Two tears she pretended not to be conscious of gathered in the dark eyes.
“No, dear—it wasn’t in me. You tried to give it back to me—that scene—at every performance.” Her voice trailed away a little wearily and it was a full minute before the slow words came to her lips again. “But I couldn’t take it away from you, no matter how hard I tried.”
She had carried him with her back to the days of struggle and hope, when success was a star at the top of the world and effort the ladder from which so many rungs fell away as climbing feet sought a firmer hold. The [228] ]days when disappointments were shared with after-theater sandwiches and the monument of ambition took the form of a dingy stock theater on the Main Street of a small town.
“And I felt like such a dog,” he reminisced. “That was when I began loving you—when I was trying to heal the hurt of your disappointment. That night when you walked out of the stage door in the pouring rain and your umbrella turned inside out and I tried to make you take my raincoat but you poked up that little head of yours and looked neither to right nor left like a real Mrs. Siddons. And then an old cab came jogging along and I scooped you up bodily and carried you into it, broken umbrella and all. Do you recall how I held you in my arms all the way to your boarding-house and kept telling you you had to marry me?”
“Take me in your arms now, dear. Let’s live those days over again.”
He looked, anxiously yet with an eager plea in his eyes, toward the nurse. She hesitated.
“Frank,” came the voice from the pillow, “won’t you put your arms around me?”
The nurse nodded, coming quickly to the bed. She slipped her own arm under the wasted body, lifted it. Then the man’s went in its place and silently he cradled the precious burden against him, bending down so that her position might not be changed. She gave a little sigh as his lips touched the silk of her hair.
“I feel better now,” she said.
They were quiet a few moments while the man’s eyes fastened blindly on a cornice of the ceiling.