"'I AM HIS WIFE,' SHE SAID."
CHAPTER XXXII
Helen's announcement was made quietly, without any melodramatic display.
In the circle immediately surrounding her and her husband were her father and mother, Elise and Evans Rutledge, and Hal Lodge but just now coming to his senses and his feet. Behind these were Mrs. Hazard, Captain Howard, Senator Richland, and a gathering of other excited guests. For a space after Helen's speech the scene was steady and fixed as for a flashlight picture, and was photographed on Elise's brain: the incredulity on her father's face—the horror on that of Evans Rutledge—the perfectly restrained features of Howard—the quickly suppressed smile of Richland as he glanced at Evans in lightning comprehension of all the situation meant—the ghastly pallor of Mrs. Phillips as she sank voiceless in a dead faint—
"No—o!"
The harshly aspirated protest of Mr. Phillips was propelled from his lungs with a burst of indignant anger, but drawn out at the end into a pathetic quaver—and the scene dissolved.
Rutledge caught and lifted Mrs. Phillips whose collapse was unnoticed by her husband in his transfixed stare at Helen, and pushing back through the crowd was about to place her upon a settle in the hall; but at Elise's bidding he carried her up the broad stairs and left her in the care of her daughter and Lola Hazard. There could be no good-bye said—no time for it; but at the glance of dismissal Elise gave him from her mother's bedside—at the look of suffering in her eyes—his heart was like to burst.
Down-stairs the confusion was painful. The guests were hesitating between being accounted so ill-bred as to stare at a family scene, and running away from it as from a scourge.
To her father's unsteady denial Helen repeated her simple statement: "I am his wife."