peele and Honora discussed their small interests. At luncheon, Beverly—who arose late—gave the details of his night. At dinner there was little conversation of any sort. The mornings, and the afternoons from four to six—when Beverly drove with his mother and Honora—were Patience’s own. Although discontented, she was by no means unhappy: she was out of bondage forever. If Beverly grew better she could return to the “Day” after a reasonable time had elapsed.

She spent most of her leisure rambling over the hills in idle reverie or meditating upon her checkered life. She gave a good deal of thought to the many phases of life which had flashed before her startled eyes in the last year, but was too young not to be more interested in herself than in problems, however momentous. Still, she did not feel much more intimate with herself than she had felt in Park Row.

She frequently wondered with some pique and much disapproval that she heard nothing from Morgan Steele. The few glimpses she had caught of the nature behind the mask tempted her to idealise him, and she finally succumbed. One night she awoke to the fact that she had been walking the stars with him, discussing the mysteries of the Universe. She pictured the smile with which he would regard the workings of her imagination, were they revealed to him, and recalled his business-like demeanour, his shirt sleeves, his Park Row vocabulary, and his impatient scorn of “damned slush.”

It happened to be midnight when these later thoughts arrived, and she laughed aloud.

“What are you laughing at?” demanded a querulous voice from the next room.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing? Do you suppose I’m an idiot? Tell me what you were laughing at.”

“Go to sleep, go to sleep.”

“I can’t go to sleep. You lie there and laugh while I lie here and suffer.”

“Why didn’t you say you were suffering? Do you want the morphine?”

“No, I don’t.”

An hour later Patience was roused from her first heavy sleep.

“Patience! Patience! Oh, my God! My God! My God!”

Patience stumbled out of bed and into her dressing-gown and slippers, shaking her head vigorously to dispel the vapours in her brain.

“Yes, yes!” she said. “I’m coming. Do please don’t make such a fuss. You’ll wake up everybody—”

“Not make a fuss! Oh, I wish you had it for a minute—”

Patience ran into the lavatory and turned up the gas. The night was very warm, and the door leading into Honora’s room stood wide. The light fell full on her face. Patience saw that her eyes were open.

“I hope Beverly didn’t wake you up,” she said. “He does make such a noise.”

“I was awake. I never sleep well in warm weather. I don’t envy you, though.”

“Oh, I don’t mind if only I don’t make a terrible mistake some night and give him an overdose. He takes particular pains to wait until I am in my first sleep and then I hardly know what I am doing. There! this is the third time I have dropped the wretched stuff. What is the good of drop bottles, anyway?”

“Why don’t you use the hypodermic?”

“I can’t. It would make me ill to puncture people. And this does him as much good.” She set the bottle down impatiently, drew a basin full of cold water, dashed it over her face, then dropped the dose and took it to Beverly.

“Stay with me,” he commanded. “You know it doesn’t take effect at once, and I feel better if I hold your hand.” She sat down beside him and nodded sleepily until the morphine did its work.

XII

The next afternoon, a few moments after Beverly had gone for his drive, Morgan Steele’s card was brought up to Patience. She had imagined that this first call would induce a mild thrill of nerve, but she merely remarked to the butler: “Tell him I will be down in a moment,” walked to the long mirror in the corner, and shook out her violet and white organdie skirts. Her long hair was braided and tied with a lavender ribbon.

“I look very well,” she thought, and went downstairs.

Steele awaited her in the drawing-room, and, as she entered, was standing with his head thrown back, regarding the medallion of Whyte Peele. She noted anew how well he dressed and carried his clothes. He looked quite at home in the drawing-room of Peele Manor. Her first remark followed in natural sequence,—

“How odd not to see you in your shirt sleeves.”

He turned with a start and a sudden warmth in his face.

“Oh, well, I hope you’ll never see me that way again. How charming you look in that frock and with your hair in that braid! _I_ always imagine _you_ in prim tailor things, with your hair tucked out of sight under a stiff turban. This is lovely. You look like a little girl. Those awful dress reformers should see you.”

“It’s a comfort to think that the She-males cannot exterminate the artistic sense. Let us go into the library.”

“Is there a large comfortable chair there? These are impressive but unpleasant. Perhaps you would not suspect it, but I love a comfortable chair and a cigar better than anything in life.”

