WHAT CHEER OF THE HARVEST?
I
The blood of youth is hot. He followed her, in spite of all,
forgetting all. They had advanced across the hall toward the gold
room, or library.
"Oh, Charley, Charley! Don't begin, wait a little," she wailed. "At
least till to-night, till afternoon. I don't know what to say yet. I
don't know what to do! Let us see him first, and tell him."
"Look about you," he commented grimly. "You're going to lose all
this--all these splendid, beautiful things."
"I don't mind losing them. I want to be poor. Oh, my God! Just to be
loved, and clean! Charley, can we?"
"But why choose me? There are so many others!"
"All like Mr. Rawn himself--men crazed of money, power, selfishness. I
wanted something different. Do you think it could have been my
father's old ideas coming out in me, so late? He came of a family of
revolutionists--independents; 'Progressives,' they call them now.
Something of his beliefs--I don't know what it was--"
"But you'll have to leave him in any case. Divorce is simple enough.
You know what I would have done, and done, also, in any case. Grace
and I--"
"Yes, I know all about everything. Everything's past," she said
despairingly. "We're dead. It's all over!"
"I ought to go?" he asked vaguely.
"Yes, pretty soon. But I suppose you'll have to see Grace,
and--to-night I'll have to see--"
He bowed his head. "Yes, we've got to pay that part first. The best
we can do and all we can give ought to be enough for him."
II
She turned, left him, passing through the great doors to the central
rooms within. Following her still, he found her at the stair and
joined her. There approached them now, with hasty tread and face
somewhat excited, the medical man who had been for so many days now in
attendance upon Grace Rawn and her child. He had come on his morning
visit unnoticed by them.
"Ah," he began, "I'm glad to find you, Mrs. Rawn--and you, Mr.
Halsey--I've been looking for you--Come! Come quickly!" His face
showed plainly his agitation.
"Is there anything wrong?" demanded Halsey sharply. "What's the
trouble?"
"It is my duty to tell you the truth," began the doctor. "Your wife is
a very sick woman, indeed."
"I know that, yes."
"But not the worst until this morning, until just now. Something--"
[Illustration: (Virginia and Halsey)]
"I've been here in the house waiting--why did you not call me?" began
Halsey clumsily.
"You must not _wait_!" the doctor interrupted him, taking him by the
arm and hastening toward the stairway.
They followed him up the stair, down the upper hall, to the rooms which
had been set apart of late days for Grace and her child, quarters all
too unfamiliar to Halsey himself.
They found Grace Halsey, faint and gasping, half sitting in her bed,
clasping the child in her arms, herself too weak now longer to hold it
up. Halsey, stricken with sudden horror, ran to take the child in his
own arms.
The truth was obvious. Even as he lifted the poor crippled form in his
arms, the head fell back, helpless. The eyes glazed, turned back
uncovered. Halsey cried out aloud. He turned about, dazed; horror and
helplessness were on his face. It was to Virginia Rawn he turned, as
to the other part of himself.
It was Virginia Rawn who took from him the feeble, misshapen body,
gathering it into her own arms. She gazed intently, frowning, grieving
a woman's grief over suffering, bending over its face; her own face
held back over it when she saw the truth. Then she passed him and
placed the body of the child upon its cot near-by, covering it gently.
III
"Grace, Grace!" sobbed Halsey. He fell upon his knees at his wife's
bedside. She did not see him, did not recognize him, although she
turned a questioning face toward him. "Me, too!" he cried. "I want to
go! I want to die and end it! Everything's wrong..."
"Come," said the doctor presently; "it's too late now. I'll call for
you after a time." He took Halsey by the arm and led him from the
room. Returning, he signed for Virginia Rawn also to leave the sick
chamber. Left alone, the medical man turned to the professional nurse
in attendance. "Keep it quiet," he said. "It would hurt my
practice--do you hear?"
He kicked beneath the bed a small broken vial, and wiped away the stain
from the lips of the dying woman.
The doctor, of course, had his guess, the public its guess, the daily
papers theirs. The truth was, Grace Halsey, by butler route, had
learned of the _tête-à-tête_ of her husband and her stepmother a half
hour before this time.