RoBards managed a wry smile and went in. Patty met him with an ancient look of woe and motioned him into the drawing room. She spoke in a voice like ashes stirred with a cold wind.
“Immy told me,” she began and dropped into a chair sobbing. “She didn’t mean to, but she screamed again at nothing and let slip a word or two, and I got it out of her. She has cried herself sick with remorse at disobeying you. How could you let that monster live? How could you?”
“He’s dead,” RoBards sighed, and sank on an ottoman, crushed with weariness.
But Patty was startled to new life. She demanded the whole truth, and he told her in a dreary, matter-of-fact tone. He told her everything, including the secret of Jud’s resting place.
The story came from him with the anguish of dragging a sharp chicken bone from his throat. It cut and left a bleeding and an ache, but it was wonderful to be free of it.
Patty listened with awe, wide-eyed and panting. There was such need of being close together under the ruins of their life, that, since he could not find strength to lift his head or a hand, she leaned forward toward him till she fell on her knees to the floor and agonized across the space between them and, creeping close into his bosom, drew his arms about her, and wept and wept—with him.
Their only words were “oh!” and “oh!” eternally repeated, yet they felt that only now were their souls made one in a marriage of grief. They had no bodies; they were mere souls crushed under the broken temple of their hopes, bruised and wounded and pinioned together in their despair.
Yet there was a kind of pitiful happiness in groping and finding each other thus, and a bitter ecstasy in being able to love and be loved utterly at last.
CHAPTER XXVI
Thereafter Patty and RoBards felt a need of keeping close. They slept together after that, her throat across his left arm. She called it “my arm,” and when his travels to distant courts took him away from her, that arm of “hers” was lonely.