“And how thankful he will be to be spared as much exertion as possible!” thought the young man, as having folded and put away the sheet of notepaper, he softly closed the door behind him, and made his way down the stairs.
He did not stop to interrogate the waiters as to who had entered his sitting room during his absence.
“Where would be the use?” he said to himself, as he called a voiture, and desired the man to drive him to the Rue Corot; “the message was the thing, the messenger mattered but little.”
Oddly enough, with the thought of the messenger there came into his mind a recollection of the sweet, careworn face of which he had caught a passing glimpse under a Salvationist poke-bonnet.
With his curiosity intensified to burning point by his anxieties, the wings of the wind would have seemed a tardy means of conveyance to his destination; so it was scarcely surprising that the jolting voiture with its sorry horse taxed his patience to its utmost limits.
The Rue Corot lies in the unfashionable quarter of the Porte Saint Martin, in close vicinity to the Théâtre Beaumarchais. It is a narrow and somewhat noisy thoroughfare of tall seven-storied houses that are let and sublet to all sorts and conditions of men.
Clive dismissed his voiture at the corner of the street, and found No. 11 for himself. The door was open, no porter was in attendance, and the entrance seemed all in darkness.
It was not until he had his foot absolutely on the first of the narrow flight of stairs, that he realised the awkwardness of his position in coming to a house to enquire for a sick person without knowledge of either the name or the sex of the individual.
Halfway up the stairs he had to draw back to the wall to allow a young woman to pass. She appeared to be of the sempstress or shop-attendant class, and was smartly dressed, as if for a café chantant, or some other bourgeois place of entertainment.
Clive seized his opportunity, and, lifting his hat, asked the girl if she could tell him if anyone were ill in the house.
“Mais oui, M’sieu,” she replied; “c’est la pauvre Marie Schira qui va mourir.”
“Marie Schira.”
Clive repeated the name to himself once or twice, and then remembered that he had seen it frequently on Parisian playbills.
Now what in the name of all that was wonderful could such a person as Marie Schira know or have to tell about such an one as Ida Culvers?
He ventured to address another question or two to the girl, and elicited the fact that Marie Schira, while dressing in her tiny dressing-room behind the scenes at the Théâtre Beaumarchais, had set her gauze sleeve on fire with the candles on her table, and, before assistance could be procured, had been so severely burned that her life was despaired of. This had happened three nights ago.
It was an awkward place for a colloquy this, on a small landing in the middle of a flight of stairs lighted only by a dim oil-lamp on a very high bracket. Yet Clive hazarded one more question.
“On which floor were Mademoiselle Schira’s rooms? Was there anyone there who could receive him?”
The young girl eyed him dubiously for a moment, as if wondering over the motive for his questions concerning a person of whom he evidently knew next to nothing.
She, however, answered him politely that Marie Schira’s rooms were on the floor above the one on which they stood; that Marie had a sister who had been summoned from England, and who was in attendance on her night and day. This sister was a member of a religious order, and wore a big “chapeau comme ça”—here the girl with her finger as nearly as possible described the shape of a coal-scuttle in the air. If she were out there would be sure to be someone else in attendance on Marie, for she was never left alone.
Then the girl wished him good evening, and passed down the stairs.
The “chapeau comme ça” at once conjured up to Clive’s fancy a vision of a Salvation Army poke-bonnet and a sweet, careworn face beneath it. He wondered if the bearer of the mysterious message stood revealed.
When he knocked at one of two doors that faced him on the second floor, the “someone else” left in charge of Marie Schira proved to be an elderly woman of most untidy appearance, with a yellow handkerchief tied over her head.
Her French was alarmingly bourgeois, and her sentences ran one into the other with such rapidity as to be almost unintelligible.
Clive could just make out that Marie was suffering agonies; that delirium had set in, and that it was not likely she would live till morning.
Would M’sieu enter and sit down in the salon? Marie’s sister, who had gone out early in the afternoon, would no doubt soon return and be able to answer any questions.
As she finished speaking the woman opened a door adjoining the one at which she stood, and showed Clive into a room dimly lighted by a single candle in a girandole over the mantelpiece.
He conjectured that a door on one side of the fireplace led into the room of the sufferer, for he presently heard the woman’s voice on the other side of it, together with what he fancied to be the creaking of an iron bedstead. It seemed as if the poor girl were tossing restlessly on her couch of pain, for presently he heard a faint moan, followed at an interval by a low, incoherent muttering.
It was a dreary waiting-time, this, that had its dreariness doubled and trebled by the fear lest even as he sat there the dying girl might pass away with the story it behoved him to hear untold.
His eye wandered round the
