“Little you would have cared,” cried she, “if a miracle had not saved my life this afternoon!”
Mr. Chater stood aghast. “My dearest! Saved you! From what?”
His dearest bitterly inquired: “What does it matter to you? You take no interest. If my battered corpse--” Swept to tremendous heights by the combined forces of her agitation, her imagination, and her two brandys-and-sodas, she rose, pointed though the window. “If my battered corpse had been carried up those steps by two policemen this very afternoon, what would you have done, I wonder?”
Mr. Chater, apprehension creeping among the roots of his hair, affirmed that he would have dropped dead in the precise spot at which he happened to be standing at the moment.
Mrs. Chater trumpeted “Never!”--dropped to her chair, and continued. “You would have been glad.” Her voice shook. “Glad--and in all this wide world only my Bob and my blessed lambs in the nursery would have wept o'er my body.”
Of so melancholy a character was the picture thus presented to her mind, augmenting her previous agitation, that the tumult within her welled damply through her eyes, with noisy distress through her lips.
Patting her distressed back, imploring her to calm, Mr. Chater begged some account of the catastrophe from which she had escaped.
Between convulsive sobs she told him, he bridging the hiatuses of emotion with “Oh-dear-oh-dears,” in which alarm and sympathy were nicely mingled.
Painting details with a masterly hand, “And there was I alone,” she concluded--“alone, at the mercy of a wild horse and a drunken cabman.”
“Miss Humfray managed to jump out and leave me.”
Through all this scene--in one form or another a matter of daily occurrence, and therefore not to arouse interest--Mary had stood waiting its cessation and her orders. Mr. Chater turned upon her. Naturally disposed to be kind to the girl, he yet readily saw in his wife's statement a way of escape from the castigation he had been enduring. As the small boy who has been kicked by the bully will with delighted relief rush to the bully's aid when the kicks are at length turned to another, urging him on so that he may forget his first prey, so Mr. Chater, delighted at his fortune, eagerly joined in turning his wife's wrath to Mary's head. For self-preservation, at whatever cost to another, is the most compelling of instincts: its power great in proportion as we have allowed our fleshly impulses to master us. If, when they prompt, we coldly and impersonally regard them, find them unworthy and crush them back humiliated, they become in time disciplined--wither and die. In proportion as we permit them, upon the other hand, they come in time to drive us with a fierceness that cannot be checked.