“My father was an impartial hearer, and he—”
“But how is it possible to be so blind? Can you not see that your cousin has prejudiced him against me? I said, impartial hearer. But let the matter drop. I tell you the charge is false; believe it or not, as you prefer. There is, however, just this in the matter: if the charge is made again, I will have your cousin under arrest. You forget that there is such a thing as libel still.”
Again he paused, and strove to collect himself; there was a design in the carpet which appeared to interest him very much, but presently he looked up again.
“Now tell me,” he said, “what did your father say?”
“Nothing, save what he said before.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing that you would care to hear.” Her eyes roamed from the neighbourly ceiling over to him and back again. “He said,” she added, “that if I persisted in living with you his money would go to my child, if I had one; if I had none, then to Guy.”
“Were you alone with him when he said this, or was Guy, as you call him, there?”
“No, I was alone with him; Guy came later.”
“And is he aware of this provision?”
For all response Justine shrugged her shoulders.
“Does he know it, I ask you?”
“He does not,” she answered. “Father told me that he never would, until the will was read.”
“H’m.” And for a moment Mistrial mused. Then presently he smiled—yet was it a smile?—a look that an hallucinated monk in a medieval abbey might have seen on that imaginary demon who, flitting by him, the forefinger outstretched, whispered as he vanished through the wall, “Thou art damned, dear friend! thou art damned!” “H’m,” he repeated; “and in view of the provisions of your father’s will, will you tell me why is it that you are without a child?”
As he spoke he had arisen, and, smiling still, though now as were he questioning her in regard to the state of the weather, he looked into her eyes. She had drawn yet further back into the chair in which she sat; a deadly sickness overcame her; to her head there mounted the nausea of each one of his many misdeeds. The memory of the blow of the week before, one which, despite her seeming forbearance, had not ceased to rankle, returned to her; and with it, one after another in swift succession, she rememorated the offences of the past. But soon she too was on her feet and fronted him. “Why is it I am without a child?” she repeated. Her voice was low and clear, and between each word she permitted a little pause to intervene. “Why is it?”
The subtlety of his reproach battening on nerves already overwrought was exciting her as nothing had done before. “It is you,” she cried, “who are to blame. What have you done with your youth? What have you done with your manhood? Look at me, Roland Mistrial! If I have borne you no child it is because monsters never engender.” As she spoke, with one gesture she tore her bodice down. Her breast, palpitant with health and anger too, heaving at the sheer injustice of his reproach, confronted and confuted him. “It is there that women have their strength; tell me, if you can, what have you done with yours?”
And thereat, with a look a princess might give to a lackey who had dared to question her, she turned and left him where he stood.
The next day he tried to make his peace with her. In this he succeeded, or flattered himself he had, for subsequently she consented to accompany him to the play. And as she sat in the stalls it was of these things that she thought.
II
The information which Mistrial gleaned concerning the provisions of his father-in-law’s will was bitter in his mouth. On the morrow he gave some time to thought—he read too a little. The taunt which Justine had flung at him, bit; and with the idea of dulling the hurt and of ministering also to his own refreshment, he consulted a book which treated of certain conditions of the nervous system, and a work on medical jurisprudence as well. But literature of that kind is notoriously unsatisfactory. It may suggest, yet the questions which it prompts remain unanswered. Roland put the volumes down: they were productions of genius, no doubt, but to him they were nothing more. From the pursuit of exact knowledge he turned and looked out into the street.
The hour then was midway in one of those green afternoons which we are apt to fancy the adjunct of lands we never see, and as he looked he saw astride a bay hunter a man ambling cautiously over the stones. From the roofs opposite a breath of lilacs came, and a breeze that was neither cool nor warm loitered on its way from the river beyond. Mistrial let the breeze, the fragrance, the fulfilment of spring, pass unnoticed. The bay hunter had caught his eye: it seemed to him that an argument with an imperative horse was just the thing he needed most, and a little later he secured a cob from a stable on the street above.
The cob was docile enough, affecting once only to regard a sewer-grating in the bridle-path as a strange, unhallowed thing which it was needful to avoid. But the initial shy was the last. The spur gave him such a nip that during the remainder of the ride, whatever distasteful object he may have encountered, he gave no outward evidence of abhorrence. He had an easy canter, a long and swinging trot; and now on one, now on the other, they passed through and out of the Park, and on beyond the brand-new edifices that line Seventh Avenue, to that scantier outlying district where the
