Pride's Bed
The Story.* Sometimes, in a small U. S. town, even in no town at all, you come upon a great house alone in its grandeur. It will have been built by some man whose intensity raised him above his fellows to the position and estate demanded by an acquisitive nature. If the house is still owned by relations of the builder, you may not see in them many traces of the old blood. But should you find the builder's kin elsewhere, and fallen on hard days, mark how often some intensity of the old blood will have been its own undoing.
The house in this story of Myra Henshawe stood behind a tall iron fence in a ten-acre park at Parthia, Ill. Myra, an orphan, was John Driscoll's great-niece and he brought her up there, a forceful, coarse old Irishman and a vivid, a wild little girl. She had jewels and many gowns and a Steinway piano. She rode keen horses. The town band played at her parties and serenaded John Driscoll on his birthday; he had bought the bandsmen their silver instruments and when they played for him he treated with his best whiskey. He had wrung a great fortune out of contract labor in Missouri swamps.
Myra became a beautiful young woman, short, plump, like a dove in repose, in action very erect, vital, challenging. Her spirit and swift wit were of a sort that old John Driscoll could understand, "racy, and none too squeamish." He was probably proud of her the snowy night she left his house, penniless, after two years of intense, secret waiting, to marry the man whom she loved and he did not. He was certainly proud of her when, after willing his house to pale-handed nuns, founding a women's refuge" in Chicago and providing that Myra could always go to that refuge free and have pinmoney, he knew that she would sooner go to the river.
It is Myra's story, but her young years with that illiterate, powerful old man made her much that she was. With such love as she and Oswald Henshawe had, another woman might have stayed happy. But ambition for him and hatred of their poverty ate her heart. Her wit sharpened when they called on his stuffy, kindly German business friends. She had been formed for distinction, for surroundings of ease and dignity and charm. Childless, she needed scope to spend herself without stint on her friendships, for she had that concentration of affection which makes individuals of its most commonplace objects and the constancy of spirit which keeps attachments with fine people inviolate in their highest mood. Deathly poor and dying bitterly, long after her bright New York days, she spent gold pieces, hoarded in an old glove, that masses might be said for her gracious friend, Madame Modjeska, years dead.
Dying of cancer in her sixties in a Pacific coast boom town, with loutish roomers clumping overhead and with no love left for her patient, tender, ineffectual husband, Myra was bitter over her self-defeat, until the end. Passion had made her a lowly bed; she had writhed on it for years. She still could laugh at some of life's absurdities. Some of its beauty was still warm to her—Heine's poems, her own lovely hands. But her steely pride was turned upon itself, 'her mortal enemy. Not even religion could resign her to the indignities of poverty. When she felt her time upon her, she stole off alone to a Pacific headland, to watch dawn break over the sea.