“She knows what you don’t know; she knows me.”
“Then she must be very wise!”
“She knows ten thousand things you never dreamed of; she has watched them bring dead men out of the pit; she has heard grimy children crying for their dead fathers. She knows the real things; but life to you is only a candy box with pretty pictures on the cover.”
“This may be very interesting,” she remarked coldly, “but I’m afraid you’re going to bore me. I don’t think I care to hear about dead men and the pit and children crying. Good night.”
He was safe for the moment. Her reference to Jean had steadied him, but he was not sure of himself. He felt that Jean was there by the table where he had pressed her hand to his face; the viol-like chords of her voice were in his ears; he saw the light of her countenance and felt the benediction of her spirit.
Mrs. Craighill had never understood him less than in that instant when, half turning to leave, she saw the far-away look of his eyes, the straightening of his figure and the indifferent glance that showed his acquiescence in her departure.
It was at this moment that the lights in the hall, which they had turned off when they sought the library, flashed on again. Mrs. Craighill sprang to the switch inside the library door and darkened the room. The hall lights fell only faintly across the library threshold, but as she peered out through the portières Mrs. Craighill saw her husband slowly descending, clad in his dressing gown, some papers in his hand. Her heart tore at her breast as she waited. When he reached the hall she was quite sure that he would come into the library and she put her hand over her mouth to stifle her frightened breathing. But he turned toward the little coat room and she heard him at the telephone. She was faint from fear, but Wayne caught her wrist and held her. Colonel Craighill was dictating a message to the telegraph office; cries for help these messages were, Wayne knew, to friends in New York and Philadelphia, and they added testimony to the worst Wayne knew of his father’s plight.
“Come,” Wayne whispered to the shrinking woman—“come.”
He drew her across the room and through a little-used door that communicated with the rear of the house, to a circular stairway that led to the upper floors, and waited until he heard the door above open and shut softly. Then he went back to the library and saw his father pass into the lighted area of the hall and mount the stair slowly.
The lights were snapped out from above and the house was still. Wayne sighed deeply and sought in the dark the chair in which Jean had sat that morning. When the light of the late winter dawn crept in grayly he was still there, his head bowed in his arms on the table.