When he had been confronted with the opportunity to end the life of
Immy’s baby and with it numberless perils, RoBards had hesitated until
the chance was taken from him.
But now he did not even question the high necessity for action. Whether
he were insane from the laceration of his sympathies or superhumanly
wise, his mind was made up the instant the idea came to him.
As if some exterior power considered and ordained the deed, his mind
was made up for him. He felt it his solemn duty to give Patty surcease
of existence. He wondered only at his long delay in recognizing the
compulsion.
The patriarch Abraham in the Old Testament had heard a voice in the
air bidding him despatch his only son for a burnt offering; he did not
waver, but clave wood and piled it upon his son’s back and lured him to
an altar and drew his knife against him. The curious god who could take
pleasure in a child’s blood was amused at the last moment to send an
angel to order the tortured old man to substitute a ram caught by his
horns in the thicket. And the poor ram was burned instead. But Abraham
had been ready to slash his boy’s young throat across at the divine
whim and to watch him roast.
There was a priestliness in RoBards’ soul, too; but he was not going
to slay his wife to appease any cloudy deity. She was already a burnt
offering alive and he was ordered to sacrifice her flesh to end its
tyranny over her hopeless soul.
He was puzzled only about the means.
His brain ran along an array of weapons; knife, poison, pistol,
throttling fingers. He read the list as if a hand held a scrolled
catalogue before his eyes. He discarded each as it came. It was too
brutal.
He stared at Patty, tossing there alone, and his heart sickened with
love. Then he was more than ever afraid for her. For now she was in
such an extreme of blind woe that she was snatching at her hair!
She had lost her last interest in beauty. She was tearing at her hair,
crisscrossing it over her face, biting and gnawing at it, sawing it
through her teeth.
He ran to her to rescue that final grace. He took her hands from it and
smoothed it back from her brow. It was soft beyond belief beneath his
palm. It was deep and dense and voluptuously velvety.
He knelt and, holding her hands tight, kissed her lips and her cheeks
and kissed her eyelids, as if he were weighting them finally with
pennies. And he groaned: “Good-by, honey!”
Her eyelids opened under the kisses he had left upon them. She gasped:
“Good-by? You’re not going to leave me? Don’t! ah, don’t!”
He shook his head and groaned:
“I’m not going to leave you, it’s you—it’s you that are—it’s you
that are leaving me. And may God send somebody to meet and care for
you on the long lonely road, oh, my beloved, my blessed, my baby, my
beautiful!”
She seemed to understand. Whether she thought with fear of the hell he
was damning himself to, or dreaded after all to let go of life, the one
thing certain, however evil, she shook her head in a panic of terror,
and fluttered,
“No, No! No!”
He knew that his deed must be done swiftly. At once, or never. So he
reached above her and took into his hands all the treasure of her hair
where he had spread and smoothed it across her pillow. He drew it down
like a heap of carded silk and swept it across her face, smothering her
with it.
She struggled and writhed, writhed to escape from under it. She seized
his hands and tugged at them, dug her nails into them.
Her breast beat up and down for breath; her heart must have plunged
like a trapped bird. But he gathered the hair more and more thickly
across her mouth. He bent down once and kissed her hot, panting lips.
Her mouth was like a rose in a tangled skein of floss. Then he closed a
double handful of her hair over her face and held it fast.
It was cruel hard that after so long a life of devotion her last look
at him should be one of horror; her farewell caresses given with her
nails. But love asked this proof.
His chief concern was whether his strength would abide the end. Her
hands fought at his hands more and more feebly. It was easier to resist
their battle than their surrender. When her hands loosened, that was
the hardest time. He imagined the prayers she was screaming dumbly
at him and at God. But his love prevailed over his humanity, and he
watched over her gaunt white bosom as the storm subsided from tempest
to slumber, to sleep.
He held her, drowned in her own hair, long after the ultimate pallor
had snowed her flesh; long, long after her hands had fallen limp and
wan, their empty palms upward like an unpitied beggar’s.
When at last he was sure that she would never groan under another of
this earth’s fardels, he lifted away her wanton tresses, as if he
raised her veil.
The first sight of her soulless face broke him like a thunderbolt.
Tears came gushing from him in shattered rain. He drew her hands
prayer-wise across her bosom, and fell across her body, loving it,
clutching at it. He could not cling, but he sank by the bed and spilled
his limbs along the floor in a brief death.
As if his soul had run after hers to make sure that it got home safe.