Public-domain ebook
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In: Novels
Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #70487.
The opening · free to read
Murray Van Rensselaer had been waiting for an hour and a quarter in the reception-room of the Blakeley Hospital.
He was not good at waiting. Things usually came at his call, or sometimes even anticipated his desires. It was incredible that he should suddenly find himself in such a maddening set of circumstances!
He still wore the great fur-lined overcoat in which he had arrived after the accident, but he seemed to be unaware of it as he paced excitedly up and down the stark leather-upholstered room.
Across the marble corridor he could just see the tip of white starched linen that was the cap of the uniformed person with double-lensed spectacles who sat at the roll-top desk and presided over this fiendish place.
Three times he had pranced pompously across the tessellated floor and demanded to know what had become of the patient he had brought in. She had only looked him over coldly, impersonally, and reiterated that word would be sent to him as soon as the examination was completed. Even his name, which he had condescendingly mentioned, had failed to make the slightest impression upon her. She had merely filed his immaculate calling card and remanded him to the reception-room.
The tall clock in the corner, the only live thing in the room, seemed to tick in eons, not seconds. He regarded it belligerently. Why should a clock seem to have eyes that searched to your soul? What was a clock doing there anyway, in a place where they regarded not time, and were absorbed in their own terrible affairs? The clock seemed to be the only connecting-link with the outside world.
He strode nearer and read the silver plate of the donor, inscribed in memory of “Elizabeth,” and turned sharply back to the door again with a haunting vision of the white-faced girl he had brought in a while before. Bessie! Little Bessie Chapparelle! She was “Elizabeth” too.
What a cute kid she was when he first knew her! Strange that on this day of all days he should have come upon her standing at that corner after all these years, suddenly grown up and stunningly handsome!
And now she lay crumpled, somewhere up in those distant marble halls!
He shuddered in his heavy coat and mopped the cold perspiration from his brows. If anything should happen to Bessie! And his fault! Everybody would of course say it was his fault! He knew he was a reckless driver. He knew he took chances, but he had always got by before! If she hadn’t been so darned pretty, so surprisingly sweet and unusual, and like the child she used to be--and that truck coming around the corner at thirty-five miles an hour!
The air was full of antiseptics. It seemed to him that he had been breathing it in until his head was swimming, that cold, pungent, penetrating smell that dwelt within those white marble walls like a living spirit of the dead!
Gad! What a place! Why did he stay? He could go home and telephone later. Nobody was compelling him to stay. Bessie was a poor girl with nobody to take her part. Nobody but her mother!
He halted in his excited walk. Her mother! If anything happened to Bessie somebody would have to tell her mother!
A door opened far in the upper marble regions, and the echo of a delirious cry shivered down through the corridors. Rubber wheels somewhere rolled a heavy object down a space and out of sound; voices rose in a subdued murmur as if they passed a certain point and drifted away from the main speech, drifted down the stairs, vague, detached words. Then all was still again.
Something dragged at his heart. He had thought they were coming, and now suddenly he was afraid to have them come. What a relief! Just a little longer respite till he could get hold of himself. He wasn’t at all fit, or things wouldn’t get hold of him this way. He had been going the pace pretty hard since he left college. Too many highballs! Too late at night!--Too many cigarettes! The old man was right! If he hadn’t been so infernally offensive in the way he put it! But one couldn’t of course go that pace forever and not feel it.
What was it he had been thinking about when those voices passed that point above the stairs? Oh! Yes! Her mother! Some one would have to tell her mother! She was a woman with a kind twinkle in her eyes. One would find it terrible to quench that twinkle in her eyes! He remembered how she had tied up his cut finger one day and given him a cooky. Those were happy days!--Ah! There! There was that sound of an opening door again!--Voices!--Footsteps! Hark! They were coming! Yes,--they were coming! Rubber heels on marble treads! And now he was in a frenzy of fear.
Bessie, little blue-eyed Bessie with the gold hair all about her white face!--
The steps came on down the hall, and he held his breath in the shelter of a heavy tan-colored velvet portière. He must get himself in hand before he faced any one. If he only hadn’t left his flask in the car! Oh, but of course! The car was smashed up! What was he thinking about? But there would be other flasks! If only he could get out of this!