“One thing I do suspect—that we shall have to become acquainted all over again. You are not exactly like a fallen angel outside of the office, but you certainly have not patronised me for five minutes.”

“Oh, you can take your revenge now and patronise me. Hang the shop! I don’t want to think about it.”

In the library he critically inspected every chair, selected one that pleased him, and drawing it to the open window sank into it with a deep sigh of content. Patience gave him permission to smoke, and a moment later he looked so happy that she laughed aloud.

“You may laugh,” he said plaintively, “but you have less imagination than I thought if you don’t understand what this is to a man after Park Row. After an hour of that water and your muslin frock, I shall go back as refreshed as if my brain had taken a cold bath.”

“I’d fly back to the office this minute if I could. I’ve felt like a bottle of over-charged champagne for two weeks.”

“You have the enthusiasm of youth. When you are my age—sixty-five—you will be thankful for the _dolce far niente_ of a colonial manor. This sort of life suits you—you are a born châtelaine. You have lost your tired expression, and are actually stouter. Besides, I want to come up here to see you.”

“Will you come often?”

“As often as you will let me. I am free every afternoon, you know, and if I followed my tactless inclination I’d come seven times a week. However, don’t look alarmed; I’m only coming once a week—” He sat up suddenly, his eyes sparkling. “By Jove!” he exclaimed. “What a beauty!”

Patience followed his eyes, which were directed ardently upon a sail-boat skimming up the river.

“Are you fond of sailing?” she asked.

“Am I? I could live in a boat. I’d rather be in a boat than—than even talking to you.”

“Well, you shall be inside of a boat in five minutes,” she said good-naturedly. “Wait until I get my hat and gloves!”

“Being only the nurse,” she said, as they walked down the wooded slope to the boathouse, “I don’t know that I have any right to take liberties, but I will, all the same. I feel that it is an act of charity.”

“It certainly is, and you really are an angel.—She’s a good boat,” he said approvingly, a few moments later, as he unreefed the sail.

Patience arranged the cushions and made herself comfortable, and they shot up the river in a stiff breeze. She watched Steele curiously. He looked as happy as a schoolboy. His hat was on the back of his head, his eyes shone. Once as he threw back his head and laughed, he bore an extraordinary resemblance to the Laughing Faun.

“I’ve lived in a boat for a whole summer,” he said, “and never seen a woman nor wanted to, nor a man neither, for that matter. There are three months in the year when I want nothing better in life than this.” His large cool eyes moved slowly to hers. “Still,” he added, “I do believe it’s an improvement to have you here. What fun if we had a little yacht and could sail like this all summer! I think we’d hit it off, don’t you? We shouldn’t either of us talk too much.”

Patience laughed. It was impossible to coquet with Steele. He took no notice of it. “I should be afraid you’d tip me over if you got tired of me.”

“I shouldn’t get tired of you,” he said seriously. “I never met a woman I liked half as much. You’re lovely to look at, and your mind is so interesting to study. Guess I’d better come about.”

They sailed for two hours. The wind fell, and they talked in a desultory fashion. They discovered that they had the same literary gods, and occasionally Steele waxed enthusiastic. He had read more than most men of forty; nor was there anything youthful about the fixity of his opinions.

“Oh, dear!” said Patience, suddenly, “why did we never meet before? I like you better than any one I ever knew. I’ve been hunting all my life for a mental companion.”

“So have I,” he said, smiling at her in his half cynical way, “and now I’ve found you I don’t propose to let you go; not even next winter.”

He confided to her that he had written a good deal, although he had published nothing. Patience wondered where he had found time to accomplish so much.

“I’m going to bring up some of my stuff and read it to you,” he said. “You can take that as a compliment if you like, for I’ve only shown it to one other person—a man.”

“Now, I know why you like me! You are going to study me.”

“Well, it’s partly that,” he replied coolly. “You are a new type—to me at any rate, and I shall probably know a good deal more after I have known you a year or so than I do now. Who is that? What an amiable-looking person!”

Patience followed his glance. Beverly stood at the foot of the slope, with distorted face.

“Oh, dear,” she said, “that is Mr. Peele. I am afraid he is going to be disagreeable. Of course I am not obliged to stay—but in a way I am.”

Steele ran the boat into the dock, handed her out, and reefed the sail before he spoke. Then he turned and looked at her squarely.

“Would you rather I did not come?” he asked.

