The “Senator” still lingered. He
was sorry for the young people; it had been a dull
evening for them. In the goodness of his heart
he tried to make it pleasant for them now; tried to
remove the ill impression necessarily left by the
general defeat; tried to be chatty, even tried to
be gay. But the responses were sickly, there
was no starting any enthusiasm; he would give it up
and quit—it was a day specially picked
out and consecrated to failures.
But when Gwendolen rose up promptly and smiled a glad
smile and said with thankfulness and blessing, “Must
you go?” it seemed cruel to desert, and he sat
down again.
He was about to begin a remark when—when
he didn’t. We have all been there.
He didn’t know how he knew his concluding to
stay longer had been a mistake, he merely knew it;
and knew it for dead certain, too. And so he
bade goodnight, and went mooning out, wondering what
he could have done that changed the atmosphere that
way. As the door closed behind him those two
were standing side by side, looking at that door—looking
at it in a waiting, second-counting, but deeply grateful
kind of way. And the instant it closed they
flung their arms about each other’s necks, and
there, heart to heart and lip to lip—
“Oh, my God, she’s kissing it!”
Nobody heard this remark, because Hawkins, who bred
it, only thought it, he didn’t utter it.
He had turned, the moment he had closed the door,
and had pushed it open a little, intending to re-enter
and ask what ill-advised thing he had done or said,
and apologize for it. But he didn’t re-enter;
he staggered off stunned, terrified, distressed.
Five minutes later he was sitting in his room, with
his head bowed within the circle of his arms, on the
table—final attitude of grief and despair.
His tears were flowing fast, and now and then a sob
broke upon the stillness. Presently he said:
“I knew her when she was a little child and
used to climb about my knees; I love her as I love
my own, and now—oh, poor thing, poor thing,
I cannot bear it!—she’s gone and
lost her heart to this mangy materializee! Why
didn’t we see that that might happen? But
how could we? Nobody could; nobody could ever
have dreamed of such a thing. You couldn’t
expect a person would fall in love with a wax-work.
And this one doesn’t even amount to that.”
He went on grieving to himself, and now and then giving
voice to his lamentations.
“It’s done, oh, it’s done, and there’s
no help for it, no undoing the miserable business.
If I had the nerve, I would kill it. But that
wouldn’t do any good. She loves it; she
thinks it’s genuine and authentic. If
she lost it she would grieve for it just as she would
for a real person. And who’s to break
it to the family! Not I—I’ll
die first. Sellers is the best human being I
ever knew and I wouldn’t any more think of—oh,
dear, why it’ll break his heart when he finds
it out. And Polly’s too. This comes
of meddling with such infernal matters! But for
this, the creature would still be roasting in Sheol
where it belongs. How is it that these people
don’t smell the brimstone? Sometimes I
can’t come into the same room with him without
nearly suffocating.”
