THE OPEN WINDOW
Over the sanatorium on the ridge sleep had descended. On its broad
grounds there was no light of moon or stars, and its chamber windows
were dark, save where here and there the soft glow of a night-lamp
sifted through a shutter. The evening had closed gloomily, breeding
storm. The air was sultry and windless, and now and then sheet-lightning
threw into blunt relief the dark bodies of the trees. Inside the
building all slumbered, soundly or fitfully as health or illness
decreed, carrying the humors of the stirring day into the wider realm of
sleep.
Jessica had closed her eyes, thinking of a time when secrecy would all
be ended, disguise done, when she would wear again the ring she had
taken off in bitterness, when indeed and in name she would be a wife
before the world. She had picked a great bowl of wild star-jasmin and
set it by her bedside and the room was sweet with the delicate scent.
The odor carried her irresistibly back to the far-away mansion that had
since seemed a haunted dwelling, to the days of her blindness and of
Hugh's courtship. Before she extinguished the light she searched in a
drawer and found her wedding-ring--the one she had worn for less than an
hour. It was folded away in a box which she had not opened since the
dreadful day when she had broken in pieces her model of the Prodigal
Son. When she crept into bed, the ring was on her finger. She had fallen
asleep with her cheek resting on it.
She awoke with a start, with a vague, inexplicable uneasiness, an
instinct that the night had voiced an unusual sound. She sat up in bed,
staring into the dark depths of the room. Her instant thought had been
of David Stires, but the tiny bell on the wall whose wire led to his
bedroom was not vibrating. She listened a moment, but there was only a
deep silence.
Slipping out of bed, she crossed the room and parted the curtain from
before the tall French window. The room was on the ground floor and the
window gave directly on the lawn. The wind seemed dead, and the world
outside--the broad, cleared expanse of trees and shrubs, and the
descending forest that closed it round--was wrapped in a dense
blackness. While she gazed there came a sudden yellow flare of lightning
and far-distant mutter of thunder spoke behind the hills.
Still with the unreasoning uneasiness holding her, she groped to the
door, drew the bolt and looked out into the wide, softly carpeted hall,
lighted dimly by a lamp set just at the turn of the staircase. All at
once a shiver ran through her. There, a dozen steps away, the light full
upon him, stood the man who filled her thoughts.
He stood perfectly still, without movement or gesture, gazing at her.
She could see his face distinctly, silhouetted on the pearl-gray wall.
It wore an expression of strained concern and of deep helplessness. The
instant agitation and surprise blotted the puzzle of his presence there.
She forgot that it was the dead of night, that she was in her nightgown.
It flashed across her mind that some near and desperate trouble had
befallen him. All the protective and maternal in her love welled up. She
went quickly toward him.
He did not move or stir, and then she realized that though his eyes
seemed to look at her, it was with a passive tranced fixity. They saw
nothing. He was asleep.
It was the mind which was conscious, the action of the brain was at
rest. The body, through the operation of some irreducible law of the
subjective self, was moving in an automatic somnambulism. The
intermittent memory that had begun to emerge in sleep, that had given
him on waking the eerie impression of a dual identity, had led him,
involuntarily and unerringly, to her.
She halted, a deep compassion and a painful wonderment holding her,
feeling with a thrill the power she possessed over him. Then, like a
cold wave, surged over her a numbing sense of his position. How had he
entered? Had he broken locks like a burglar? The situation was
anomalous. What should she do? Waked abruptly, the result might be
disastrous. Discovered, his presence there when all slumbered, suspected
as he had been, would be ruinous. She must get him away, out of the
house, and quickly.
A breath of cool air swept past her, putting out the lamp--an outer door
was open. At the same instant she heard steps beyond the curve of the
hall, Doctor Brent's voice peremptory and inquiring. Her nerves chilled;
he blocked the sole avenue of retreat. No, there was one other, and only
one--a single way to shield him. Quiet and resourceful now, though her
cheeks were hot, she took the hand of the unconscious man, drew him
silent and unresisting into the friendly shadow of her room, closed the
door noiselessly and bolted it.
For a moment she stood motionless, her heart beating violently. Had he
been seen? Or had the open door created an alarm? Releasing his hand
gently, she found her way softly to a stand, lighted a tiny night-taper,
and threw a shawl about her. Through its ground-glass the light cast a
wan glimmer which showed the shadowy outlines of the room, its white
rumpled bed, its scattered belongings eloquent of a woman's ownership,
and the pallid countenance of the sleeping man. He had stopped still; a
troubled frown was on his face, and his head was bent as if listening.
A sudden confusion tingled through her veins, a sense of maidenly shame
that she could be there beside him _en deshabille_, opposing the sweet
reminder of their real relationship--was he not in fact her
husband?--that lay ever beneath her thought to justify and explain. He
must wake before he left that room. What would he think? She flushed
scarlet in the semi-darkness; she could not tell him--that! Not there
and then! The blood forsook her heart as footsteps sounded outside the
door. They paused, passed on, returned and died away.
Suddenly, in the tense silence of the room, the mantel-clock struck
three, a deep chime, like the vibration of a far-off church bell. The
tone was not loud--indeed the low roll of the thunder had been well-nigh
as loud--but there was in the intrusive metallic cadence a peculiar
suggestion to the dormant mind. As the sound of the church bell in the
town had done so often, it penetrated the crust of sleep; it touched the
inner ear of the conscious intelligence that stirred so painfully,
throbbing keenly to sights and sounds and odors that to the wakeful mind
left only a cloudy impression eddying to some unfamiliar center. Harry
started, a shudder ran through his frame, he swayed dizzily, his hand
went to his forehead.
In the instant of shocked awakening, Jessica was at his side in an agony
of apprehension, her arm thrown about him, her hand pressed across his
lips, her own lips at his ear in an agonized warning:
"Hush, do not speak! It is I, Jessica. Make no noise."
