In this way. His wife came into his workshop one morning. The workshop was forbidden ground, and Yethill dropped the negative he was developing, and turned to stare. He saw that she was very pale, and that her lips were bitten in. He heard her say that there was something the matter with baby, and she wanted the doctor.
Solely in the interests of his wife whom he esteemed above all living women, Yethill refused to allow the doctor to be sent for. The child was as right as a trivet. Women were always worrying. She was to get away with her nonsense, and leave him in peace. With more to the same effect. She drooped her head, and went away obediently, only to return in half an hour, with another version of the same prayer upon her lips. Would he—would he come and look for himself? Yethill was thoroughly annoyed. Yethill refused. Yethill went on, stubbornly, dabbling with his negatives, until right from overhead—baby’s nursery was above the workshop—Yethill had never heard a woman scream like that before.... Something like an ice-bolt shot down his spine. He dashed up to the nursery, and looked in. The sight he saw there sent him tearing across the Common, a hatless, coatless man, to the Doctor’s house.
When the Doctor came he said he could be of no use; he ought to have been called in an hour ago. And Yethill, hearing this fiat, and meeting his wife’s eyes across the table, felt the system totter to its foundations.
He found himself wondering at her for taking baby’s end so quietly; but he had schooled her to endure silently. There were no tears—he had always jeered at tears. The Doctor took him aside before he left.
“You must treat your wife with kindness—and consideration, Yethill,� said the Doctor, “or I won’t answer for the consequences!�
As if Yethill needed to be told to be kind or considerate! As if Yethill had never loved—did not love—the late Miss Sallis! He planned a revelation for her without delay. He would take her in his arms; kiss her, and tell her that her time of trial was overpast; give her her meed of praise for her heroism, her meed of sympathy for her grief—and his. And he would own that he had made a mistake in the matter of baby deceased. And she would forgive—as she always had forgiven.
As he decided this, she came into the room. She was quite composed. She carried something behind her. She spoke to him very quietly in a dull, strange, level voice—so strange a voice that, just as he was about to open his arms and say, “Annie!� in the voice he had been saving up for the Day of Revelation, the gesture and the word wouldn’t come.
“Tom,� said Mrs. Yethill, “what should you say if I told you that I had made up my mind to kill myself?�
She brought her hand from behind her; it held one of Yethill’s revolvers. She had been very much afraid of these lethal instruments in the early days of her marriage, but under the system had learned to clean them, and even drew the cartridges. But the thing she held wasn’t loaded, Yethill was quite sure of that. It sealed up the fountain of his admiring tenderness to have her treat him to commonplace, vulgar heroics. It put her out of drawing, and Yethill out of temper.
She asked again: