He gathered together all his forces and suddenly expelled with rousing force the word he had already applied to her on the day of the intercepted letter.
He found it seemed great satisfaction in the sound and taste of it. He repeated it thrice. "Zut," cried the doctor, "Sssh!"
Then Sir Isaac intimated his sense that calm was imperative. "You send for c.r.a.ppen," he said with a quiet earnestness.
She had become now so used to terms of infamy during the last year or so, so accustomed to forgive them as part of his suffering, that she seemed not to hear the insult.
"Do you want him at once?" she asked. "Shall I telegraph?"
"Want him at once!" He dropped his voice to a whisper. "Yes, you fool--yes. Telegraph. (Phew.) Telegraph.... I mustn"t get angry, you know. You--telegraph."
He became suddenly still. But his eyes were active with hate.
She glanced at the doctor, then moved to the door.
"I will send a telegram," she said, and left him still malignant.
She closed the door softly and walked down the long cool pa.s.sage towards her own room....
--10
She had to be patient. She had to be patient. This sort of thing had to go on from crisis to crisis. It might go on for years. She could see no remedy and no escape.
What else was there to do but be patient? It was all amazing unjust, but to be a married woman she was beginning to understand is to be outside justice. It is autocracy. She had once imagined otherwise, and most of her life had been the slow unlearning of that initial error. She had imagined that the hostels were hers simply because he had put it in that way. They had never been anything but his, and now it was manifest he would do what he liked with his own. The law takes no cognizance of the unwritten terms of a domestic reconciliation.
She sat down at the writing-table the hotel management had improvised for her.
She rested her chin on her hand and tried to think out her position. But what was there to think out, seeing that nature and law and custom have conspired together to put women altogether under the power of jealous and acquisitive men?
She drew the telegram form towards her.
She was going to write a telegram that she knew would bring c.r.a.ppen headlong--to disinherit her absolutely. And--it suddenly struck her--her husband had trusted her to write it. She was going to do what he had trusted her to do.... But it was absurd.
She sat making patterns of little dots with her pencil point upon the telegram form, and there was a faint smile of amus.e.m.e.nt upon her lips.
It was absurd--and everything was absurd. What more was to be said or thought about it? This was the lot of woman. She had made her struggle, rebelled her little bit of rebellion. Most other women no doubt had done as much. It made no difference in the long run.
But it was hard to give up the hostels. She had been foolish of course, but she had not let them make her feel _real_. And she wasn"t real. She was a wife--just _this_....
She sighed and bestirred herself and began to write.
Then abruptly she stopped writing.
For three years her excuse for standing--everything, had been these hostels. If now the hostels were to be wrenched out of her hands, if at her husband"s death she was to be stripped of every possession and left a helpless dependant on her own children, if for all her good behaviour she was to be insulted by his frantic suspicions so long as he lived and then disgraced by his posthumous mistrust; was there any reason why she should go on standing anything any more? Away there in England was Mr.
Brumley, _her_ man, ready with service and devotion....
It was a profoundly comforting thing to think of him there as hers. He was hers. He"d given so much and on the whole so well. If at last she were to go to him....
Yet when she came to imagine the reality of the step that was in her mind, it took upon itself a chill and forbidding strangeness. It was like stepping out of a familiar house into empty s.p.a.ce. What could it be like? To take some odd trunks with her, meet him somewhere, travel, travel through the evening, travel past nightfall? The bleak strangeness of that going out never to return!
Her imagination could give her no figure of Mr. Brumley as intimate, as habitual. She could as easily imagine his skeleton. He remained in all this queer speculation something friendly, something incidental, more than a trifle disembodied, entirely devoted of course in that hovering way--but hovering....
And she wanted to be free. It wasn"t Mr. Brumley she wanted; he was but a means--if indeed he was a means--to an end. The person she wanted, the person she had always wanted--was _herself_. Could Mr. Brumley give her that? Would Mr. Brumley give her that? Was it conceivable he would carry sacrifice to such a pitch as that?...
And what nonsense was this dream! Here was her husband needing her. And the children, whose inherent ungainliness, whose ungracious spirits demanded a perpetual palliation of culture and instilled deportment.
What honest over-nurse was there for him or helper and guide and friend for them, if she withdrew? There was something undignified in a flight for mere happiness. There was something vindictive in flight from mere insult. To go, because she was disinherited, because her hostels were shattered,--No! And in short--she couldn"t do it....
If Sir Isaac wanted to disinherit her he must disinherit her. If he wanted to go on seizing and reading her letters, then he could. There was nothing in the whole scheme of things to stop him if he did not want to stop himself, nothing at all. She was caught. This was the lot of women. She was a _wife_. What else in honour was there but to be a wife up to the hilt?...
She finished writing her telegram.
--11
Suddenly came a running in the pa.s.sage outside, a rap at the door and the nurse entered, scared, voluble in Italian, but with gestures that translated her.
Lady Harman rose, realized the gravity and urgency of the moment and hurried with her along the pa.s.sage. "Est-il mauvais?" the poor lady attempted, "Est-il----"
Oh! what words are there for "taken worse"?
The woman attempted English and failed. She resorted to her native Italian and exclaimed about the "povero signore." She conveyed a sense of pitiful extremities. Could it be he was in pain again? What was it?
What was it? Ten minutes ago he had been so grimly angry.
At the door of the sick room the nurse laid a warning hand on the arm of Lady Harman and made an apprehensive gesture. They entered almost noiselessly.
The Bavarian doctor turned his face from the bed at their entrance. He was bending over Sir Isaac. He held up one hand as if to arrest them; his other was engaged with his patient. "No," he said. His attention went back to the sick man, and he remained very still in that position, leaving Lady Harman to note for the first time how broad and flat he was both between his shoulders and between his ears. Then his face came round slowly, he relinquished something heavy, stood up, held up a hand.
"Zu spat," he whispered, as though he too was surprised. He sought in his mind for English and then found his phrase: "He has gone!"
"Gone?"
"In one instant."
"Dead?"
"So. In one instant."
On the bed lay Sir Isaac. His hand was thrust out as though he grasped at some invisible thing. His open eyes stared hard at his wife, and as she met his eyes he snored noisily in his nose and throat.
She looked from the doctor to the nurse. It seemed to her that both these people must be mad. Never had she seen anything less like death.
"But he"s not dead!" she protested, still standing in the middle of the room.
"It iss chust the air in his throat," the doctor said. "He went--_so!_ In one instant as I was helping him."
He waited to see some symptom of feminine weakness. There was a quality in his bearing--as though this event did him credit.
"But--Isaac!"