“No! No! I want you to come. I’ll think it over and write you—or—I wonder if you are horrid like most men and would misunderstand me if I asked you always to come on a certain day and meet me in that wood up there, instead of going to the house?”

“Look here,” he said in his old business-like tone, “just let me set your mind at rest. I haven’t the slightest intention of making love to you. In the first place I am just now tired and sick of that sort of thing—a state a man does get into occasionally, although a woman will never believe it. In the second place I like to think of you as _sui generis_; a woman on a pedestal. It is very refreshing. A week from to-day I’ll be in that wood, and I’ll stay there from four to six whether you come or not. There comes my train.”

“You must flag it. Hurry. I’ll expect you Thursday.”

XIII

“Who is that man?” thundered Beverly, as she crossed the track behind the train.

Patience raised her eyebrows. “What have you to do with my visitors?”

“You sha’n’t receive men, and you sha’n’t sail in my boat.”

“Of course the boat is yours. I shall not use it again.”

“You are my nurse.”

“Your nurse is always ready to be dismissed,” and she walked up the slope, taking no further notice of him.

Hal returned the following week; and, as Beverly improved steadily, the house was filled with company once more. Whenever Patience hinted that she was no longer required, Beverly immediately went to bed and rent the air; but as a matter of fact his attacks were growing less and less frequent.

Patience, in the circumstances, was not impatient to return to work until the hot weather was over. Her position was very pleasant, Hal was ever her loyal friend, and she saw Morgan Steele once a week.

The wood was a wild place on a slope of the bluff some distance above the house. Its underbrush made it unpopular with the guests of Peele Manor. Steele left the train at the regular station a mile up the road and walked back without encounter. In the heart of the dark cool little wood Patience swung two hammocks and filled them with pillows. Steele lay full length in his and looked comfortable and happy, a cigar ever between his lips. Patience, in hers, sat in as dignified an attitude as she could assume.

“Does it make you feel romantic?” he said one day, looking at her quizzically.

“What do you mean?” she asked, flushing a little.

“Oh, I think you have a queer romantic sentimental streak through your modernity—or had. I’ve been wondering if there was any of it left.”

“I never told you.”

“No, but you suggest it. Tell me: didn’t you once have ideals and that sort of thing?”

“I don’t see how you can even guess it, for I have none now.”

“Oh, yes, you have. You won’t when you’re thirty, but you have all sorts of kiddish notions stored away yet in that brain of yours.” He had seen Peele a few days before in the train, and knew the history of their courtship quite as well as if she had related it to him, but he was curious to know what she had been before. He drew her on until she told him the story of the tower and the owl.

That little picture pleased his artistic sense, but when she described her girlish ideals and dreams he threw back his head and laughed loud and long.

“What would I have done with you if I had met you then?” he said, looking with intense amusement at her half angry face. “I should have run, I expect. You are a thousand times more interesting now.”

“Not to myself.”

“Of course not, because you are less of an egoist, and draw a larger measure of your individuality from your environment. But you are real now, where before you were unreal—you were a sort of waxwork with numerous dents. The two extremes in this world are nature and civilisation. Children belong by right to nature, and she holds on to them as long as possible. When civilisation gets hold of them she proceeds to pick out with a pair of tweezers all but the primal passions; and the result is the only human variety capable of enjoying life.”

“Don’t you believe in ideals?” asked Patience, rather wistfully.

“Of course not,” he said contemptuously. “Life is what it is, and you can’t alter it. And as we are only just so big and have only just so many years in which to get over a limited surface of this mighty complication called Life, all we can do is to keep our eyes open, and pick out here and there what appeals to our taste most strongly, swallowing the disagreeable majority as philosophically as possible. When you know the world—and yourself—you can’t have ideals, and the sooner you quit wasting time thinking about them the sooner you begin to enjoy life. And remember that we live but from day to day—we may be a cold cadaver to-morrow. Life is a game of chance. To set up ideals is as purposeless as to waste this life preparing for an impossible next. Omar expressed it better than I can when he said:—

“‘To-morrow? Why, to-morrow I myself may be
With yesterday’s seven thousand years.’”

“You have certain ideals though,” said Patience. “You are intellectually ambitious; and you say that you never run after a merely pretty face, and never wasted time on any sort of woman unless she had brains; and the men at the office say that you are scrupulously square in money matters. So that I can’t see that you are altogether without ideals.”

