“Thorold,” Mistrial repeated, “give me a moment, will you?”
The physician raised the arm that he had pressed against his waistcoat, and, with four fingers straightened and the fifth askew, stroked an imaginary whisker.
“It is about Justine,” Mistrial continued. “She is out of sorts; I want you to see her.”
“Ah!” And Thorold looked down and away.
“Yes, I had intended to speak to Dr. McMasters; but when by the merest chance I saw you in there I told myself that, whatever our differences might be, there was no one who would understand the case more readily than you.”
As Mistrial spoke he imitated the discretion of his enemy; he looked down and away. The next moment, however, both were gazing into each other’s face.
“H’m.” Thorold, as he stared, seemed to muse. “I saw her the other day,” he said, at last; “she looked well enough then.”
“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 someone’s advice. Can you not give it to her?”
“Certainly,” Thorold answered, “I can do that;” and he looked very sturdy 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 fingernail.
“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 notebook, 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 notebook 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 glass 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 windowpane. At intervals a shiver 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 passed on in diminishing 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 passed 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 passed 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 advertisements 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
