Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a
heart trouble, great care was taken to break to
her as gently as possible the news of her
husband's death.
It was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken
sentences; veiled hints that revealed in half
concealing. Her husband's friend Richards was
there, too, near her. It was he who had been in
the newspaper office when intelligence of the
railroad disaster was received, with Brently
Mallard's name leading the list of "killed." He had
only taken the time to assure himself of its truth
by a second telegram, and had hastened to
forestall any less careful, less tender friend in
bearing the sad message.
She did not hear the story as many women have
heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to
accept its significance. She wept at once, with
sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister's arms.
When the storm of grief had spent itself she went
away to her room alone. She would have no one
follow her.
There stood, facing the open window, a
comfortable, roomy armchair. Into this she sank,
pressed down by a physical exhaustion that
haunted her body and seemed to reach into her
soul.
She could see in the open square before her
house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with
the new spring life. The delicious breath of rain
was in the air. In the street below a peddler was
crying his wares. The notes of a distant song
which someone was singing reached her faintly,
and countless sparrows were twittering in the
eaves.
There were patches of blue sky showing here and
there through the clouds that had met and piled
one above the other in the west facing her
window.
She sat with her head thrown back upon the
cushion of the chair, quite motionless, except
when a sob came up into her throat and shook
her, as a child who has cried itself to sleep
continues to sob in its dreams.
She was young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines
bespoke repression and even a certain strength.
But now there was a dull stare in her eyes, whose
gaze was fixed away off yonder on one of those
patches of blue sky. It was not a glance of
reflection, but rather indicated a suspension of
intelligent thought.
There was something coming to her and she was
waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not
know; it was too subtle and elusive to name. But
she felt it, creeping out of the sky, reaching
toward her through the sounds, the scents, the
color that filled the air.
Now her bosom rose and fell tumultuously. She
was beginning to recognize this thing that was
approaching to possess her, and she was striving
to beat it back with her will--as powerless as her
two white slender hands would have been. When
she abandoned herself a little whispered word
escaped her slightly parted lips. She said it over
and over under the breath: "free, free, free!" The
vacant stare and the look of terror that had
followed it went from her eyes. They stayed keen
and bright. Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing
blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her
body.
She did not stop to ask if it were or were not a
monstrous joy that held her. A clear and exalted
perception enabled her to dismiss the suggestion
as trivial. She knew that she would weep again
when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in
death; the face that had never looked save with
love upon her, fixed and gray and dead. But she
saw beyond that bitter moment a long procession
of years to come that would belong to her
absolutely. And she opened and spread her arms
out to them in welcome.
There would be no one to live for during those
coming years; she would live for herself. There
would be no powerful will bending hers in that
blind persistence with which men and women
believe they have a right to impose a private will
upon a fellow-creature. A kind intention or a cruel
intention made the act seem no less a crime as
she looked upon it in that brief moment of
illumination.
And yet she had loved him--sometimes. Often she
had not. What did it matter! What could love, the
unsolved mystery, count for in the face of this
possession of self-assertion which she suddenly
recognized as the strongest impulse of her being!
"Free! Body and soul free!" she kept whispering.
Josephine was kneeling before the closed door
with her lips to the keyhole, imploring for
admission. "Louise, open the door! I beg; open
the door--you will make yourself ill. What are you
doing, Louise? For heaven's sake open the door."
"Go away. I am not making myself ill." No; she
was drinking in a very elixir of life through that
open window.
Her fancy was running riot along those days
ahead of her. Spring days, and summer days, and
all sorts of days that would be her own. She
breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It
was only yesterday she had thought with a
shudder that life might be long.
She arose at length and opened the door to her
sister's importunities. There was a feverish
triumph in her eyes, and she carried herself
unwittingly like a goddess of Victory. She clasped
her sister's waist, and together they descended
the stairs. Richards stood waiting for them at the
bottom.
Someone was opening the front door with a
latchkey. It was Brently Mallard who entered, a
little travel-stained, composedly carrying his grip-
sack and umbrella. He had been far from the
scene of the accident, and did not even know
there had been one. He stood amazed at
Josephine's piercing cry; at Richards' quick
motion to screen him from the view of his wife.
When the doctors came they said she had died of
heart disease--of the joy that kills.