CHAPTER XLI
Hestumbled into the house in sudden need of Patty and her support in his panic.
He found her lying on the floor of the parlor, where she had fainted. Her big crinoline skirts belled out and she looked like a huge tulip fallen on its side. Her feet sat up awkwardly on their heels; her limbs were visible to the knees. It was the only ungraceful posture he had ever known her to assume.
As he gathered her into his arms, Patty returned from her coma into a kind of mania. She talked to herself or to some invisible listener. Mostly she muttered unintelligibly some gibberish that made her beautiful mouth ugly and unhuman.
She clung to her husband’s hands and arms, clutching at them when he moved them to lift her to a chair and bent above her, pleading with her to talk to him. She called him by his first name, babbling:
“David, David, oh, David! David, David!”
It was a long while before he could make out any other word and then he caught faintly:
“They shan’t stay here! They can go to Europe or California or hell. But they shan’t stay here! they shan’t, they shan’t!”
He could not persuade her to speak to them. When Immy came in radiant and shaken with laughter, Patty laughed like a woman long insane, worn down with some old ribald mania; but she would not speak, though Immy wept and begged:
“Mamma, kiss me. Please, Mamma! If I did wrong, it’s too late to make a fuss. Don’t spoil my first little chance of happiness, Mamma! Oh, come on and kiss me and say you forgive me!”
At last Patty whispered, and patted Immy’s quivering hands, but as if to be rid of her:
“I’ve nothing to forgive you, you poor baby, you poor little ignorant baby. But—but——”
That was all, and she put out her cheek to Immy’s lips in dismissal, but did not kiss her. Immy stole away baffled, disheartened.
The wise Chalender dared not approach Patty. His intuition of woman warned him to stay out on the porch or wait by the carriage till Immy’s trunk was brought down. Then he drove away with her and RoBards dared not wave them good-by.
At last when there was silence and the hush of night, RoBards fell asleep. He was wakened by a squeaking sound. He thought he saw a ghost by the bureau. He rose slowly and went towards the wraith cautiously. It was Patty in her nightgown. She was struggling to open the drawer where he had kept an ancient dueling pistol for years against the burglars that never came.
As he stood stock still, she got the drawer open and took out the weapon. She caressed it, and nodded her head, mumbling drowsily, “Yes, yes, I must, I must save her from him!” Her lips moved, but her eyes were not open.
With all gentleness, he took her hand and lifted from her unresisting fingers the pistol. Then he set his arms about Patty and guided her back to bed. He lifted her feet between the sheets and drew the covers over her.
She breathed the placid, shallow breath of one who sleeps, but she clung to his hands so that he could hardly free them. Then he hid the pistol under the mattress beneath his head and thanked heaven for one horror at least that had been forestalled.
By and by Patty, still aslumber, turned into his bosom and laid her little hands beneath his chin. He sighed, “Thank God for sleep!” But even in her sleep there was purgatory, for she twitched and clutched him in incessant nightmares.
The next morning she said nothing of her dream or her somnambulism. And he felt no need of questioning her.The soul has its own torture chambers, where even love has no right of entry, especially when it knows too well what is within.
All that Patty said was: “I don’t feel well enough to get up to-day. I’ll just rest here.”
Late that forenoon Immy drove up alone from White Plains, where she and her husband had found lodging at a tavern. She led her father into his library and said to him:
“Harry—my husband—and I have talked things over and he’s—we’ve decided to go back to California. I think I’d be happier out there—away from everything. I think Mamma would be happier. You haven’t congratulated me yet, so I congratulate you on getting me honestly married off. That’s something in these days. Besides, nobody will miss me much.”
As RoBards looked at her now, she was not the wife of Chalender or anybody: she was the little, ill-fated girl he had defended in vain against life. She had secured herself a new defender—against too much sober thought about things. He realized how canny she had been, how lonely and how afraid.
His arms went leaping out to her. She flung herself into his lap and he clenched her fiercely, kissing the rippling curls along the top of her bent head, and moaning:
“Oh, my baby, my baby!”
Then she broke into sobs:
“Don’t say that word, Papa! That’s the word I said when I lost my baby—as you’ve lost yours. Where have they gone, Papa, your baby and mine? Where have they both gone? Where does everything go that we love and lose?”