SIMMONS stumbled across the hall and up the dark staircase. The coming storm had suddenly blackened all the house. The open doors of the bedrooms sucked out the swaying air that came in puffs from the windows. In the eastern room, above the terrace where they had been sitting, Simmons found his wife, clasping their child in a hysterical embrace.
“What have you done? My darling—my one—my Oscar!” A dry sob ended the broken exclamations.
They were huddled in a heap upon the floor beside the window. The child’s face had a look of intense wonder, of concentrated thought upon some difficult idea which eluded his baby mind. Across the iron cot at one side of the room was stretched the inert form of the nurse.
“Look at her, Olaf,” said Mrs. Simmons. “He has—cut her—stabbed her with the knife.”
As Simmons approached the bed, he kicked something with his foot. It fell upon the tiled fireplace with the tinkle of steel. The woman on the bed groaned. Simmons turned on the electric light, and hastily examined the nurse.
“She’s not badly hurt, Evelyn. A scratch along the neck. She fainted at the sight of blood, I guess. But what was the knife?”
He picked up the thing from the fireplace and examined it. It was a long, dull, sharp-pointed knife, brought from the kitchen to cut bread with. Along the edge it was faintly daubed with blood. Simmons, still holding it in his hands, stepped to the window. His wife was crouching there, sobbing over the child, whom she held in her arms tightly. Little Oscar’s eyes were fixed upon the thunder-clouds outside. He neither saw nor heard what was passing in the room. The father leaned over and touched his forehead with his hand. The child shrank away.
“You must take him out of here, Evelyn!” he said. “I will look after her.”
“She must have been cutting the bread for his supper, and laid the knife down on the table for a moment. I—I told her never to leave it about. I have been afraid—of something!”
“You have been afraid?” her husband asked quickly. “Why so?”
The boy moved uneasily and turned his head to watch his father.
“What you got my knife for?” he demanded. “Give me my knife!”
“You shall never, never have it again!” his mother moaned, clasping him more tightly.
“Why not?” he asked curiously. “What’s the matter with Dora? Why’s she lying on my bed? Tell her to get up. I am tired. Oscar wants to go to bed.”
His eyelids fell and rose, as though the long search for the mysterious thing in his mind had put him into a doze.
“He does not seem to know what he has done. What is it? Olaf, what is the matter with him?”
“Ssh, hush! Don’t rouse him. Get him to bed. Don’t let him know. I’ll look after Dora—she’s coming around now—and then I’ll call Vessinger, if it is necessary.”
“No! no! not him,” she protested vehemently. “I don’t want him to see, to know anything about it,—no one, but he least of all.”
Simmons looked mystified by her vehemence.
“It all seems dark around me!” she moaned.
“There,” he said soothingly. “Wrap him in that dressing-gown and take him to your room. I must attend to this woman.”
In spite of his wife’s objections, however, he went downstairs to look for the doctor. The room and the terrace were both empty; he could see the party riding, like a group of scuttled birds, at a hard gallop down the lane at the end of the lawn.
“They might have waited to find out!” he muttered. Great drops of rain splashed on the bricks about him. They had fled from his house even in the teeth of the storm. He returned hastily to the nurse, bathed the wound in the neck, and gave her some liquor from his flask. When she had gone to her room, he went downstairs once more, without crossing the hall to his wife’s room. That took a kind of courage which he did not have. Servants had lit the lamps in the long room and pulled the shades. Outside the rain swept across the terrace and beat upon the French windows. He waited, listening, irresolute, unwilling to take the future in his hands.
Finally he detected a dragging step on the stairs. His wife came slowly toward him, her erect young woman’s head crushed under a weight of fear.
“They have gone,” she sighed with relief.
“Yes, they cleared out in the face of the storm!”
“I am so glad!”
“Sit down, dear,” he urged, taking her cold hands.
She disengaged herself from him before he could kiss her, and sat down beside the long table in a straight stiff chair. She clasped her hands tightly and looked at her husband with a face of misery and horror.
“What is it, Olaf? Tell me what it is. Tell me!”
“Why, what do you mean by it?” he stammered.
“You know!” she exclaimed passionately. “Don’t let us hide it any longer. What is the matter with little Oscar, with our child?”
“What do you mean?” He was still looking for subterfuges.
“It wasn’t Dora. I knew he would do it some day, and I have tried to keep things that he could do harm with from him. I dreaded this. Something seized him,—something inside him,—and he snatched the knife out of her hand. When I got there, he was looking at the knife. It was—all bloody. Oh, Olaf! He was talking to himself. Then he dropped the knife, and he didn’t seem to remember. He is sleeping now, just as if it had never happened.”
“It’s just his fearful temper, Evelyn,” the man answered with an effort. “Dora irritates him, and the thundery air and all. You must pack up and get to the seashore or mountains, where it’s more bracing. He’s just nervous like you and me, only more so, because he’s smaller.”
She shook her head wearily. What was the use of self-deception? Hadn’t she watched this habit of rage for months? The child was a part of her; and more than she knew her hand or her foot she knew him. Doctors talked of nerves and diet. But she had seen the storms gather in the child and watched them burst.
“No! That is no use, Olaf. I can’t tell myself those things any more and be contented. It is worse!”
Simmons was walking up and down the room, hands thrust in his pockets, his face knit over the problem.
“All the world like old Oscar,” he muttered, talking to himself.
His wife caught up the words greedily.
“Old Oscar Svenson, your step-father, the one who brought you up and gave you your education? The one we named him after?”
The man nodded half guiltily.
“Yes, old Oscar,—the man who gave me everything,—the chance to live, to win you—all.”
He resumed his tramp to and fro across the rug, scrupulously refraining from stepping beyond the border. His wife still kept her eyes fixed on him, as though resolved to win from him the secret of the matter. Suddenly she rose and went to him, putting her arms about his neck.
“Let me look at you! You have always been a good man, I know. You need not tell me so. This cannot be some terrible revenge for your weakness or wickedness. Have I not held you in my arms? I should have known, if it had been you, for whom our boy suffers.”
He kissed her tenderly and led her to a couch; then knelt down beside her.
“No, Evelyn—not that. But you must be calm or you will lose your head. You take it too seriously. Oscar is a baby five years old. A five-year-old baby!”
“And some day he will commit murder. My God, will you tell me to be quiet and not think of that!”
A maid entered the room to announce dinner.
