She tramped her round of social duties mechanically. Everything bored her now. The joy of life had gone out of her. She ate the bread of sorrow in captivity.
And then, this morning, had come a voice from the world she had lost—little Mrs. Bailey’s voice, small and tearful.
Could she possibly come out by the next train? Bailey was very ill. Bailey was dying. Bailey had come home last night looking ghastly. He had not slept. In the early morning he had begun to babble—Mrs. Bailey’s voice had risen and broken on the word, and Ruth at the other end of the wire had heard her frightened sobs. The doctor had come. The doctor had looked awfully grave. The doctor had telephoned to New York for another doctor. They were both upstairs now. It was awful, and Ruth must come at once.
This was the bad news which had brought about the pallor which had impressed Mr. Keggs as he helped Ruth into her cab.
Little Mrs. Bailey was waiting for her on the platform when she got out of the train. Her face was drawn and miserable. She looked like a beaten kitten. She hugged Ruth hysterically.
“Oh, my dear, I’m so glad you’ve come. He’s better, but it has been awful. The doctors have had to fight him to keep him in bed. He was crazy to get to town. He kept saying over and over again that he must be at the office. They gave him something, and he was asleep when I left the house.”
She began to cry helplessly. The fates had not bestowed upon Sybil Bannister the same care in the matter of education for times of crisis which they had accorded to Steve’s Mamie. Her life till now had been sheltered and unruffled, and disaster, swooping upon her, had found her an easy victim.
She was trying to be brave, but her powers of resistance were small like her body. She clung to Ruth as a child clings to its mother. Ruth, as she tried to comfort her, felt curiously old. It occurred to her with a suggestion almost of grotesqueness that she and Sybil had been debutantes in the same season.
They walked up to the house. The summer cottage which Bailey had taken was not far from the station. On the way, in the intervals of her sobs, Sybil told Ruth the disjointed story of what had happened.
Bailey had not been looking well for some days. She had thought it must be the heat or business worries or something. He had not eaten very much, and he had seemed too tired to talk when he got home each evening. She had begged him to take a few days’ rest. That had been the only occasion in the whole of the last week when she had heard him laugh; and it had been such a horrid, ugly sort of laugh that she wished she hadn’t.
He had said that if he stayed away from the office for some time to come it would mean love in a cottage for them for the rest of their lives—and not a summer cottage at Tuxedo at that. “ ‘My dear child,’ ” he had gone on, “and you know when Bailey calls me that,” said Sybil, “it means that there is something the matter; for, as a rule, he never calls me anything but my name, or baby, or something like that.”
Which gave Ruth a little shock of surprise. Somehow the idea of the dignified Bailey addressing his wife as baby startled her. She was certainly learning these days that she did not know people as completely as she had supposed. There seemed to be endless sides to people’s characters which had never come under her notice. A sudden memory of Kirk on that fateful afternoon came to her and made her wince.
Mrs. Bailey continued: “ ‘My dear child,’ he went on, ‘this week is about the most important week you and I are ever likely to live through. It’s the showdown. We either come out on top or we blow up. It’s one thing or the other. And if I take a few days’ holiday just now you had better start looking about for the best place to sell your jewellery.’
“Those were his very words,” she said tearfully. “I remember them all. It was so unlike his usual way of talking.”
Ruth acknowledged that it was. More than ever she felt that she did not know the complete Bailey.
“He was probably exaggerating,” she said for the sake of saying something.
Sybil was silent for a moment.
“It isn’t that that’s worrying me,” she went on then. “Somehow I don’t seem to care at all whether we come out right or not, so long as he gets well. Last night, when I thought he was going to die, I made up my mind that I couldn’t go on living without him. I wouldn’t have, either.”
This time the shock of surprise which came to Ruth was greater by a hundredfold than the first had been. She gave a quick glance at Sybil. Her small face was hard, and the little white teeth gleamed between her drawn lips. It was the face, for one brief instant, of a fanatic. The sight of it affected Ruth extraordinarily. It was as if she had seen a naked soul where she had never imagined a soul to be.
She had weighed Sybil in the same calm, complacent almost patronizing fashion in which she had weighed Bailey, Kirk, everybody. She had set her down as a delightful child, an undeveloped, featherbrained little thing, pleasant to spend an afternoon with, but not to be taken seriously by anyone as magnificent
