“I’m afraid so,” was Peter’s answer. “But I’ve been wiring, and you’ll be quite safe in telling your husband that she’s in no actual danger. The Marine Hospital officials have acknowledged that no flame was inhaled, that it’s merely temporary shock, and, of course, the face-burn.”
“But what can they do?” I asked, in little more than a whisper.
“They’re trying the new ambersine treatment, and later on, I suppose, they can rely on skin-grafting and facial surgery,” Peter explained to me.
“Is it that bad?” I asked, sitting down in one of the empty chairs, for the mere effort to vision any such disfigurement had brought a Channel-crossing and Calais-packet feeling to me.
“It’s very sad,” said Peter, more ill-at-ease than I’d ever seen him before, “But there’s positively no danger, remember. It won’t be so bad as your morning paper will try to make it out. They’ve sensationalized it, of course. That’s why I wanted to be here first, and give you the facts. They are distressing enough, God knows, without those yellow reporters working them over for wire consumption.”
I was glad that Peter didn’t offer to stay, didn’t even seem to wish to stay. I wanted quietness and time to think the thing over. Dinky-Dunk, I realized, would have to be told, and told at once. It would, of course, be a shock to him. And it would be something more. It would be a sudden crowding to some final issue of all those possibilities which lay like spring-traps beneath the under-brush of our indifference. I had no way of knowing what it was that had attracted him to Lady Alicia. Beauty of face, of course, must have been a factor in it. And that beauty was now gone. But love, according to the Prophets and the Poets, overcometh all things. And in her very helplessness, it was only too plain to me, his Cousin Allie might appeal to him in a more personal and more perilous way. My Diddums himself, of late, had appealed more to me in his weakness and his unhappiness than in his earlier strength and triumph. There was a time, in fact, when I had almost grown to hate his successes. And yet he was my husband. He was mine. And it was a human enough instinct to fight for what was one’s own. But that wild-bird part of man known as his will could never be caged and chained. If somewhere far off it beheld beauty and nobility it must be free to wing its way where it wished. The only bond that held it was the bond of free-giving and goodness. And if it abjured such things as that, the sooner the flight took place and the colors were shown, the better. If on the home-bough beside him nested neither beauty nor nobility, it was only natural that he should wander a-field for what I had failed to give him. And now, in this final test, I must not altogether fail him. For once in my life, I concluded, I had to be generous.
So I waited until Dinky-Dunk emerged. I waited, deep in thought, while he splashed like a sea-lion in his bath, and called out to Struthers almost gaily for his glass of orange-juice, and shaved, and opened and closed drawers, and finished dressing and came out in his cool-looking suit of cricketer’s flannel, so immaculate and freshly-pressed that one would never dream it had been bought in England and packed in mothballs for four long years.
I heard him asking for the kiddies while I was still out in the patio putting the finishing touches to his breakfast-table, and his grunt that was half a sigh when he learned that they’d been sent off before he’d had a glimpse of them. And I could see him inhale a lungful of the balmy morning air as he stood in the open doorway and stared, not without approval, at me and the new-minted day.
“Why the clouded brow, Lady-Bird?” he demanded as he joined me at the little wicker table.
“I’ve had some rather disturbing news,” I told him, wondering just how to begin.