"Jean is dead," he said distinctly.
He threw himself down on her lounge and tried to collect himself, as he would for any other event of life—that he might meet it manfully.
"She is really dead," he repeated. "I have got to live without her, ... and those children ... no mother. I must arouse myself. I must bear it, as other men do."
Even as the words turned themselves like poisoned wires through his mind the conviction that his sorrow was not like the sorrow of other men rushed upon him. What had he done to her? Oh, what had he been to her—his poor Jean? He turned his head and thrust his face into the depths of her blue pillow. A delicate breath stole from it—the violet perfume that Jean used about her bedroom because he fancied it. He sprang from the lounge, and began to pace the room madly to and fro.
Now there rose about him, wave by wave, like the rising of an awful tide, the overlooked but irresistible force of the common life which married man and woman share—incidents that he would rather have died than recall, words, looks, scenes, which it shattered his soul and body to remember.
A solemn sea, they widened and spread about him. He felt himself torn from his feet and tossed into the surge of them.
It seemed to him that every tenderness he had shown his wife was drowning out of his consciousness. But every hard thing he had ever done rose and rolled upon him—an unkind look, a harsh word, a little neglect here, a certain indifference there; an occasion when he had made her miserable and could just as easily have made her happy; a time when she had asked—Jean so seldom asked—for some trifling attention which he had omitted to bestow; the desolate look she wore on a given day; the patient eyes she lifted, heart-sick with sore surprise, once when he ...
The worst of it was in thinking how it was when she began to be weak and ill. Jean was not a complaining woman, never a whining invalid, but resolute, sweet, and cheerful. Like an air-plant on oxygen, she existed on his tenderness. He had offered it to her when he felt like it. Well, busy, bustling man—out of his bounteous health and freedom, what comfort had he given to this imprisoned woman? The passing of his moods? The attention of his whims? The fragments of his time? The blunt edge of his sympathy?
One night he had come in late, when he could quite as well have come two hours before; he found her by the open window, gasping for breath in the cold night air, in her blue gown, with her braided hair, her lovely look, the dear expression in her eyes. She had not reproached him ... he wished from his soul, now, that she had reproached him, sometimes; it would have done him good; it would have dashed cold water on his fainting sense of duty to her; he was the kind of man who would have responded to it like a man. But she was not the kind of woman to do it. And she never had. So he had slid into those easy habits of accepting the invalid, anyhow; as a fact not to be put too much in the foreground of his daily life ... not to intrude too much. And she had not protested, had not cried out against the frost that gathered in his heart.
She had trodden her via dolorosa alone. As she had endured, so she had died. He thought that if he had only been with her then, he could have borne it all.