Page:O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories for 1919.pdf/59

Rh His mother seemed not to have known he was near till he flung the door back and came stalking into the light with the rusty bread-knife in his hand. One would not have imagined there were blood enough left in her wasted heart, but her face went crimson when she lifted it and saw him.

It brought him up short—the blush, where he had looked for fright. It shocked him, and, shocking him, more than by a thousand laboured words of explanation, it opened a window in his disordered brain. He stood gawking with the effort of thought, hardly conscious of his mother’s cry:

“Christopher, I never meant you to know!”

He kept on staring at the ashen face between the pillows, long (as his own was long), sensitive, worn; and at the ’cello keeping incorruptible vigil over its dead. And then slowly his eyes went down to his own left hand, to which that same old wine-brown creature had come home from the first with a curious sense of fitness and authority and right.

“Who is this man?”

“Don’t look at me so! Don’t, Chris!”

But he did look at her. Preoccupied as he was, he was appalled at sight of the damage the half-dozen of days had done. She had been so much the lady, so perfectly the gentlewoman. To no one had the outward gesture and symbol of purity been more precious. No whisper had ever breathed against her. If there had been secrets behind her, they had been dead; if a skeleton, the closet had been closed. And now, looking down on her, he was not only appalled, he was a little sickened, as one might be to find squalor and decay creeping into a familiar and once immaculate room.

“Who is this man?” he repeated.

“He grew up with me.” She half raised herself on her knees in the eagerness of her appeal. “We were boy and girl together at home in Maryland. We were meant for each other, Chris. We were always to marry—always, Chis. And when I went away, and when I married your—when I married Daniel Kain, he