The Gates Between

by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

Until the time mentioned at the beginning of my narrative, I had in no sense appreciated the state of the case, as it lay between my ideal and my fact. That I had been more or less impatient of speech in my own home for some time past, is probably true. The ungoverned lip is a terrible master; and I had been a slave too long. I was in the habit of finding fault with my patients. I was accustomed to be what we call "quick" with servants. Neither had, I thought, as a rule, seemed to care the less for me on this account. If I lost a patient or a coachman now and then, I could afford to. The item did not trouble me. I was inconsiderate at times with personal friends. They said, It is his way, and bore with me. People usually bore with me; they always had. I looked upon this as one of the rights of temperament, so far as I looked upon it at all. I do not think this indulgence had occurred to me as other than a tribute. It is common enough in dealing with men of my sort. (And alas, there are enough of my sort; I must be looked upon rather as a type than a specimen.) Such indulgence is a movement of self-defence, or else of philosophy, upon the part of those who come in contact with us. To this view of the subject I had given no attention.

I had lived to be almost fifty years old, and no person had ever said: "Esmerald Thorne, you trust your attractive qualities too far. Power and charm do not give a man a permit to be disagreeable. Your temperament does not release you from the common-place human duty of self-restraint. A gentleman has no more right to get uncontrollably angry than he has to get drunk. The patience with which others receive you is not a testimony to your strength; it is a concession to your weakness. You are living upon concessions like disease, or childhood, or age."

No one had said this—surely not my wife. I can recall an expression of bewilderment at times upon her beautiful face, which for the moment perplexed me. After I had gone out, I would remember that I had been nervous in my manner. I do not think I had ever spoken with actual roughness to her, until this day of which I write. That I had been sometimes cross enough, is undoubtedly the case.

On that November day I had been overworked. This was no novelty, and I offer it as no excuse. I had been up for two nights with a dangerous case. I had another in the suburbs, and a consultation out of town. There was a quarrel at the hospital, and a panic in Stock Street. I had seen sixty patients that day. I had been attacked in the "Therapeutic Quarterly" upon my famous theory of Antisepsis. Perhaps I may add the circumstance that my baby was teething.

This was, naturally, less important to me than to his mother, who thought the child was ill. I knew better, and it annoyed me that my knowledge did not remove her apprehension. In point of fact, he had cried at night for a week or two, more than he ought to have done. She could not understand why I denied him a Dover's powder. I needed sleep, and could not get it. We were both worn, and—I might fill my chapter to the brim with the little reasons for my great error. Let it suffice that they were small and that it was large.

We had been married three years, and our boy was a year old. He was a fine fellow. Helen lost her Greek look and took on the Madonna expression after he was born. Any woman who is fit to be a mother gains that expression with her first child. My wife was a very happy mother.

She was sitting in the library when I came in that evening. It was a warm, red library, with heavy curtains and an open fire—a deep room that absorbed colour. I fancied the room, and it was my wife's pleasure to await me in it with the child each evening at the earliest hour when I might by any chance be expected home. She possessed to the full the terrible power of waiting which women have. She could do nothing when she expected me. Although three years married, she could not read, or write, or play when she was listening for my step. I do not mean that she told me this. I found it out. She never called my attention to such little feminine weaknesses. She was never over-fond. My wife had a noble reserve. I had never seen the hour when I felt that her tenderness was a treasure to be lightly had, or indifferently treated.

It should be said that the library opened from the parlours, and was at that time separated from them by a heavy portière of crimson stuff, the doors not being drawn. This drapery she was in the habit of folding apart at the hours of my probable return, and as I came through the long parlours my eyes had the first greeting of her, before my voice or arms. Upon this evening, as upon others, I entered by the parlour door, and came—more quickly than usual—toward the library. I was in a great hurry; one of the acute attacks of the chronic condition which besets the busy doctor. As I crossed the length of the thick carpet, the rooms shook beneath my tread; I burst into, rather than entered, the library,—not seeing her, I think, or not pausing to see her, in the accustomed manner. When I had come to her I found that the child was not with her, as usual. She was sitting alone by the library table under the drop-light, which held a shade of red lace. She had a gown of white wool trimmed with ermine; a costume which gave me pleasure, and which she wore upon cool evenings, not too often for me to weary of it. She regarded my taste in dress as delicately and as delightedly as she did every other wish or will of mine.

She had been trying to read; but the magazine lay closed upon her knee below her folded hands. Her face wore an anxious look as she turned the fine contours of her head toward me.

"Oh," she cried, "at last!"