Part 33 (1/2)

”Yes, sir, I think he did--I think they came back together.”

There was a knock at the door, and then the murmur of words outside.

”Who's there?” called out Richard Maule in a strong voice. ”What's all that whispering about?” He spoke querulously, as he sometimes did in the morning.

”It's only I--Mallet!”

The doctor came in. He and Richard Maule were old friends--in fact, contemporaries. But there was a great difference between the two men--the one was broad, ruddy, and did not look his years; the other was the wreck we know.

”I'm sorry to say Mrs. Maule is very ill.” The doctor plunged at once into the business which had brought him. Long experience had taught him the futility, the cruelty, of ”breaking” bad news.

”What's the matter with her? She's always enjoyed remarkably good health.” Richard Maule moved a little in his bed.

”Yes, I should have taken her to be a remarkably healthy woman, though of course as you know--we both know--she has always been very sleepless.

Almost as if she caught insomnia from you, eh?”

The doctor's courage was beginning to fail him, curiously. It was strange, it--it was horrible, the hatred, the contempt Richard Maule felt for his wife.

”Mallet--come here, closer. I believe you are concealing something from me. If there's bad news I'd rather hear whatever it is from you than from d.i.c.k.” Mr. Maule spoke in a hard, rather breathless tone.

”There is something to hear. Your wife last night took an overdose of chloral----”

The doctor said no word of sympathy. The words would have stuck in his throat. He knew too well the real relations.h.i.+p of the husband and wife.

Richard Maule would receive plenty of condolences from others. But even so, to learn suddenly of the death of a human being with whom one has been a.s.sociated over long years is always a shock, is always painful.

Richard Maule straightened himself in bed. ”An overdose of chloral,” he repeated, ”then she's--she's----”

The other bent his head.

”She thought she would outlive me many years.”

The doctor looked thoughtfully at his patient. He knew that illness of a certain type atrophies the memory and the affections, while leaving unaffected the mind and a certain fierce instinct of self-preservation.

Dr. Mallet was not so much shocked or so much surprised by Richard Maule's remark as a layman would have been.

Again the bereaved husband spoke, and this time questioningly. ”A peaceful death, Mallet? A happy death?”

”Yes--yes, certainly.” Something impelled him to add, ”But a terrible thing when it comes to one so young, so beautiful, as was your wife!”

He compared the stillness, the equanimity, of the man lying before him, with the awful agitation of d.i.c.k Wantele--an agitation so terrible, a horror so overwhelming, that it had confirmed Dr. Mallet in a theory of his, a theory formed a good many years ago, and of which he had sometimes felt ashamed.

But the mind of an intelligent medical man who has enjoyed for many years a large family practice becomes like one of those old manuals for the use of confessors. His mind perforce becomes a store-house of strange sins, of troubled, abnormal happenings, which belong, from the point of view of the happy and the sane, to a fifth dimension, unimagined, unimaginable. The wise physician, like the wise confessor, does not allow his mind to dwell on these things, but he does not make the mistake of telling himself--as so many of us do--that they are not there. The doctor had formed a suspicion, which had now become a certainty. Yet he was surprised by Richard Maule's next words.

”It must have been an awful shock to d.i.c.k, Mallet. He was thrown so much more with Athena than I could be of late years, though to be sure she was a great deal away.”

He waited a moment, and as the doctor made no comment, ”Although they didn't pull it off well together, still for my sake they both kept up a kind of armed truce, eh, Mallet?” He looked searchingly at the other man. ”I am telling you nothing you do not know.”

The other nodded gravely.