Flaming Youth

CHAPTER XXXI

"I'm off of men," confidently wrote Pat in her diary. "There's nothing to it for me. From now on I'm going to be so nice and careful and mind-your-steppy that the place won't know me. All the old cats in Dorrisdale will purr when I come around. I think I shall take up slumming. Anyway, no more flutters for little Pat. I've reformed."

In proof of which she comported herself with great circumspection for a space of several months, to the surprise of all and the discomfiture of sundry amatory youths of her circle. The word went about that Pat Fentriss was slowing up. While as much fun as ever in a crowd, she was less approachable in a corner. Pat, her peculiar radiance deepening and ripening, was content with the crowd. Her quickening intelligence was impatient of the callowness and shallowness of her contemporaries among the youth of the suburb.

To fill her time a new and purely unselfish interest had come into her life; not so showy as the slumming which she had considered, but of far more practical beneficence. At the time of T. Jameson James's accident she had devoted herself with centred enthusiasm to the sufferer and his household. Later as the tragedy became a commonplace to her mind, she drifted wide of it. It was natural to the shallow fervours and shifting interests of her youth that she should unconsciously drop out of mind that silent and shadowed personality in the big house across the town. When she did think of it, temporary self-reproach would send her there two or three times in[Pg 296] a week. But there seemed to be "nothing that she could do"; and she would drop away again.

It was an episode of one of these visits that changed her attitude. On her arrival Dee had told her that Jim was probably asleep; she could creep up softly and see; the attendant who pushed the wheeled-chair was out. Tiptoeing to the open door Pat peered in at the crack. T. Jameson James lay very stiff and still on the window divan, apparently sleeping. Pat was just about to turn away with a sense of relief when she noticed the hand nearest her. It was so tightly clenched that the flesh around the nails was white. His head turned quite gradually, bringing the contour of the face into view. She saw that the eyes were closed, but in the corners two drops of water gathered and grew, slowly, slowly, as if wrung from the very core of a soul's repressed agony. The drops broke, darted, trickled down like rain along a windowpane. A slight shudder lifted his breast. Then he was immobile again.

Pat crept away until she reached the refuge of the lower floor. She ran into the garden, kept on running to the far extent of the grounds, flung herself down and so lay. She did not collapse; she did not cry. But presently—unpoetic and anti-climactic though it be to record plain facts—the stress of sudden emotion on top of a hearty luncheon had its logical effect. Pat was violently sick.

As soon as she recovered breath and poise, she returned to the house with a plan in mind, stamped noisily upstairs and entered the sick room.

"Hello, Jimmie-jams!"

"Hello, Pat." His face lighted up a little; she was miserably conscious that he had always welcomed her with a smile.

[Pg 297]
"How are you feeling?"

"All right." This was his invariable formula.

"Don't lie to me!" She closed the door, lowered the window, and turned upon him. "Jimmie!"

"Well?"

"Swear!"

"All right. I swear. What's the secret?"

"Not that kind of swear. Cuss. Rip it out. Blast the ceiling off the roof. Let yourself go."

He peered into her face. It was solemn, intent. "I don't know what——" he began. Then he broke off and let himself go. Such virulent, vitriolic, blazing, throbbing profanity Pat had never dreamt of. It comprehended the known universe and covered the history of the cosmos, past, present, and future. When he had finished and lay back exhausted, she enquired: