The subject seemed to be making both uncomfortable; they dropped it.
Women are bred to attach enormous importance to their physical selves--so much so that many women have no other sense of self-respect, and regard themselves as possessing the entirety of virtue if they have chast.i.ty or can pretend to have it.
The life Susan had led upsets all this and forces a woman either utterly to despise herself, even as she is despised of men, or to discard the s.e.x measure of feminine self-respect as ridiculously inadequate, and to seek some other measure.
Susan had sought this other measure, and had found it. She was, therefore, not a little surprised to find--after Freddie had been back three or four days--that he was arousing in her the same sensations which a strange man intimately about would have aroused in her in the long past girlhood of innocence.
It was not physical repulsion; it was not a sense of immorality. It was a kind of shyness, a feeling of violated modesty. She felt herself blushing if he came into the room when she was dressing. As soon as she awakened in the morning she sprang from bed beside him and hastened into her dressing-room and closed the door, resisting an impulse to lock it. Apparently the feeling of physical modesty which she had thought dead, killed to the last root, was not dead, was once more stirring toward life.
"What are you blushing about?" asked he, when she, pa.s.sing through the bedroom, came suddenly upon him, very scantily dressed.
She laughed confusedly and beat a hurried retreat. She began to revolve the idea of separate bedrooms; she resolved that when they moved again she would arrange it on some pretext--and she was looking about for a new place on the plea that their quarters in Half Moon Street were too cramped. All this close upon his return, for it was before the end of the first week that she, taking a shower bath one morning, saw the door of the bathroom opening to admit him, and cried out sharply:
"Close that door!"
"It"s I," Freddie called, to make himself heard above the noise of the water. "Shut off that water and listen."
She shut off the water, but instead of listening, she said, nervous but determined:
"Please close the door. I"ll be out directly."
"Listen, I tell you," he cried, and she now noticed that his voice was curiously, arrestingly, shrill.
"Brent--has been hurt--badly hurt." She was dripping wet.
She thrust her arms into her bathrobe, flung wide the partly open door. He was standing there, a newspaper in his trembling hand. "This is a dispatch from New York--dated yesterday," he began. "Listen," and he read:
"During an attempt to rob the house of Mr. Robert Brent, the distinguished playwright, early this morning, Mr. Brent was set upon and stabbed in a dozen places, his butler, James Fourget, was wounded, perhaps mortally, and his secretary, Mr.
J. C. Garvey, was knocked insensible. The thieves made their escape. The police have several clues. Mr. Brent is hovering between life and death, with the chances against him."
Susan, leaning with all her weight against the door jamb, saw Palmer"s white face going away from her, heard his agitated voice less and less distinctly--fell to the floor with a crash and knew no more.
When she came to, she was lying in the bed; about it or near it were Palmer, her maid, his valet, Clelie, several strangers. Her glance turned to Freddie"s face and she looked into his eyes amid a profound silence. She saw in those eyes only intense anxiety and intense affection. He said:
"What is it, dear? You are all right. Only a fainting spell."
"Was that true?" she asked.
"Yes, but he"ll pull through. The surgeons save everybody nowadays. I"ve cabled his secretary, Garvey, and to my lawyers. We"ll have an answer soon. I"ve sent out for all the papers."
"She must not be agitated," interposed a medical looking man with stupid brown eyes and a thin brown beard spa.r.s.ely veiling his gaunt and pasty face.
"Nonsense!" said Palmer, curtly. "My wife is not an invalid.
Our closest friend has been almost killed. To keep the news from her would be to make her sick."
Susan closed her eyes. "Thank you," she murmured. "Send them all away--except Clelie. . . . Leave me alone with Clelie."
Pushing the others before him, Freddie moved toward the door into the hall. At the threshold he paused to say:
"Shall I bring the papers when they come?"
She hesitated. "No," she answered without opening her eyes.
"Send them in. I want to read them, myself."
She lay quiet, Clelie stroking her brow. From time to time a shudder pa.s.sed over her. When, in answer to a knock, Clelie took in the bundle of newspapers, she sat up in bed and read the meager dispatches. The long accounts were made long by the addition of facts about Brent"s life. The short accounts added nothing to what she already knew. When she had read all, she sank back among the pillows and closed her eyes. A long, long silence in the room. Then a soft knock at the door. Clelie left the bedside to answer it, returned to say:
"Mr. Freddie wishes to come in with a telegram."
Susan started up wildly. Her eyes were wide and staring--a look of horror. "No--no!" she cried. Then she compressed her lips, pa.s.sed her hand slowly over her brow. "Yes--tell him to come in."
Her gaze was upon the door until it opened, leaped to his face, to his eyes, the instant he appeared. He was smiling--hopefully, but not gayly.
"Garvey says"--and he read from a slip of paper in his hand--"
"None of the wounds necessarily mortal. Doctors refuse to commit themselves, but I believe he has a good chance.""
He extended the cablegram that she might read for herself, and said, "He"ll win, my dear. He has luck, and lucky people always win in big things."
Her gaze did not leave his face. One would have said that she had not heard, that she was still seeking what she had admitted him to learn. He sat down where Clelie had been, and said:
"There"s only one thing for us to do, and that is to go over at once."
She closed her eyes. A baffled, puzzled expression was upon her deathly pale face.
"We can sail on the _Mauretania_ Sat.u.r.day," continued he.
"I"ve telephoned and there are good rooms."
She turned her face away.
"Don"t you feel equal to going?"
"As you say, we must."
"The trip can"t do you any harm." His forced composure abruptly vanished and he cried out hysterically: "Good G.o.d!
It"s incredible." Then he got himself in hand again, and went on: "No wonder it bowled you out. I had my anxiety about you to break the shock. But you---- How do you feel now?"
"I"m going to dress."
"I"ll send you in some brandy." He bent and kissed her. A shudder convulsed her--a shudder visible even through the covers. But he seemed not to note it, and went on: "I didn"t realize how fond I was of Brent until I saw that thing in the paper. I almost fainted, myself. I gave Clelie a horrible scare."
"I thought you were having an attack," said Clelie. "My husband looked exactly as you did when he died that way."
Susan"s strange eyes were gazing intently at him--the searching, baffled, persistently seeking look. She closed them as he turned from the bed. When she and Clelie were alone and she was dressing, she said:
"Freddie gave you a scare?"
"I was at breakfast," replied Clelie, "was pouring my coffee.
He came into the room in his bathrobe--took up the papers from the table opened to the foreign news as he always does. I happened to be looking at him"--Clelie flushed--"he is very handsome in that robe--and all at once he dropped the paper--grew white--staggered and fell into a chair. Exactly like my husband."
Susan, seated at her dressing-table, was staring absently out of the window. She shook her head impatiently, drew a long breath, went on with her toilet.