I looked around the beautiful, befrilled bedroom, with its handsome furniture of Circassian walnut and its dainty blue silk hangings—and I thought, with a quick little pang of longing, of my severely plain sleeping apartment at home. This Spartan bareness is in imitation of Alfred's cell-like bedroom, which Ann Lisbeth had once shown me, and which had attracted me by the air of wholesomeness the immaculate cleanliness gave it. Alfred and I have often planned a house so plain and sanitary that we could turn the hose all through it. Housekeeping would be a delightfully simple affair with him, for he and I agree so perfectly in our dislike of complicated things. Dear me! I wonder what kind of house Richard and I will keep? It will be—expensive, but will it be harmonious?
The events of last night came crowding before me and I remembered with a most disagreeable little chill that Mrs. Chalmers' eye had held a look of terror as she thought of Richard's commands being disobeyed. Was Richard a monster then? Did he eat people when they dared to go contrary to his wishes? I also recalled the day he and I had had our first actual quarrel—about the volume of Byron which Alfred had given me. His eyes grow very cold and glittering when he is angry, and—yes, I can understand that a certain class of women might be very much afraid of him. Especially if they had him to live with! And I wondered if, at last, after months of struggling, I, too, might not find it more restful and peaceable to become a groveling sort of hypocrite to my lord and master?
"Never, never!" I cried aloud, jumping out of bed as I heard again the same sounds which had awakened me—hurrying footsteps down-stairs through the halls, and the sound of many doors being hastily opened and closed. "I'll give him up if I find him as they say he is."
Just then I recognized the heavy, dignified slam of the massive front door, a kind of muffled protest against the impertinence of using haste with such an august portion of that house; then, a moment after, there was the sound of an automobile starting.
"Evelyn must be much worse," I thought uneasily, as I hurried through with my bath and slipped into my clothes. If this were so I knew that I should not have to meet Mrs. Chalmers at the breakfast table, and I should be relieved of the ordeal of coming in contact with her bland smile. I instinctively felt that she would meet us all exactly as if nothing had happened the night before. She is entirely too well-bred to bear malice.
Now, for my part, I have a nervous distaste to whited sepulchers, aside from any question of morality, and I always have a sense of being brought face to face with the rottenness and dead men's bones whenever I am forced to smooth over a situation which has not been thoroughly explained and threshed out. When I have a grievance against any one, my first desire is to "have it out" with the offender, and I always want any one whom I have offended to offer me the same privilege of setting myself straight.
But Mrs. Chalmers would, I know, sit for ever at the mouth of such whited sepulcher with a bottle of vera-violet held to her nose before she would face anybody in helping to rid the place of its pestilence.
These thoughts were running through my mind as I was dressing, and I will say that I had the grace to feel ashamed of them as I ran down the steps and met her in the hall, her face looking old and drawn with anxiety, her hair in disarray, and her figure enveloped in a fantastic kimono.
"Evelyn is very much worse," she said in a trembling voice as I came up with her and inquired after the patient. "It is an acute attack of appendicitis and Doctor Cooley has just telephoned to the city for Doctor Gordon to come out on the first train. He says—she can't—live without an operation; and, even so, he is very much afraid that it—the appendix—has ruptured."
She broke down here and sobbed miserably, burying her face in her hands and wiping away the tears upon one long silken sleeve of her flowered kimono.