“Ah, yes!� she said. “Why not tell you what you know already, and be coaxed and patted into compliance and meek, patient submission for the hundredth time! You will kiss me good-bye to-morrow morning, if the weather permits of your starting, and make this flight. It is to be the last, the very last, like the others that have gone before it; it is only so much more daring, only so much more risky, only so much more dangerous than the things that other aviators have dared and risked and braved. If it blows from the north you will not dream of making the venture—the jagged rocks and shoals, and the towering, greedy seas of the Channel Islands threaten things too grim. You will wait, and I with you—oh, my God!—for a favorable wind. Your successes at Brookfields and at Nismes have made the ‘Aquila’ patent worth a moderate fortune; they are turning out replicas of her at your workshops as rapidly as they can make them—your manager took on twenty more skilled hands only last week. You have done what you set out to do; we are freed from poverty for the rest of our lives—we might live happily, peacefully together somewhere, if this unnatural love of peril had not bitten you to the bone. ‘One more contest,’ you will keep on saying; ‘one more revenge I am bound to give this and that or the other man whom I have beaten, or who has challenged me.’� Her bosom heaved, and the ivory paleness of her face was darkened with a rush of blood. “Honor is involved. You are bound in honor to keep your word to others, but free to deceive, to defraud, to cheat and lie to—your wife!�
“Take care what you’re saying!�
Sheldrick leaped out of his chair, fiery red and glaring angrily. Mrs. Sheldrick looked at him out of her glittering, narrowed eyes, and laughed, and her laugh was ugly to hear.
“Your wife! Did you ever realize what it meant to me to be your wife? When we were married, and for eighteen months after that! Heaven upon earth! Have you ever dreamed what sort of life began for me when you were first bitten by this craze of flying, three years ago? Hell—sheer, unmitigated hell! To the public I am a woman in an ulster, or in a dust cloak and a silk motor veil, thick to hide the ghastly terror in my face!—a woman who kisses you before the start, and keeps pace with your aeroplane in an automobile through the long-distance flights, with what the English newspaper men describe as ‘unswerving devotion,’ and the French press correspondents term ‘a tenderness of the most touching.’ They are wrong! I am not conscious of any special devotion. The springs of tenderness have frozen in me. I am like every other spectator on the course, possessed, body and soul, by the secret, poignant, momentary expectation of seeing a man hurled to a horrible death. Only the man is—my husband! Now I remember this, Edgar, but a day will dawn—an hour will come to me—is coming as surely as there is a God in heaven—when he will be no more than the flying man who may possibly be killed!�
There was silence in the room, and the hoarse, dry sound that broke it was not a sob. It came from Sheldrick, a single utterance, like the sound of something breaking.
“I—understand!�
There was no response, for the woman, having unsealed and poured out the last drop of her vials of bitterness and wrath, was dumb. Sheldrick added, after a long pause:
“What do you ask? That I should give up the attempt to fly to Cherbourg? That I should break the engagement with the Aero Club—withdraw the challenge given to M. Ledru? Is that what you demand?�
She said with a hopeless gesture:
“I ask nothing! I demand nothing!