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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 her 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 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 keyhole, 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 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.
But Richards was too
late.
When the doctors came
they said she had died of heart disease—of joy that kills.
Sumber :
http://www.pbs.org/katechopin/library/storyofanhour.html#
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