“Those are mere matters of taste and worldly sense. I aim for nothing that is impossible. When I think I want a thing I set about to accomplish it. If I find that it is impossible I quit without further loss of time. You don’t suppose I have an ideal woman, do you? How can any man that knows women?—although he may often succumb to a happy combination. When I was exactly twelve my Sunday School teacher forestalled any inclination I might have developed to idealise woman. I met her once after I was grown, by the way, and it did me good to tell her what I thought of her. That is where you women have the advantage of us. It is so long before you know man at all that after you do it is hard work making him over as he is. The woman never lived that understood man by intuition. That is the reason a woman so seldom has any fascination but that of mere youth until she’s pretty well on to thirty. You, of course, have had an exceptional experience, but you are a good deal of a kid yet.”

XIV

Morgan Steele was a type of the precocious young United States newspaper man which only this end of the century has evolved: Preternaturally wise in the way of the world and the nature of woman; with young blood and cold judgment; wary, deliberate, calculating; full of kind impulses; generous with his money, yet careful of it; ready to make cold-blooded use of a man to-day and offer him a free lodging to-morrow; possessed of more self-control than the Club man of forty; without sentimentality, yet with a certain limited power of loving; having a thorough appreciation of the finer as of the coarser shades of woman; incapable of a blind supreme rush of feeling, through the habit of eternal analysis; placidly and philosophically content with the present, and fully expecting to be laid away in the past at forty; _blasé_, yet full of boyish delight in outdoor sport; having faith in no woman, yet treating the lowest with a cynical kindness and consideration which was part of his philosophy.

One night he faced the question of his relationship to Patience with his usual deliberation.

He lay on a divan in his bachelor quarters: a long room with bedroom and bath attached. The walls of the living-room were covered with red paper, the doors and windows hung with Smyrna cloth. A rug half covered the stained floor. Between the windows was a large desk covered with papers. A long table was strewn thick with magazines. Small bookcases were filled with the works of Omar, Whitman, Emerson, Hugo, Heine, Dumas, Maupassant, Bourget, Pater, Dobson, Herrick, Ibsen, Zola, Landor, Rabelais, Stevenson, Kipling. On the mantel there was a number of photographs and a notable absence of legs. The walls were covered with artists’ sketches.

“The summer will pass harmlessly enough,” he thought. “I only see her once a week, and her husband is likely to be hidden in the brush; but when she returns to town in the winter I shall find myself calling on her every night. I’m not stuck on matrimony, but I certainly should like her for a companion in a little house or double apartment where there would be plenty of elbow room and some chance of keeping up the illusions. I think it would be some years before I should tire of her, and I think I could love her a good deal. Why in thunder doesn’t the man die? She’s too good for anything else. It would be a terrible pity—the details smirch so. A novelist would remark at this point, ‘And yet he never thought of sparing her.’ No, my dear fictionist, we don’t, nor if she loved me would she thank me for sparing her. And yet it would be a pity. She is like some delicate wild-flower that has been transplanted. I should like to offer her the best one can, instead of practically remarking: ‘My dear, this brain racket is worked out for the present. We’ll return to it later, or not at all.’

“It is often a clever thing for those that love and cannot marry to part when the shock comes: they coddle the misery and have a glorious time suffering. But that would not do for us. We live in the thick and rush of life, and have no time to sit down with memories, hardly time enough to realise an ache. We must have our day in fact or not at all; and afterward, thank God, there is again no time for memories. Well, this is only the eighth of July. By winter that intolerable nuisance may be in the family vault.”

XV

People remarked that summer that Patience looked unusually well. At times her eyes had a certain liquid softness, at others they sparkled wickedly. Her colour was beautiful and her manner and conversation full of animation.

It was on a hot August afternoon that Patience and Steele, in the green shades of their wood, suddenly met each other’s eyes and burst out laughing.

“We are in love,” said Patience.

“Well—yes—I suppose we are.”

“I feel very light-minded over this unexpected _dénouement_. I had imagined all sorts of dramatic climaxes; but the unexpected always will happen in this life—more’s the pity.”

“Did you expect we should not fall in love?”

“I did not think about it at all for a time—just drifted. But as the situation is so serious it is as well to take it humourously. What are we going to do about it?”

