"It has all been a hideous mistake!"
Abruptly, defiantly Beatrix threw out the words at Thayer, as he
entered. Then her head dropped on her arms which rested on the table
before her.
Breathless from his struggle with the storm and astounded at her
greeting, Thayer halted just across the threshold and looked at her in
silence. The silence grew irksome to her. She changed the form of her
words.
"I couldn't help it. I have tried." The defiance in her voice suddenly
gave place to desperation. She pushed back her chair, rose and crossed
the room to the fire. There she turned and stood facing Thayer, her head
erect, her cheeks scarlet, her hands, palms downward, tightly clasped.
"I have tried my best and failed. It is a total, absolute failure," she
went on fiercely. "I know it, and you know it, too. You have watched it
coming on, growing and overpowering me. We may as well admit it; I made
a mistake when I married Sidney Lorimer."
Thayer met her eyes steadily, rallying all his forces to face her in
this new mood. This sudden change in her baffled his powers of
comprehension. Weakened and torn and shaken by her endless hours alone
in the whistling, roaring storm, listening moment by moment to the
hideous noises of delirium coming from the next room, the level nerves
of Beatrix had at last given way completely. The noises had stopped now,
and an ominous stillness lay over the room; but in Beatrix's ears they
still were ringing, beating a terrible accompaniment to the crowding
measures of her thoughts. Hour after hour as she had sat alone, her
fingers in her ears, her eyes fixed on the snow-draped landscape outside
the window, her mind had worked ceaselessly, arbitrarily. For the time
being, she had felt herself unable to control the direction of her
thoughts, and the direction had been fraught with danger.
She went back to her first meeting with Lorimer. She went over each
detail of their friendship and of their married life. She tried in vain
to connect the genial, fascinating man she had first known with the man
whose ravings found their way under her fingers pressed against her
ears. She recalled his old-time devotion and chivalry; she contrasted it
with his moodiness and the brutal petulance which of late had marked
his manner to her. At no one point had there been a sudden change in
him. The transition had been slow, insidious. At last she had wakened to
it in all its bald reality.
Now and then she rose and went to the window in the hope of seeing
Thayer's familiar figure coming towards her through the storm. Each time
she did so, her thoughts lingered a little upon him, upon his power to
hold Lorimer, upon his constant thoughtfulness for her. Each time she
thought of him, her mind rested there longer, until she found herself
going over their acquaintance much as, a few hours earlier, she had gone
over her life with Lorimer. Then, all at once, she dropped her head on
the table with a little moan. Her will was powerless longer to blind her
to the truth. Her loyalty to Lorimer, her traditions, her training had
made her fight for months, a fight no less bitter because it was
subconscious. Now her fighting strength was gone. The truth had asserted
itself at the instant when her nervous force was at its weakest. It had
asserted itself, and it had mastered her.
She was still in the passive stage of defeat, when Thayer entered the
room, hours later. Struggling to her through the storm, he had been
urged on by a fierce passion of anxiety for the woman he loved. A
strange fire had flashed up within him, and, had he found Beatrix in her
usual mood, he might have lost his power to quench it. Met by a passion
equal to his own, he instinctively pulled himself together. Two such
storms must inevitably have landed them upon hidden rocks and wrecked
them pitilessly and in mid-career. He realized the danger. It took all
his manhood to face it; but two lives were trembling in the balance,
with nothing but his own past character and half of his inherited
tendencies to act as a fulcrum.
"I am afraid I don't quite understand you," he said.
"Then what are you doing here?" she returned sharply.