Part 9 (1/2)

”But can't a person look well and yet be out of sorts?”

Mistrial was becoming angry, and he showed it. It was evident, however, that his irritation was caused less by the man to whom he spoke than by the physician whom he was seeking to consult. This Thorold seemed to grasp, for he answered perplexedly:

”After what has happened I don't see very well how I can go to your house.”

”Look here, Thorold: the past is over and done with--ill done, you will say, and I admit it. Be that as it may, it has gone. At the same time there is no reason why any shadow of it should fall on Justine. She is really in need of some one's advice. Can you not give it to her?”

”Certainly,” Thorold answered, ”I can do that;” and he looked very st.u.r.dy as he said it. ”Only--”

”Only what? If you can't go as a friend, at least you might go as a physician.”

Thorold's hand had slid from his cheek to his chin, and he nibbled reflectively at a finger-nail.

”Very good,” he said; ”I will go to her. Is she to be at home this afternoon?”

”The evening would be better, I think. Unless, of course--” and Mistrial made a gesture as though to imply that, if Thorold's evening were engaged, a visit in the afternoon might be attempted.

But the suggestion presumably was acceptable. Thorold drew out a note-book, at which he glanced.

”And I say,” Mistrial continued, ”I wish--you see, it is a delicate matter; Justine is very sensitive--I wish you wouldn't say you met me.

Just act as though--”

”Give yourself no uneasiness, sir.” Thorold had replaced the note-book and looked up again in Mistrial's face. ”I never mention your name.” And thereat, with a toss of the head, he dodged an omnibus and crossed the street.

For a moment Mistrial gazed after him, then he turned, and presently he was ordering a gla.s.s of brandy at the Brunswick bar.

It was late that night when he reached his home. During the days that followed he had no fixed hours at all. Several times he entered the apartment with the smallest amount of noise that was possible, and listened at the sitting-room door. At last he must have heard something that pleased him, for as he sought his own room he smiled. ”_Maintenant, mon cher, je te tiens._”

The next day he surprised Justine by informing her that he intended to pay a visit to a relative. He was gone a week.

IV.

That night the stars, dim and distant, were scattered like specks of frost on some wide, blue window-pane. At intervals a s.h.i.+ver of wheels crunching the resistant snow stirred the lethargy of the street, and at times a rumble accentuated by the chill of winter mounted gradually, and pa.s.sed on in diminis.h.i.+ng vibrations. Within, a single light, burning scantily, diffused through the room the drowsiness of a spell. In the bed was Justine, her eyes dilated, her face attenuated and pinched. One hand that lay on the coverlid was clinched so tightly that the nails must have entered the flesh. Presently she moaned, and a trim little woman issued from a corner with the noiseless wariness of a rat. As she pa.s.sed before the night-light, the silhouette of a giantess, fabulously obese, jumped out and vanished from the wall. For a moment she scrutinized her charge, burrowing into her, as it were, with shrewd yet kindly eyes. Again a moan escaped the sufferer, the wail of one whose agony is lancinating--one that ascended in crescendos and terminated in a cry of such utter helplessness, and therewith of such insistent pain, that the nurse caught the hand that lay on the coverlid, and unlocking the fingers stroked and held it in her own. ”There, dear heart--there, I know.”

Ah, yes, she knew very well. She had not pa.s.sed ten years of her existence tending women in travail for the fun of it. And as she took Justine's hand and stroked it, she knew that in a little while the agony, acuter still, would lower her charge into that vestibule of death where Life appears. Whether or not Justine was to cross that silent threshold, whether happily she would find it barred, whether it would greet and keep her and hold her there, whether indeed it would let the child go free, an hour would tell, or two at most.

But there were preparations to be made. The nurse left the bed and moved out into the hall. In a room near by, Mistrial, occupied with some advertis.e.m.e.nts in the _Post_, sat companioned by a physician who was reading a book which he had written himself. At the footfall of the nurse the latter left the room. Presently he returned. ”Everything is going nicely,” he announced, and placidly resumed his seat.

It was the fourth time in two hours that he had made that same remark.

Mistrial said nothing. He was gazing through the paper he held at the wall opposite, and out of it into the future beyond.

Since that day, the previous spring, on which he had set out to visit a relative, many things had happened, yet but few that were of importance to him. On his return from the trip, during one fleeting second, for the first time since he had known Justine, it seemed to him that she avoided his eyes. To this, in other circ.u.mstances, he would have given no thought whatever; as matters were, it made him feel that his excursion should not be regarded as time ill-spent. Whether it had been wholly serviceable to his project, he could not at the time decide. He waited, however, very patiently, but he seldom waited within the apartment walls. At that period he developed a curious facility for renewing relations with former friends. Once he took a run to Chicago with an Englishman he had known in j.a.pan; and once, with the brother of a lady who had married into the Baxter branch of the house of Mistrial, he went on a fis.h.i.+ng trip to Canada. These people he did not bring to call on his wife. He seemed to act as though solitude were grateful to her. Save Mrs. Metuchen, Thorold at that time was her only visitor, and the visits of that gentleman Mistrial encouraged in every way that he could devise.

Through meetings that, parenthetically, were more frequent on the stair or in the hallway than anywhere else, the two men, through sheer force of circ.u.mstances, dropped into an exchange of salutations--remarks about the weather, reciprocal inquiries on the subject of each other's health, which, wholly formal on Thorold's part, were from Mistrial always civil and aptly put. After all, was he not the host? and was it not for him to show particular courtesy to anyone whom his wife received?

To her, meanwhile, his att.i.tude was little short of perfection itself.

He was considerate, foresighted, and un.o.btrusive--a course of conduct which frightened her a little. Two or three months after he had struck her in the face she made--_a propos_ of nothing at all--an announcement which brought a trace of color to her cheeks.