“Because I should have gone completely mad if I had stayed another minute. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I was scarcely capable of thought, and yet they tried to cheer me up as if I were an automaton, and all they had to do was to turn a crank. I was supposed to sit on the lawn and drink iced postum and be sociable with my fellow pariahs. Then the radio was turned on every night and those who could still hobble were expected to dance. So wholesome, you know. Half crazed already, the canned music and canned joviality finished me. The jazz sounded in my ears all night. I felt as if my soul were being pounded into a jelly. I couldn’t sleep a wink. So I packed my things and stole away without saying a word. I think I had some delirious idea of losing myself and my identity forever. I hiked for the first few days, keeping to the woods for fear of being found. I got my meals at stray farmhouses and slept once or twice in a barn. When I came to the hut I was pretty well exhausted and decided to rest up for a day or two. That’s all,” he sighed wearily.
Anne’s eyes were full of compassionate horror.
“Poor boy, it must have been ghastly. I scarcely wonder you wanted to end it all. And it was I who awakened you from your first good sleep. Will you ever forgive me for bringing you back to this sordid old world?”
He looked up at her with worshipping eyes.
“Not sordid with you in it,” he caught at her hand and retained it. “You are the fairy princess, you know, who broke the evil spell. To-day I feel—almost healed.”
The mournful young voice went to her heart. With an assumption of gayety she ran to the window and pulled down the shade.
“Very pretty indeed from a sick child. But now I am really going. You must sleep. Later on I will bring you a little supper, your first real meal under my roof, and we will discuss the future. Meanwhile I will give your letter to my chauffeur, who is going into New York anyway, to bring back some necessary things for the house. And now, sweet dreams.”
She turned to leave the room, but before she could stop him he drew her hand to his lips and kissed the palm passionately and with reverence.
The next day he was so much better that he was allowed to sit up in bed and dictate to Regina as to the proper disposal of the contents of his suitcase which Anne’s chauffeur had packed and brought down from the hut before leaving for New York. Attired in a pair of his own pajamas, hair brushed, face and hands washed by the delighted and flustered old woman, Alexis was seriously contemplating a shave, when at the bottom of the suitcase beneath some silk socks he came upon Claire’s picture.
He drew it out slowly, an expression of shrinking upon his face. Where had it come from? He certainly would never consciously have packed it among his things. And neither would his mother have done so. The girl herself, pitiful, sentimental little fool must have secreted it among his things hoping that he would come upon it, and perhaps cast her a random thought, as one throws a bone to a dog. For Claire was like a dog, with the same beseeching, tragic gaze that looked up at him now from the photograph so reproachfully. A tremor of rage swept over him as he met those wistful eyes. Damn it, what right had she to reproach him and to look so woebegone! As if he, Alexis, were to blame for everything. Hadn’t she fallen in with his mother’s plans with alacrity, with indecency even? Yes, they had tricked him nicely between them. Claire’s visit to his room in the dead of night and his mother’s neatly-timed discovery, and accusations. What else had there been to do after that, but to marry the girl though they were both innocent even in thought? No, Claire had no right to reproach him, for she had deceived him, too. His mother, for her own cryptic purposes and Claire in self-deluded passion. He had done the only thing possible under the circumstances. Was it his fault that he had never been able to love her? He had told her so from the beginning, hadn’t he? She had nothing to complain of. If he had neglected her, he at least had been faithful in a technical sense. What mattered it if the faithfulness had proceeded from indifference, rather than from a sense of strict virtue? The fact remained, he had been faithful. And to what? A tool of his insatiable mother; a toy thrown to serve as outlet for hitherto-repressed physical desires; a stuffed doll to appease nascent passion.