He stumbled into the house in sudden need of Patty and her support in
his panic.
He found her lying on the floor of the parlor, where she had fainted.
Her big crinoline skirts belled out and she looked like a huge tulip
fallen on its side. Her feet sat up awkwardly on their heels; her limbs
were visible to the knees. It was the only ungraceful posture he had
ever known her to assume.
As he gathered her into his arms, Patty returned from her coma into a
kind of mania. She talked to herself or to some invisible listener.
Mostly she muttered unintelligibly some gibberish that made her
beautiful mouth ugly and unhuman.
She clung to her husband’s hands and arms, clutching at them when he
moved them to lift her to a chair and bent above her, pleading with her
to talk to him. She called him by his first name, babbling:
“David, David, oh, David! David, David!”
It was a long while before he could make out any other word and then he
caught faintly:
“They shan’t stay here! They can go to Europe or California or hell.
But they shan’t stay here! they shan’t, they shan’t!”
He could not persuade her to speak to them. When Immy came in radiant
and shaken with laughter, Patty laughed like a woman long insane, worn
down with some old ribald mania; but she would not speak, though Immy
wept and begged:
“Mamma, kiss me. Please, Mamma! If I did wrong, it’s too late to make a
fuss. Don’t spoil my first little chance of happiness, Mamma! Oh, come
on and kiss me and say you forgive me!”
At last Patty whispered, and patted Immy’s quivering hands, but as if
to be rid of her:
“I’ve nothing to forgive you, you poor baby, you poor little ignorant
baby. But—but——”
That was all, and she put out her cheek to Immy’s lips in dismissal,
but did not kiss her. Immy stole away baffled, disheartened.
The wise Chalender dared not approach Patty. His intuition of woman
warned him to stay out on the porch or wait by the carriage till Immy’s
trunk was brought down. Then he drove away with her and RoBards dared
not wave them good-by.
At last when there was silence and the hush of night, RoBards fell
asleep. He was wakened by a squeaking sound. He thought he saw a ghost
by the bureau. He rose slowly and went towards the wraith cautiously.
It was Patty in her nightgown. She was struggling to open the drawer
where he had kept an ancient dueling pistol for years against the
burglars that never came.
As he stood stock still, she got the drawer open and took out the
weapon. She caressed it, and nodded her head, mumbling drowsily, “Yes,
yes, I must, I must save her from him!” Her lips moved, but her eyes
were not open.
With all gentleness, he took her hand and lifted from her unresisting
fingers the pistol. Then he set his arms about Patty and guided her
back to bed. He lifted her feet between the sheets and drew the covers
over her.
She breathed the placid, shallow breath of one who sleeps, but she
clung to his hands so that he could hardly free them. Then he hid the
pistol under the mattress beneath his head and thanked heaven for one
horror at least that had been forestalled.
By and by Patty, still aslumber, turned into his bosom and laid her
little hands beneath his chin. He sighed, “Thank God for sleep!” But
even in her sleep there was purgatory, for she twitched and clutched
him in incessant nightmares.
The next morning she said nothing of her dream or her somnambulism.
And he felt no need of questioning her. The soul has its own torture
chambers, where even love has no right of entry, especially when it
knows too well what is within.
All that Patty said was: “I don’t feel well enough to get up to-day.
I’ll just rest here.”
Late that forenoon Immy drove up alone from White Plains, where she and
her husband had found lodging at a tavern. She led her father into his
library and said to him:
“Harry—my husband—and I have talked things over and he’s—we’ve decided
to go back to California. I think I’d be happier out there—away from
everything. I think Mamma would be happier. You haven’t congratulated
me yet, so I congratulate you on getting me honestly married off.
That’s something in these days. Besides, nobody will miss me much.”
As RoBards looked at her now, she was not the wife of Chalender or
anybody: she was the little, ill-fated girl he had defended in vain
against life. She had secured herself a new defender—against too much
sober thought about things. He realized how canny she had been, how
lonely and how afraid.
His arms went leaping out to her. She flung herself into his lap and he
clenched her fiercely, kissing the rippling curls along the top of her
bent head, and moaning:
“Oh, my baby, my baby!”
Then she broke into sobs:
“Don’t say that word, Papa! That’s the word I said when I lost my
baby—as you’ve lost yours. Where have they gone, Papa, your baby and
mine? Where have they both gone? Where does everything go that we love
and lose?”