His hands clutched the bushes as he passed. He kicked the gravel from his feet. He cursed aloud, not knowing what he was saying. He felt an intolerable thirst; his eyeballs burned; his heart hammered spasmodically.
He looked at his watch. It was twelve o’clock. His spinning brain conceived the wild project of forcing himself up to that lighted room at the corner of the house and putting the woman to the torture. And at that moment he saw the priest lean out of the window and speak to the notary public, who immediately entered the house.
A half hour later the priest came out of the front door and toward him. He held a paper in his hand.
Bourke was waiting at the door. He took the affidavit from the priest, glanced over it, and thrust it into his pocket.
“Come,” he said. “I’ll get one of the men here to hitch up a team and drive us to the One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street station. There we’ll take the train for Forty-second Street, and at the Grand Central the train for Albany. No south bound local will pass here for an hour. I happen to know that the governor is in Albany to-night attending a banquet.”
XXIII
Patience had given up hope at last. Its death had been accompanied by wonder rather than by despair. Her remarkable experience with Bourke had led her to idealise him even beyond the habit of woman, and her faith in his ability to save her had been absolute. Nevertheless, woman like, she wove elaborate excuses for him, and loved him none the less.
The day had dragged itself into twenty years. The chaplain had called and been dismissed. The warden had visited her and uttered the conventional words of sympathy, to which Patience had listened without expression, loathing the coarse ungrammatical brute. The head-keeper she liked, for she was the first to recognise true sympathy and nobility within whatever bark. Miss Beale had come and wept and kissed her hands through the bars.
“Patience! Patience!” she sobbed. “If it could only be said that you died like a Christian!”
“It can be said that I died like an American gentlewoman of the nineteenth century,” replied Patience. “I am quite satisfied to know that they will be obliged to say that.”