He had removed his cigar, and was regarding her with his contemplative stare. “I have thanked your complicated ancestors more than once for your large variety of moods. I am glad and sorry that you have spoken: sorry, because this was very pleasant; glad that the discussion of ways and means should take place here instead of in town. I shall be brutally frank. How long is your husband likely to live?”

“He may live for twenty years. I heard the doctors—they have a consultation every once in a while—tell Mrs. Peele so the other day. He is much better. On the other hand, he might take a turn for the worse any day.”

“Then you must persuade him to give you a divorce.”

“Oh, dear, I am afraid that is out of the question. I’ve thought of it; but—you don’t know him.”

“You are a clever woman: now look up your resources. Enlist the family on your side. Tell them that you are about to leave, never to return, and that you are on the road to become a famous newspaper woman; that if they will persuade your husband to give you a divorce you will drop their name; otherwise that it will be dinned in their ears for the next twenty years. Tell them that we intend to let you sign hereafter. That ought to fetch them, as they appear to look upon the newspaper business with shuddering horror. And persuade them that Beverly needs a good domestic little wife who would gladden his declining years.”

“I’m sorry I feel in this mood,” said Patience, abruptly. “I should far rather it had been the other way—the usual way. I suppose I am possessed with what Poe calls The Imp of the Perverse.”

“My dear girl, I need not remind you that it is just as well and a good deal better. You need a shaking to wake you up, though. You imagine that you are awake already, but you are not—not by a long sight. You have buried your nature five fathoms deep. Well, time is up. I must be off. Think over what I have said. Good-bye.”

XVI

On the following Thursday morning Patience walked slowly over to where Beverly sat under a tree on one of the lawns, reading a newspaper. She had made up her mind to adopt Steele’s advice, but had deferred the evil moment as long as possible.

“Beverly,” she said abruptly, sitting down in front of him, “I want to speak to you.”

He laid down the newspaper and regarded her with eager admiration. She had carefully selected the most unbecoming frock she possessed, a sickly green, and twisted her hair in a fashion to distort the fine lines of her head. Nevertheless, she looked as fresh as the morning, and her eyes sparkled with excitement.

“What is it?” he asked. “Oh, why—why—”

“Never mind! I am going to have a business talk with you, and please don’t get excited. If you do, you’ll be sure to have a pain, you know.”

“Well, what is it? It doesn’t do a fellow any good to keep him in suspense.”

“On the first of November I am going away—”

“You are not!”

“And I shall not come back—not in any circumstances. You have proved that your attacks are more or less under your own control. A sojourn at some foreign baths will probably cure you. I have given you all of my life that I intend to give you. I know that self-sacrifice is the ideal of happiness of some women, but it is not mine. When I leave here on the first of November it will be forever. There is no inducement, material nor sentimental, that will bring me back. Do you understand that much clearly?”

He burst into a volley of oaths, and beat his knees with his fists. Patience continued as soon as she could be heard:—

“Now, it can do you no possible good to retain a legal hold on me, nor can you care to hear of your name becoming familiar in Park Row. Give me my freedom, and I will take my own name—”

“You’ll get no divorce,” he roared, “now nor ever. Do you understand that? I’ll brace up and live until I’m ninety—by God I will! I’ll go abroad and live at a water cure. You’ll never be the wife of any other man. Do you understand that?”

“Oh, Beverly,” she said, breaking suddenly, “don’t be cruel,—don’t! What good can it do you? Give me my freedom.”

He grasped her wrists. His eyes were full of rage and malevolence. “Do you want to marry some one else?” he asked. “Some damned newspaper man, I suppose.”

Patience stood up and shook him off. “If ever I do marry another man,” she said cuttingly, “you may be sure he will have brains this time, and that he will also be a gentleman. The most vulgar persons I have ever known have been socially the most highly placed.”

As she moved away he sprang after her and caught her arm. “Now look here,” he said hoarsely, “you’ll neither marry, nor will you have a lover, unless you want all New York to know it. The moment you leave this place a detective goes after you. You’ll do nothing that I don’t know. I may not have brains, but I’ll get the best of you all the same.”

Patience flung him off and went straight to Mrs. Peele. Her mother-in-law watched her with narrowed eyes until she had finished, then remarked unexpectedly: “I shall do my best to make my son divorce you. If you intend to leave us I prefer that the rupture should be complete. As you suggest, I have no desire to see the name of Peele signed to newspaper articles. Moreover, I believe I can persuade my son to marry again,—a woman of his own station, who will not desecrate the name of wife; and who,” with sudden violence, “will give this house an heir.” She paused a moment to recover herself, then continued more calmly: “I have talked the matter over with my husband, and he agrees with me. Of course, you will expect no alimony.”