She felt her wrist caught in a grasp that made her wince. His whole body
was trembling violently. "Jessica!" he said in a painfully articulated
whisper. "You? Where am I?"
"This is my room," she breathed. "You have been walking in your sleep.
Make no sound. We shall be heard."
A low exclamation broke from his lips. He looked bewilderedly about him,
his eyes returning to her face with a horrified realization. "I ... came
here ... to your room?" The voice was scarcely audible.
"It was I who brought you here. You were in the hall--you would have
been found. The house is roused."
He turned abruptly to the door, but she caught his arm. "What are you
going to do? You will be seen!"
"So much the better; it will be at my proper measure--as a prowler, a
housebreaker, a disturber of honest sleep!"
"No, no!" she protested in a panic. "You shall not; I will not have you
taken for what you are not! I know--but they would not know! No one must
see you leave this room! Do you not think of me?"
He caught his breath hard. "Think of you!" he repeated huskily. "Is
there ever an hour when I do not think of you? Is there a day when I
would not die to serve you? Yet in my very sleep--"
He paused, gazing at her where she stood in the half-light, a misty,
uncertain figure. She was curiously happy. The delicious and pangless
sense of guilt, however--the guilt of the hidden, not the blameworthy
thing--that was tingling through her was for him a shrinking and acute
self-reproach.
"Here!" he said under his breath. "To have brought myself here, of all
places, for you of all women to risk yourself for me! I only know that I
was wandering for years and years in a shadowy desert, searching for
something that would not be found--and then, suddenly I was here and
you were speaking to me! You should have left me to be dragged away
where I could trouble no one again."
She was silent. "Forgive me," he said, "if you can. I--I can never
forgive myself. How can I best go?"
For answer she moved to the window, slender and wraith-like. He followed
silently. A million vague new impressions were clutching at him; the
fragrance in the room was like a hypnotic incense veiling shadowy forms.
Lines started from the blank:
And I swear, as I thought of her thus, in that hour,
And how, after all, old things were best,
That I smelt the smell of that jasmin-flower
Which she used to wear in her breast!
As she parted the curtain, a second of bright lightning revealed the
landscape, the dark hedges and clustered trees. It blackened, and she
drew him back with a hushed word, pointing where a lantern was flashing
through the shrubbery.
"It is a watchman," she said. "He will be gone presently."
Looking at her, where she stood in the dim light, half turned away, one
hand against her cheek, there welled through him a wave of that hopeless
longing which her kiss had awakened in that epoch moment of the
Reverend Henry Sanderson. The clinging white gown, with the filmy lace
at its throat, the taper's faint glow glimmering to a numbus in her
loosened hair, the sweet intangible suggestions of the room--all these
called to him potently, through the lines that raced in his brain.
But O, the smell of that jasmin-flower!
And O that music! and O the way
That voice rang out from the donjon tower--
"God help me!" he whispered, the pent passion of his dreams rushing to
utterance. "Why did I ever see your face? I was reckless and careless
then. I had damned the decent side of me that now is quivering alive! I
have tried to blot your face from my memory. But it is useless. I shall
always see it."
A rumble of nearer thunder sounded and a tentative dash of rain struck
the pane. She was shaken to her depths. She stood in a whirlwind of
emotion. She seemed to feel his arms clasping her, his lips on hers, his
adjuring words in her ears. The odor of the flowers wreathed them both.
The beating of her heart seemed to fill all the silent room.
On the lawn just outside the window, low voices were heard through the
increasing rain. They passed, and after a moment he softly unlatched the
window.
"Good-by," he said.
She stretched out her hand. He touched it, then drew the window wide. As
he stepped noiselessly down on to the springy turf, the lightning
flashed again--a pale-green glow that seemed almost before her face. She
drew back, and the same instant, through the thunder, the electric bell
on the wall rang sharply. She threw on her dressing-gown, thrust her
feet into slippers, and hastened from the room.
The same flash that had startled Jessica lighted brightly the physician
and the watchman, who stood at the corner of the building, having
finished their tour of inspection. It was the latter who had found the
open door and who had aroused the doctor, insisting that he had seen a
man in the hall. The other had pooh-poohed this, but now by the
lightning both saw the figure emerge from the French window and
disappear in the darkness.
They ran back, the physician ahead. The window was not locked, and they
stepped through it into an empty room.
"To be sure!" said the doctor disgustedly. "He was here all the
time--heard us searching the halls, and took the first unlocked door he
found. Miss Holme, no doubt, is sitting up with Mr. Stires. Not a word
of this," he added as they walked along the hall. "Unless she misses
something, there is no need of frightening her."
He barred the outer door behind the watchman and went on. As he reached
David Stires' room, the door opened and Jessica came out. She spoke to
him in a low, anxious voice. "I was coming for you," she said. "I am
afraid he is not so well. I can not rouse him. Will you come in and see
what you can do?"
The doctor entered, and a glance at his patient alarmed him. Until dawn
he sat with Jessica watching. When the early sunlight was flooding the
room, however, David Stires opened his eyes and looked upon her quite
naturally.
"Where is Harry Sanderson?" he asked. "I thought he was here."
She looked at him with a forced smile. "You have been dreaming," she
answered.
He seemed to realize where he was. "I suppose so," he said with a sigh,
"but it was very real. I thought he came in and spoke your name."
She stroked his hand. "It was fancy, dear." If he but knew who had
really been there that night! If she could only tell him all the happy
truth!
He lay silent a moment. Then he said: "If it could only have been Harry
you married instead of Hugh! For he loved you, Jessica."
She flushed as she said: "Ah, that was fancy, too!"
It was the first time since the day of her marriage that he had spoken
Hugh's name.