Studies in Wives

by Marie Belloc Lowndes

There was a long silence, and then Mrs. Panfillen crept up close to Althea and touched her, making her start violently. "Then I will call Bolt," she said, and made as if to pass through the window, but Althea stopped her with a quick movement of recoil—"No, no!" she cried, "let me do that!" and she ran down the iron steps; it was good to be out of sight even for a moment of the still presence of the dead—the dead whose mocking spirit seemed to be still terribly alive.

But during the long, difficult minutes that followed, it was Joan Panfillen, not Althea Scrope, who shrank and blenched. It was Althea who put out her young strength to help to lift the dead man, and, under cover of the sheltering mist, to make the leaden feet retrace their steps down the iron stairway, and along the narrow path they had so often leapt up and along with eager haste.

To two of the three women the progress seemed intolerably slow, but to Althea it was all too swift; she dreaded with an awful dread the companioned drive which lay before her.

Perhaps something of what she was feeling was divined by Mrs. Panfillen, for at the very last Scrope's Egeria forgot self, and made, in all sincerity, an offer which on her part was heroic.

"Shall I come with you?" she whispered, averting her eyes from that which lay huddled up by Althea's side, "I will come, willingly; let me come—Althea."

But Althea only shook her head in cold, hurried refusal. She felt that with speech would go a measure of her courage.

Afterwards Althea remembered that there had come a respite,—what had seemed to her at the time an inexplicable delay. A man and a girl had gone slowly by, staring curiously at the two bare-headed women standing out on the pavement, and on whose pale faces there fell the quivering gleam of the old-fashioned cab lamp. Then, when the footfalls of these passers-by had become faint, Bolt spoke to the driver, and handed him some money. Althea heard the words as in dream, "Get along as quick as you can to 24, Delahay Street, there's a good man," and then the clink of silver in the stillness, followed by the full sound of the man's wheezy gratitude.

There came a sudden movement and the dread drive began, the horse slipping, the cab swaying and jolting over the frozen ground.

With a gesture which was wholly instinctive, Althea put out her arm,—her firm, rounded, living arm,—and slipped it round the inert, sagging thing which had been till an hour ago Perceval Scrope. And, as she did so, as she pressed him to her, and kept from him the ignominy of physical helplessness, there came a great lightening of her spirit.

Fear, the base fear bred of the imagination, fell away from her. For the first time there came the certainty that her husband was at last satisfied with her; for the first time she was able to do Perceval Scrope dead what she had never been able to do Perceval Scrope alive, a great service—a service which she might have refused to do.