“I don’t want alimony. I make more with my pen than Beverly ever allowed me.”

The red came into Mrs. Peele’s face. “My son was quite as generous as was to be expected. Moreover, he had the right to demand that his wife should not come to him empty handed. I shall speak to Beverly.”

An hour later Patience met Mrs. Peele in the side hall. The older woman looked flushed and excited. “I have had a most terrible interview with Beverly,” she exclaimed. “I can do nothing with him. You little fool, why didn’t you swear that you did not want to marry another man? Heaven knows I should prefer to have you take another name as soon as possible; but you have ruined your chances by letting Beverly suspect the truth.”

Patience sank upon a chair, and sat for a long while staring straight before her. She felt the incarnation of rage and hate. Her lovely face was set and repellent. She came to herself with a start, and wondered if she had ever had any womanly impulses.

She had never wanted anything in her life as much as she wanted to marry Morgan Steele. His very unlikeness to all her old ideals fascinated her, and she was convinced that she was profoundly in love. She could hardly imagine what life with him would be like, and was the more curious to ascertain; and the obstacles enraged her impatient spirit.

The butler left the dining-room to announce luncheon.

“Send mine up to my room,” she said. As she reached the first landing of the stair she turned to him suddenly. “Tell John to go to New York this afternoon, and have Mr. Beverly’s morphine bottle filled. He took the last last night and he may need it again before I go down myself. Don’t fail to tell him. The bottle is in the lavatory.”

That afternoon she met Steele at the edge of the wood.

“I could not keep still,” she said. “My brain feels on fire.”

He drew her hand through his arm and held it tenderly. “What is it?” he asked. “Did you speak, and was it disagreeable?”

“I’ll tell you in a minute. Just now it is enough to feel you here.”

“I can only stay an hour. I should not have come at all, but I could not stay away.”

When they reached the hammocks Patience flung herself into hers and told the story of the morning with dramatic indignation. Then, insensibly, she drifted into the story of her married life, and described her intense hatred and loathing of her husband.

“It was all my own fault,” she said in conclusion. “I married him with my eyes open; but all the same I hate him. Sometimes I felt, and feel yet, fairly murderous. I seem to have a terrible nature—does it make you hate me?”

He laughed. “No, I don’t hate you, and you know it quite as well as I do. You have wonderful possibilities—but I can’t quite make up my mind that I am the man—”

“Oh, yes, you are. I could love you as much as I hate Beverly Peele.”

“Well, if you think so it amounts to the same thing, for a while at least. I shall come again in a few days. I’ll write you. If your husband cannot be induced to change his mind I’ll talk to you about a paper that has been offered to me in Texas; but if you prefer it the other way, I’ll leave you alone without a word.”

“Oh, I don’t know! There are some words I hate,—the words free-love and adultery. I don’t want to be exploited in the newspapers, and I don’t want to be insulted by my landlord. After all, expediency is the source of all morality. My life with you would be a thousand times better than it was with Beverly Peele; but I suspect that we can’t violate certain moral laws that heredity has made part of our brain fibre, without ultimate regret, even when we keep the world in ignorance. I suffered horribly once, although I had not defied the conventions. But I think we must have everything, or the large share of herself that Nature has given each of us rebels,—in other words, the ideal is not complete.”

“When you are very much in love,” he said dryly, “you won’t analyse.”

Contrary to her habit, she remained in the wood for some time after he left her. Suddenly she was aroused from her reverie by a peculiar heavy sound, as of a man crawling. She listened intently, her hair stiffening: the house was a quarter of a mile away. The sound continued steadily. She sprang to her feet and fled from the wood. As she ran up the hill beyond, she glanced fearfully over her shoulder. A man shot from the lower edge of the wood and ran toward the stables.

XVII

An hour after midnight Patience ran into Honora’s room and shook her violently.

“Honora! Honora!” she cried, “something is the matter with Beverly. I can’t wake him up.”

Honora stretched herself languidly. Her eyelids fluttered a moment, then lifted. She said sleepily:

“What is it, Patience?”

