Cynthia almost agreed with Lewis. But she looked very sorry. After all, Clare Farwell had for several years made life richer and more significant for Cynthia. Cynthia was hungry for the good and the beautiful, as are we all when given leisure to discover ourselves. It was hard giving Clare up as an ideal. Cynthia took a brave hold on honesty and justice when she said, after a painful silence, “Probably you are right, Lewis, in all you say. But I owe Clare a lot. And I’m going to try to stay friends with her and to like her. I mayn’t go on idealizing her as I have. I can’t any more. I’ve seen too much, and last night, as you say, finished the revelation. Any one could see that she was vicious toward Petra. But I think her friendship for me is genuine. And I shall try to make mine for her genuine and understanding. I am sorry for her.—And now promise me, Lewis” (he was up, ready to be off. It was quarter to eight), “promise me at least to suggest that Petra stays home to-day. Couldn’t I take her place? I have nothing to do. I’d love it.”
“You’re a dear,” Lewis said. “I’ll let you know if I need you. As I said, I’m sure Petra’s all right by now. She’s a healthy creature. I wish I had your charity, Cynthia. I need it terribly.”
Green Doors had a hushed air. Lewis felt, from the manner of Elise who opened the door to him, that the curtain had not yet been rung up, as it were, and that it was a little unreasonable of him to expect to be let in on the stage while the hands were still busy shifting scenery from night to morning. But when he asked for Petra, Elise’s face cleared. Petra, since her job, had become a worker, one of the hands. Part of real life. If it was only Petra he wanted, well, Petra could be produced easily enough.
“She hasn’t come down to breakfast yet. She ought to have been down half an hour ago. The cook was just asking me, was she coming.”
“She had a headache last night. Perhaps she is not able to get up. Will you please go and see? Tell her that Doctor Pryne is calling and that it’s all right, he’ll go along without her, unless she’s better.”
Lewis walked back and forth over a space of twelve of the floor tiles in the great hall while he waited for Elise’s return. He counted them each time. They were beautiful tiles. Gray-green and glistening with a silken sheen. The maid seemed a long time away. But she came at last, presenting to his expectant and quickly questioning look a face of blank perplexity.
“Miss Farwell didn’t sleep in her room last night,” she said. “Her bed is opened, just as I left it, and her night things laid out. I can’t think—”
“Take me to her room. Let me see it.” Lewis had the woman by the elbow and was pushing her toward the staircase. It was as if he had taken in Harry’s words about Petra’s not going to bed but out the front door for the first time. Without a wrap! And Clare had said, “She’ll be in bed by now then. It’s really October.”—Something like that, anyway.
As Elise led the way up the stars, Lewis knew, absolutely, that he had lived through these very moments before. He knew also that the dénouement was to be a tragic one. He knew beyond this that he and nobody else in the whole world was responsible and to blame. There was nothing dreamlike in all this. It was as if he were more, not less, sensibly conscious than ordinarily.
Lewis had no hesitation whatever about entering the room which the maid whispered to him was Petra’s. It was a corner room: two windows on each side. He looked about on perfect order. Glazed chintz draperies thickly pleated, like cardboard, were drawn across the window-panes, pulled there by the maid who had opened Petra’s bed for the night, as a screen for her undressing. Petra would have pushed them wide and opened the windows if she had slept here, of course. The curtains being drawn, and the windows shut, was evidence that she had not. Lewis turned to the bed. A pleated spread to match the curtains had been carefully removed and laid across two chairs, stiff and unwrinkled. The sheets were turned down. Across the foot of the bed a white nightgown was laid out, and down on the floor a pair of high-heeled mules, gay with pompoms. The dressing table, in one corner, with its rows of silver and glass-topped jars and bottles, was in exquisite order. Everything in the room was orderly—untouched. Even in his condition of fearful presentiment of evil, Lewis looked for the picture he had given Petra yesterday for her birthday. Had she hung it here in her bedroom, as he had hoped she would? No, there was a painting by Georgia O’Keefe on one wall,—a picture Petra couldn’t possibly understand. Nothing else.