The nurse came on down the hall. He could see her reflection in the plate glass of the front door that was within his vision as he stood with his back toward the desk. She was going straight to the desk with a message!
The front door-knob rattled.
He glared impatiently at the blurred interruption to his vision of the nurse. A sallow man with a bandaged head was fumbling with the door-knob, and the white uniform of the nurse was no longer plain. He held his breath and listened:
“Well, is there any change?” asked the voice behind the roll-top desk, impassively.
“Yes, she’s dead!” answered the nurse.
“Well, you better go down to that man in the reception-room. He’s been pestering the life out of me. He thinks he’s the only one!--”
“I can’t!” said the nurse sharply. “I’ve got to call up the police station first. The doctor said--” She lowered her voice inaudibly. The man with the bandaged head had managed the door-knob at last.
The door swung wide, noiselessly, on its well-oiled hinges, letting in the bandaged man; and as he limped heavily in, a shadow slipped from the folds of the heavy curtain and passed behind him into the night.
In the big white marble house on the avenue that Murray Van Rensselaer called home the servants were lighting costly lamps and drawing silken shades. A little Pekingese pet came tipping out with the man to see what was the matter with the light over the front entrance, stood for a brief second glancing up and down haughtily, barked sharply at a passer-by, and retreated plumily into the dark of the entrance-hall with an air of ownership, clicking off to find his mistress. Sweet perfumes drifted out from shadowy rooms where masses of hothouse flowers glowed in costly jardinières, and a wood fire flickered softly over deep-toned rugs and fine old polished woods, reflected from illuminated covers of many rare books behind leaded panes of glass. It flickered and lighted the dreary face of the haughty master of the house as he sat in a deep chair and watched the flames, and seemed to be watching the burning out of his own life in bitter disappointment.
The great dining-room glittered with crystal and silver, and abounded in exquisite napery, hand-wrought, beautiful and fine as a spider’s web or a tracery of frost. The table was set for a large dinner, and a profusion of roses graced its centre.
Ancestral portraits looked down from the walls.
At one end of the room, in a screened balcony behind great fronds of mammoth ferns, musicians were preparing to play, arranging music, speaking in low tones.
The footfalls of the servants were inaudible as they came and went over the deep pile of ancient rugs.
A deep-throated chime from a tall old clock in the hall called out the hour, and a bell somewhere in the distance rang sharply, imperatively.
A maid came noiselessly down the stairs and paused beside the library door, tapping gently.
“Mr. Van Rensselaer, Mrs. Van Rensselaer would like to see you at once if you’re not busy.”
The wistful look in the master’s eyes changed at the summons into his habitual belligerence, and he rose with a sigh of impatience. He mounted the stairs like one going to a familiar stake.
Mrs. Van Rensselaer sat at her dressing-table fresh from the hands of her maid, a perfectly groomed woman in the prime of her life. Not a wrinkle marred the loveliness of her complexion, not a line of tenderness, or suffering, or self-abnegation gave character to her exquisite features. She had been considered the most beautiful woman of the day when Charles Van Rensselaer married her, and she still retained her beauty. No one, not even her bitterest enemy, could say that she had aged or faded. Her face and her figure were her first concern. She never let anything come between her and her ambition to remain young and lovely.
If her meaningless beauty had long since palled upon the man who had worked hard in his younger days to win her hand, he nevertheless yielded her the court which she demanded; and if there was sometimes a note of mock ceremony in his voice it was well guarded.
He stood in the violet shadow of her silken-shrouded lamp and watched her with a bitter sadness in his eyes. It was a moment when they might have met on common ground and drawn nearer to one another if she had but sensed it. But she was busy trying the effect of different earrings against her pearly tinted neck. Should it be the new rock crystals or the jade, or should she wear the Van Rensselaer emeralds after all?
She turned at last, as if just aware that he had come in, and spoke in an annoyed tone:
“Charles, you really will have to speak to Murray again.”
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