"I'm only so dead tired--that's the trouble.""then you'd better get right into bed. Here's my old plaid dressing-gown--you remember it, don't you?" Ann Eliza laughed, recalling Evelina's ironies on the subject of the antiquated garment. With trembling fingers she began to undo her sister's cloak. The dress beneath it told a tale of poverty that Ann Eliza dared not pause to note. She drew it gently off, and as it slipped from Evelina's shoulders it revealed a tiny black bag hanging on a ribbon about her neck. Evelina lifted her hand as though to screen the bag from Ann Eliza; and the elder sister, seeing the gesture, continued her task with lowered eyes. She undressed Evelina as quickly as she could, and wrapping her in the plaid dressing-gown put her to bed, and spread her own shawl and her sister's cloak above the blanket.
"Where's the old red comfortable?" Evelina asked, as she sank down on the pillow.
"The comfortable? Oh, it was so hot and heavy I never used it after you went--so I sold that too. I never could sleep under much clothes."She became aware that her sister was looking at her more attentively.
"I guess you've been in trouble too," Evelina said.
"Me? In trouble? What do you mean, Evelina?""You've had to pawn the things, I suppose," Evelina continued in a weary unmoved tone. "Well, I've been through worse than that.
I've been to hell and back."
"Oh, Evelina--don't say it, sister!" Ann Eliza implored, shrinking from the unholy word. She knelt down and began to rub her sister's feet beneath the bedclothes.
"I've been to hell and back--if I AM back," Evelina repeated. She lifted her head from the pillow and began to talk with a sudden feverish volubility. "It began right away, less than a month after we were married. I've been in hell all that time, Ann Eliza." She fixed her eyes with passionate intentness on Ann Eliza's face. "He took opium. I didn't find it out till long afterward--at first, when he acted so strange, I thought he drank.
But it was worse, much worse than drinking."
"Oh, sister, don't say it--don't say it yet! It's so sweet just to have you here with me again.""I must say it," Evelina insisted, her flushed face burning with a kind of bitter cruelty. "You don't know what life's like--you don't know anything about it--setting here safe all the while in this peaceful place.""Oh, Evelina--why didn't you write and send for me if it was like that?""That's why I couldn't write. Didn't you guess I was ashamed?""How could you be? Ashamed to write to Ann Eliza?"Evelina raised herself on her thin elbow, while Ann Eliza, bending over, drew a corner of the shawl about her shoulder.
"Do lay down again. You'll catch your death.""My death? That don't frighten me! You don't know what I've been through." And sitting upright in the old mahogany bed, with flushed cheeks and chattering teeth, and Ann Eliza's trembling arm clasping the shawl about her neck, Evelina poured out her story.
It was a tale of misery and humiliation so remote from the elder sister's innocent experiences that much of it was hardly intelligible to her. Evelina's dreadful familiarity with it all, her fluency about things which Ann Eliza half-guessed and quickly shuddered back from, seemed even more alien and terrible than the actual tale she told. It was one thing--and heaven knew it was bad enough!--to learn that one's sister's husband was a drug-fiend; it was another, and much worse thing, to learn from that sister's pallid lips what vileness lay behind the word.
Evelina, unconscious of any distress but her own, sat upright, shivering in Ann Eliza's hold, while she piled up, detail by detail, her dreary narrative.
"The minute we got out there, and he found the job wasn't as good as he expected, he changed. At first I thought he was sick--Iused to try to keep him home and nurse him. Then I saw it was something different. He used to go off for hours at a time, and when he came back his eyes kinder had a fog over them. Sometimes he didn't har'ly know me, and when he did he seemed to hate me.
Once he hit me here." She touched her breast. "Do you remember, Ann Eliza, that time he didn't come to see us for a week--the time after we all went to Central Park together--and you and I thought he must be sick?"Ann Eliza nodded.