"I promise."
XL.
Helen lies staring out of the window. There is no curtain to shut out the glaring sunlight, which is causing the fumes to rise from the broiling humanity below.
Metropolitan poverty suggests to me sounds and smells. I could endure sights. What one sees, one knows. There is no longer room for the imagination—that is capable of so much that is more horrible than reality. But a sound!
A woman in the room below us cries, "Don't!" She may be speaking excitedly to her child—or that brute, her husband, may have her by the hair preparing to cut her throat.
Just now, Helen hears a chair knocked over in the dark hall outside her door. It does not occur to her that someone has stumbled in the darkness; she thinks someone has knocked someone down in the hall. There is no more noise, and she carries on the thought still farther. She says, "One of them is being strangled, and that is why it is still." With this thought, a face she has seen once in the doorway opposite comes to her mind; an evil, loathsome face. She at once associates it with the silent murder that is being done in the hall. She has not the slightest doubt that this is a fact. She does not stir. She would not if the evil man with the loathsome face came in to strangle her. She would be perfectly quiet because she would know of nothing else to do.
Some one raps on her door. It is the man with the loathsome face, she knows. She does not speak. Her eyes are fixed in a sort of fascination on the door. The knob turns; she still stares as the door opens. There is an eeriness in watching a slowly opening door when one knows nothing of the one who is impelling it.
A man enters. It is not the man of the evil face. It is Everet; but the outward effect is the same, upon her. She does not speak. She watches him as he comes toward the bed. He does not speak to her. He stands at the bedside looking down at her. She lies motionless, looking up into his face.
Slowly his eyes fill with tears. He takes the slim, transparent hand that lies inert on the grimy quilt, and bowing over it lifts it to his lips. He kisses it as though it were the hand of a princess. There is a reverence, a homage in the act that he never showed to Helen Braine in her proudest days,—the homage that helplessness and misery command.