"That's about all, then," he said, and he had the decency not to hold out his hand. "Good luck," he added in an undertone.
I made no answer and turned my face away from him with a wonderful sense of relief.
No sooner had the porter bustled out with his things and the door closed than I looked toward my own small bag with the dominant thought of returning home. But I could not move. I found myself shaking like a leaf and I sank down in the nearest chair, quivering as though the vibration in my nerves would hurl my body to pieces. No, I could not go home in this state. And taking off my coat with hands that shook as in a palsy, I threw myself upon the bed. But before I passed into the sleep of stupefied exhaustion a single insistent foreboding kept dully throbbing through my brain.
"He will come back—Pendleton will come back!"
CHAPTER XIX
Exultation filled me when I awoke late in the morning.
Though I had slept in my clothes and felt particularly disheveled, I stripped with the joy of an athlete after a victory and plunged into the cool invigorating bath.
Pendleton was gone! I do not remember the emotions of Sinbad when he had rid himself of the Old Man of the Sea. But his emotions must have resembled mine. My heart sang, I sang myself. I was manumitted. I was free. To my intimate journal may I not say that I felt myself a man?
I had fought the beast at Ephesus, my pulses blasphemously and jubilantly informed me, and by the Lord, I had won!
The children were mine! Alicia was mine! Would that I could bind them to me with triple brass. But I have bound them. In ridding myself of Pendleton, I had made them securely mine. Suppose he should return one day? They would be grown—reared by me. He would be merely the family skeleton. What is a family without a skeleton? He was that now. He wouldn't matter. It is human destiny to revolve about the child, about children. With the exception of Pendleton the outcast and Gertrude the—well, Gertrude—every one attained completeness only in rearing the next generation. And as I rubbed my body with the coarse towel I felt complete!