Patience Sparhawk and Her Times: A Novel

by Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

This morning she listened to the rain for a time, then moved suddenly to her side, her eyes opening more widely in the dark. The rain said nothing to her. She listened to it without a thrill, with no longing, with no loneliness of soul, and no vague tremor of passion.

Nothing in her unhappy experience had so forcibly brought home to her the changes which her inner self had undergone in the last few years. Life was a hard clear-cut fact; she could no longer dream. Imagination had taken itself out of her and gone elsewhere, into some brain whose dear privilege it was to have a long future and a brief past.

The tears scalded her eyes. She cursed Beverly Peele. She wished she had remained in Monterey. There, at least, she would never have married any one, for there was no one to marry.

“Even if my life had been a success,” she thought, “if Beverly Peele had been less objectionable, or had died, and I had had the world at my feet, it would be too high a price to pay. Not even to care that one is alone when the rain is sweeping about with that hollow song! To think and dream of nothing beyond the moment! To have accepted life with cynical philosophy, and feel no desire to shake the Universe with a great passion! To be beyond the spell of the rain is to be a thousand years old, and a thousand centuries away from the cosmic sense. I wish I were dead.”

And there were other moods. Sometimes the devil which is an integral part of all strong natures—of woman’s as well as of man’s, and no matter what her creed—awoke and clamoured. There were four or five men in the office whom she liked well enough when absent, and in whom the lightning of her glance would have changed friendship to passion. Why she resisted the temptation which so fiercely assailed her at times she never knew. Conventions did not exist for her impatient mind excepting in so far as they made life more comfortable; she had in full measure youth’s power to know and to give joy, and she owed no one loyalty. And at this time she imaged no future: she had lost faith in ideals. It was only at brief intervals that there came a sudden passionate desire—almost a flash of prophetic insight—for the one man who must exist for her among the millions of men. And this, if anything, took the place of her lost ideals and conquered the primal impulses of her nature. Or was it a mere matter of destiny? Woman is a strange and complex instrument. She is as she was made, and it is not well to condemn her even after elaborate analysis.

X

One morning in May, Hal came in before Patience was out of bed. She sat down on a chair and tapped the floor with her foot.

“I come charged with a message, a special mission, as it were,” she said. “I hardly know where to begin.”

“Well?”

“Don’t look at me like that, or I’ll never have the courage to go on. Bev is desperately ill,—not in bed, but he has the most frightful pains: his disease, which has been threatening for a year, has developed. It may or may not be fatal. The doctor says it certainly will be unless he has peace of mind, and he is fretting after you like a big baby. The grippe seems to have broken the back of his temper, and he is simply a great calf bleating for its parent. It would be ridiculous if it were not serious. You’d better come back to us, Patience.”