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Page 35
"Where is the doctor?" demanded Jane.
"Busy," replied Higgins. "One of the women is sick."
Jane was provoked. She had put some labour into the eggnog. But it
shows the curious evolution going on in her that she got out the
eggs and milk and made another one without protest. Then with her
head up she carried it to the door.
"You might clear things away, Higgins," she said, and went down the
stairs. Her heart was going rather fast. Most of the men Jane knew
drank more or less, but this was different. She would have turned
back halfway there had it not been for Higgins and for owning
herself conquered. That was Jane's real weakness--she never owned
herself beaten.
The singing had subsided to a low muttering. Jane stopped outside
the door and took a fresh grip on her courage. Then she pushed the
door open and went in.
The light was shaded, and at first the tossing figure on the bed was
only a misty outline of greys and whites. She walked over, expecting
a pillow at any moment and shielding the glass from attack with her
hand.
"I have brought you another eggnog," she began severely, "and if you
spill it----"
Then she looked down and saw the face on the pillow.
To her everlasting credit, Jane did not faint. But in that moment,
while she stood staring down at the flushed young face with its
tumbled dark hair and deep-cut lines of dissipation, the man who had
sung to her over the piano, looking love into her eyes, died to her,
and Jane, cold and steady, sat down on the side of the bed and fed
the eggnog, spoonful by spoonful, to his corpse!
When the blank-eyed young man on the bed had swallowed it all
passively, looking at her with dull, incurious eyes, she went back
to her room and closing the door put the washstand against it. She
did nothing theatrical. She went over to the window and stood
looking out where the trees along the drive were fading in the dusk
from green to grey, from grey to black. And over the transom came
again and again monotonously the refrain:
_I--love you o--own--ly,
I love--but--you._
Jane fell on her knees beside the bed and buried her wilful head in
the hand-embroidered pillow, and said a little prayer because she
had found out in time.
III
The full realisation of their predicament came with the dusk. The
electric lights were shut off! Jane, crawling into bed tearfully at
half after eight, turned the reading light switch over her head, but
no flood of rosy radiance poured down on the hand-embroidered pillow
with the pink bow.
Jane sat up and stared round her. Already the outline of her dresser
was faint and shadowy. In half an hour black night would settle down
and she had not even a candle or a box of matches. She crawled out,
panicky, and began in the darkness to don her kimono and slippers.
As she opened the door and stepped into the hall the convalescent
typhoid heard her and set up his usual cry.
"Hey," he called, "whoever that is come in and fix the lights.
They're broken. And I want some bread and milk. I can't sleep on an
empty stomach!"
Jane padded on past the room where love lay cold and dead, down the
corridor with its alarming echoes. The house seemed very quiet. At a
corner unexpectedly she collided with some one going hastily. The
result was a crash and a deluge of hot water. Jane got a drop on her
bare ankle, and as soon as she could breathe she screamed.
"Why don't you look where you're going?" demanded the red-haired
person angrily. "I've been an hour boiling that water, and now it
has to be done over again!"
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