RISCILLA DUNSCOMB drew back the curtain and peered incuriously into the night. The action was purely automatic; and the discovery that the fine drizzle of an hour before had turned to a drenching downpour alone restored her to a consciousness of her movements.
“It’s going to be a bad night,” she half whispered, and stood watching the trickling streaks on the small panes with an intentness that betokened sheer absence of mind.
In the dull light of a single kerosene lamp her sharp features were blurred and softened, but the haggard, work-chiseled lines were still visible. At the back of her head the knot of hair was wound so tight as to lend her face an almost drawn appearance, yet the gray-shot strands would have been soft and wavy had they not been so uncompromisingly restrained.
Priscilla Dunscomb stared into the rain-soaked darkness, but her mind was busy with many thoughts. For her hour was approaching—the hour of release from a thraldom dating back over twenty years—and she was striving hard that her joy be not too apparent, even to herself.
Something stirred in the great four-poster, and she turned at the sound, stepping with the mechanical caution natural to service in the sick-room. After slightly adjusting the patchwork cover and shifting the screen before the lamp, she stood looking down at the prostrate figure.
There was no softness in her eyes as she noted the gray, deathlike pallor, the piteous pinched features, the alternately sharp and muffled breathing. There was no softness in her heart at the knowledge of Daniel Dunscomb’s approaching end—only a grim, unrelenting exultation that the hour of her freedom was at hand.
Presently she sat down in a wooden rocker by the bedside and resumed her vigil. At certain intervals she moistened a cloth in a bowl by her side and bathed the unconscious man’s forehead and wrists. Her manner of performing this soothing act suggested an indomitable repugnance, fought down by sheer will power. In the interim she sat with averted eyes, one hand shielding her face from the light—and waited.
A clock somewhere below struck the hour with two rasping, wheezy strokes. Priscilla Dunscomb started slightly, and glanced at the sick man. It was the hour the doctor had told her to watch for—the crisis, the turning-point, the mysterious moment where the scales of life and death hang evenly balanced.
“I wish I could be with you, Mrs. Dunscomb,” the physician had ended kindly, “but I could not do anything more for him if I were, and you are an excellent nurse. You see, I’ve got that critical case in the village. There isn’t one chance in a hundred that he will live, and if he does it will only mean hopeless invalidism for another year—so perhaps it would be more merciful to have it all ended now.”
Dr. Brewster had the good taste not to condole with Priscilla Dunscomb. He knew—all the village knew, for that matter—the incompatibility of those two ill-mated lives, the twenty years of slavery to the demands of a man who had crushed every atom of joy out of Priscilla Dunscomb’s existence. And Priscilla inwardly rejoiced that the doctor could not know how madly thankful she was to be alone when the great moment arrived.
She recognized absolutely no fear of death, experienced no physical shrinking at the nearness of the great mystery. Five times had she fought with it a losing battle for the lives of her children. On occasions innumerable had she “sat up” with a stricken friend or neighbor, watching while the flame of vitality flickered out. Death was very familiar to Priscilla Dunscomb.
At the stroke of the clock a faint, scarcely perceptible tremor quivered through the form on the bed. Almost involuntarily she bent forward, her hands clasped on her knees, to watch the struggle more closely. Some deep instinct warned her that there would be a moment of consciousness before the end. She was curious to see just what that moment would disclose. With steady intensity she regarded the deathlike mask. For many years she had systematically avoided scanning her husband’s face. It drew her gaze now, in spite of herself.
Suddenly, as she looked, she caught her breath. Something in the pinched, haggard features recalled the face of her eldest child, and stinging memories surged over her like a torrent. Again they came before her—her children—the only beings she had ever really loved, all snatched from her in the early years of life. Priscilla Dunscomb had been a woman of passionate maternity. The mother-love she had expended on her little brood of weaklings had crushed down and stamped out every other emotion.