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 some one 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 hte 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 keyhold, 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.
Some one 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.