At this moment there was a convulsion in the bed, and the red face
of Clarence Breckenridge revealed itself. The eyes were
bloodstained, the usually pale skin flushed and oily, the fair,
thin hair tumbled across a high and well-developed forehead.
Rachael knew every movement of the red and swollen lips, every
tone of the querulous voice.
"Does Alfred have to stay up here doing a chambermaid's work?"
demanded the man of the house fretfully. "My God! Can you or can't
you manage--between your teas and card parties--to get someone
else to put this room in order?" He ended in a long moan, and
dropped his head again into the pillows.
"Do you know what he wants?" Rachael asked the man in a quick
whisper. "Go down and get it, then!"
"I'm co-o-old!" said the man in the bed, going into a sudden and
violent chill. "I've caught my death, I think. Joe made a punch--
some sort of an eggnog--eggs were bad, I think. I'm poisoned. The
stuff was rotten!" He sank mumbling back into the pillows.
Rachael, who had been hanging his coat carefully in the big closet
adjoining his room, came to the bedside and laid her cool fingers
on his burning forehead. If irrepressible distaste was visible in
her face, it was only a faint reflection of the burning resentment
in her heart.
"You've got a fever, Clarence," she announced quietly. The answer
was only a furious and incoherent burst of denunciation; the
patient was in utter physical discomfort, and could not choose his
terms. Rachael--not for the first nor the hundredth time--felt
within her an impulse to leave him here, leave him to outwear his
miseries without her help. But this she could not do without
throwing the house into an uproar. Clarence at these times had no
consideration for public opinion, had no dignity, no self-control.
Much better satisfy him, as she had done so many times before, and
keep a brave face to the world.
So she placed a hot-water bag against his cold feet, went to her
own room adjoining to borrow a fluffy satin comforter with which
to augment his own bed covering, laid an icy towel upon his
throbbing forehead, and when Alfred presently appeared with a
decanter of whisky, Rachael watched her husband eagerly gulp down
a glass of it without uttering one word of the bitter protest that
rose to her lips.
She was not a prude, with the sublime inconsistency of most women
whose lives are made the darker for drink; she did not identify
herself with any movement toward prohibition, or refuse the
cocktails, the claret, and the wine that were customarily served
at her own and at other people's dinner-tables. But she hated
coarseness in any form, she hated contact with the sodden, self-
pitying, ugly animal that Clarence Breckenridge became under the
influence of drink.