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Page 37
"You've forgotten your slippers," called the convalescent typhoid
after her. But nothing would have taken Jane back.
The convalescent typhoid took the slippers home later and locked
them away in an inner drawer, where he kept one or two things like
faded roses, and old gloves, and a silk necktie that a girl had made
him at college--things that are all the secrets a man keeps from his
wife and that belong in that small corner of his heart which also
he keeps from his wife. But that has nothing to do with Jane.
Jane went back to her own bed thoroughly demoralised. And sleep
being pretty well banished by that time, she sat up in bed and
thought things over. Before this she had not thought much, only
raged and sulked alternately. But now she thought. She thought about
the man in the room down the hall with the lines of dissipation on
his face. And she thought a great deal about what a silly she had
been, and that it was not too late yet, she being not forty and
"beautiful." It must be confessed that she thought a great deal
about that. Also she reflected that what she deserved was to marry
some person with even a worse temper than hers, who would bully her
at times and generally keep her straight. And from that, of course,
it was only a step to the fact that red-haired people are
proverbially bad-tempered!
She thought, too, about Mary O'Shaughnessy without another woman
near, and not even a light, except perhaps a candle. Things were
always so much worse in the darkness. And perhaps she might be going
to be very ill and ought to have another doctor!
Jane seemed to have been reflecting for a long time, when the church
clock far down in the village struck nine. And with the chiming of
the clock was born, full grown, an idea which before it was sixty
seconds of age was a determination.
In pursuance of the idea Jane once more crawled out of bed and began
to dress; she put on heavy shoes and a short skirt, a coat, and a
motor veil over her hair. The indignation at the defection of the
hospital staff, held in subjection during the day by the necessity
for doing something, now rose and lent speed and fury to her
movements. In an incredibly short time Jane was feeling her way
along the hall and down the staircase, now a well of unfathomable
blackness and incredible rustlings and creakings.
The front doors were unlocked. Outside there was faint starlight,
the chirp of a sleepy bird, and far off across the valley the
gasping and wheezing of a freight climbing the heavy grade to the
village.
Jane paused at the drive and took a breath. Then at her best
gymnasium pace, arms close to sides, head up, feet well planted, she
started to run. At the sundial she left the drive and took to the
lawn gleaming with the frost of late October. She stopped running
then and began to pick her way more cautiously. Even at that she
collided heavily with a wire fence marking the boundary, and sat on
the ground for some time after, whimpering over the outrage and
feeling her nose. It was distinctly scratched and swollen. No one
would think her beautiful with a nose like that!
She had not expected the wire fence. It was impossible to climb and
more difficult to get under. However, she found one place where the
ground dipped, and wormed her way under the fence in most
undignified fashion. It is perfectly certain that had Jane's family
seen her then and been told that she was doing this remarkable thing
for a woman she had never seen before that day, named Mary
O'Shaughnessy, and also for a certain red-haired person of whom it
had never heard, it would have considered Jane quite irrational. But
it is entirely probable that Jane became really rational that night
for the first time in her spoiled young life.
Jane never told the details of that excursion. Those that came out
in the paper were only guess-work, of course, but it is quite true
that a reporter found scraps of her motor veil on three wire fences,
and there seems to be no reason to doubt, also, that two false curls
were discovered a week later in a cow pasture on her own estate. But
as Jane never wore curls afterward anyhow----
Well, Jane got to her own house about eleven and crept in like a
thief to the telephone. There were more rustlings and creakings and
rumblings in the empty house than she had ever imagined, and she
went backward through the hall for fear of something coming after
her. But, which is to the point, she got to the telephone and called
up her father in the city.
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