University of Virginia Library

4. IV

THE door from the study opened, and she started eagerly toward her husband. "Oh, Will, won't you tell me about Jack's foot now? Did he hurt it badly?"

Smithers looked at her with a side-wise twist of his mouth and said evenly: "I see your usual careful house-keeping in that large spot of dirty water on the carpet."

Belle and Alice both faced him, amazed, and Alice cried impulsively: "Why, Will, you upset the —"

He cut her off with one of his blighting looks. "It's curious how I am to blame for everything that happens. I don't suppose your peerless beauty, there, is capable of getting me a bottle of beer, is she? As usual, we are without any other servants. I dare say that I am also to blame for your incapacity to keep any help in the house. It seems as though, with all the money you have for service, you might be able to keep somebody besides that harridan. I suppose the fact is you're jealous of any one who doesn't resemble your old eyesore. Oh, don't explain. You needn't be afraid I'd ever think you capable of such a live flesh-and-blood sentiment. Milk and water can't burn." He addressed himself threateningly to Belle: "Will you get some beer, or won't you?"

She answered him sullenly: "The liquor man ain't sent the beer yet."

The man's smoothness broke into an ugly cold fury. He advanced upon his wife, so that she shrank into herself in terror. "Alice, your incompetence is simply maddening! You know the doctor has ordered me to drink beer. You seem actually to plan to thwart any measures for my good. I'm not surprised that you show no interest in my health. Indeed, I dare say you would be very glad if —"

"Oh, no, Will!" shrieked his wife, in an agony of protest. "Don't! I can't bear to hear you say such a dreadful thing!"

The sight of her agitation seemed to restore him to his usual cold control of himself. He eyed her with a smile. "The extraordinary ease with which your guilty imagination fills out my sentences is something surprising, even to me — used as I am to your affection for your husband. I'm going out to the kitchen myself to see if I can't find a bottle which your vigilant handmaid has sequestered for her own use."

In the moment of his absence the scrubwoman raised her gaunt frame again in exhortation: "Oh, blame it all, ma'am — if you would — just once — just try it on!"

Alice hushed her, with a frantic fear of being overheard, and turned to her husband, who entered the room with a bottle of beer, which he opened with a deft strength and half emptied into a glass. The two women followed his most trivial actions with a fascinated gaze. The first draft seemed to relax him, for he leaned back in his chair, wiping his beard and looking neutrally at his wife. "Have you heard anything lately from Tom, Alice?" he asked.

Alice flushed up into a timid desire to please him in this brief interlude of peace. "No, Will, not for a long time. How kind of you to think of him! I long to hear from him so. I can't tell you! I think I should almost die of happiness to see him again."

She drew away in a drooping submission under her husband's curt "Oh, don't be sickening! Every time I try to have a little reasonable conversation with you you turn my stomach. It's enough to drive any man with a nerve in his body mad with irritation — your fawning ways. I'm sorry for myself! It's not my fault. Any woman with a spark of grit in her — you make me hate myself as well as you —" He

interrupted himself sharply, pointing tensely into a corner of the room. "A mouse! Alice, have you or have you not used that poison I got for you?"

"Oh, Will," she fluttered protestingly, "I'm so afraid to have it around! I haven't seen any mice for a long time, and I thought traps — the children —"

Smithers struck his hand heavily on the table, with a loud oath: "Can't a man be safe from vermin in his own home because he has a fool for a wife?"

He rushed out, and Belle again approached with her ignorant, vacant look of curiosity. "Why are you so afraid of that stuff, ma'am?"

Mrs. Smithers shuddered. "Oh, Belle, it's poison — deadly poison — and the least little drop of it in anything we eat would kill us. And when the children are here —"

Their whispered colloquy was interrupted by Smithers's entrance, bearing a small bottle, which he placed on the mantelpiece in a complete and significant silence. As he seated himself he said coldly: "I hope I shall not have to wait until we are attacked in our beds by the rats before you decide to be reasonable." He fixed his pale eyes on her. "Alice, this is as good a time as ever to tell you that I have decided to send Jack to school — a military school in Wisconsin."

Belle uttered a loud exclamation at this, which was lost in the high hysterical wail of Mrs. Smithers's voice, "Will, I don't want to seem to doubt your judgment, but I really know more about Jack's health than you can, and I know he can't live without the most anxious care. A military school — why, he's lame! And so far away! And Jack is only nine — a baby — a baby!"

She flung herself upon him, kneeling with imploring hands and awaiting his answer in a breathless suspense. He waited a long time before speaking, and then finished his glass of beer and set it down carefully. "Quite what I expected — just the silly exhibition of yourself that I am used to. And you expect me to leave my children to be brought up by an hysterical idiot like that! I had not finally decided, but I do so now, that the other two would be better in a sane and reasonable atmosphere, which unfortunately, owing to my choice of a wife, I cannot give them in my own house. Elsie and Harry, as soon as they come home from the country, shall go abroad under the charge of a French governess."

His wife's face did not change at all. She slipped slowly to the floor in an unconscious heap, and her face did not alter from its expression of stupefied horror.