“Beverly! Go to him—quick—while I wake up Mr. and Mrs. Peele, and send for the doctor. He dropped his own morphine to-night, and he must have taken too much.”

A few moments later there was an alarmed group of people at Beverly Peele’s bedside, and the butler could be heard at the telephone demanding the doctor.

Mr. Peele was in his pyjamas, and Patience struggled with an importunate desire to tell him that his hair stood on end. Mrs. Peele’s back hair was in a scant braid; the front locks were on pins. Her skin looked pallid and old. Honora, as usual, looked like a vision from heaven. Hal and her husband were in Newport, and there were no guests at Peele Manor.

“Are you sure,” asked Mr. Peele, as precisely as if his hair was parted in the middle and plastered on each side, “that anything is the matter? Does not the morphine always put him to sleep?”

“Not at once. You see he takes it internally, and it’s twenty minutes or half an hour before it takes effect. During that time he always groans, for he never takes it until the last minute. I heard him get up and return to bed; and then I knew something must be the matter because he was so quiet—”

“How could you let him drop it himself?” exclaimed Mrs. Peele, passionately. “How could you? What are you here for?”

“I offered to drop it for him, but he wouldn’t let me. I didn’t insist, as he always put it off—and we had had a quarrel—”

“My poor son!”

“Well, something’s got to be done,” said Mr. Peele. “I don’t like the way he’s beginning to breathe. There are one or two things we can do until the doctor comes.”

He raised Beverly’s arms above the head, brought them down and pressed them into the chest, repeating the act twenty or thirty times. Beverly meanwhile was breathing stertorously.

“Can’t I do something?” cried his mother, distractedly.

“I think we had better walk him,” said Mr. Peele, whose mouth was tightening. “Call Hickman.”

The butler was waiting in the hall, and came at once. He helped Mr. Peele to lift the young man from the bed. The stalwart figure hung limply between them: he was as collapsed as the new dead. Mr. Peele and Hickman walked him up and down the long line of rooms, shaking him vigorously from time to time; but they would have produced as much effect upon the bolster. Mrs. Peele had sunk into a chair. She sat with compressed lips, and dilating eyes fixed upon Patience. Honora knelt beside her, patting her hand. After a time she arose, liberated Mrs. Peele’s hair from its braid and steels, and arranged it with deft hands, fetching some of her own amber pins.

Patience sat on the edge of the bed. She was beginning to feel hopelessly sleepy. The day’s excitement had sapped her nerves. It was now nearly two o’clock, and she had not slept. Beverly had been ill the night before and given her little rest. She felt bitterly ashamed of herself; but every few moments she was obliged to cover her face with her handkerchief to conceal a yawn. Once or twice her head dropped suddenly.

The last time she sat up with a gasp. Mrs. Peele groaned. The two men had entered with their burden. Beverly’s face was blue, and he breathed infrequently.

“His body is bathed in a cold perspiration,” said Mr. Peele. “Will that doctor never come?”

“O my God!” murmured Mrs. Peele.

Patience left the bed and sat on the sill of the window. The night was very hot and still. A shuddering horror took possession of her. A palpable presence seemed skimming the dark gulf under the window. She sat with distended eyes, half expecting to see a long arm reach past her and pluck the soul from the unconscious man on the bed. She closed her eyes and put her fingers in her ears. When she removed them she drew a long breath.

“The doctor is coming,” she said. “I hear the wheels.”

“Did you make him understand what was the matter?” asked Mr. Peele of the butler.

“Yes, sir. He said he would bring everything necessary.”

When the doctor came in he bent over the sick man and lifted his eyelids.

“It is morphine poisoning, sure enough,” he said. “Have some black coffee made. I shall use the electricity meanwhile. Better telegraph to New York. I don’t like this case, and don’t want it alone.”

Patience watched them mechanically for an hour, then slipped into her own room and into her bed. Nature had conquered her. Another moment, and she would have fallen to the floor in sleep.

Four hours later she was awakened by a vigorous shaking of her shoulder.

She sat upright and glanced about wildly. “What is it? What is the matter?” she cried. “I had such a horrible dream. I thought Beverly was drowning me—holding me down under the water—”

“Your husband is dead,” said the doctor. “Do you wish to go to him?”

Patience shrank under the bedclothes, pulling them about her head. After the doctor had gone she ran over to a spare room, opened all the windows to admit light, then went to bed and slept until late in the day.