Mrs. Carstairs went in to see her, and was alarmed. She took the girl’s temperature and then called up the doctor.
“You have a fever,” she said. “You must go back to bed. It’s nothing, I daresay, but we have to be on the safe side, dear.”
Louise betrayed her agitation. She pleaded to be allowed to dress and go out for her walk. There were moments when actual fear lurked in her dark eyes.
“I will be all right in a little while, Aunt Frieda. Don’t be cross with me. I must have eaten something last night that disagreed with me. The lobster,—I ate a tiny bit of it.”
“Very likely,” said her aunt calmly. “All the more reason for being careful today. No, my dear, I must insist on your remaining in bed,—at least until Dr. Browne has seen you.”
“When is he coming?”
“The attendant said she could locate him and would send him here as soon as possible. He is out making his calls.”
“The chocolate tasted queerly this morning, Aunt Frieda,” said the girl, feverishly.
“Imagination. Nothing tastes right when one’s stomach is upset.”
“Oh, I want so much to get out for a breath of fresh air. It is a perfectly lovely day. I am sure Dr. Browne will say it’s the best thing in the world—”
“Dr. Browne doesn’t know everything,” interrupted Mrs. Carstairs. She laid her hand on the girl’s hot forehead. “You must go back to bed,—just for a little while,” she said, and there was an inexorableness in her tone that roused swift resentment in Louise. A rebellious, angry light smouldered in her eyes. “I know what is best for you. If it should turn out to be ptomaine poisoning—”
“It can’t be ptomaine if it came from the chocolate I drank,” sad Louise, excitement causing her voice to tremble and to take on a certain shrillness.
“I am confident it is all due to nervousness,” said Mrs. Carstairs. She spoke in a patient, consoling manner. “Dr. Browne will give you something to straighten out your digestion, and you will be all right by tomorrow. You are not strong yet, you know. Just be patient, my dear. It takes time.”
“I should like to telephone, Aunt Frieda,” said the girl abruptly. Submissive to the gentle but unyielding authority of the older woman, who dominated as one with the power to scourge if resistance continued, she had begun to divest herself, rather helplessly, of the gay peignoir in which she had breakfasted. With feverish haste, she slipped her arms through the loose folds, and faced her aunt. There was defiance in her glance. For an instant it held.
The calm smile and the tolerant shake of the head, as to a pleading child, shattered her resolve; she saw that argument was useless. The robe fell from her shoulders as she turned away with a sob in her throat.
“Is it important?” inquired the older woman.
“I—this afternoon will do as well, I suppose,” replied the girl, without turning her head.
“Let me call up for you, dear. It is no trouble at all. I can explain that you are ill.”
“No, thank you, Aunt Frieda. It—it doesn’t matter.”
She hesitated about confiding to Mrs. Car-stairs that she was going out to meet her lover. Something told her that it would be the wrong thing to do,—something that for want of another name would have to go as cunning. She shared a vague, disturbing secret with Steele....
Mrs. Carstairs tucked the bedclothes about her.
“The doctor will be here soon, I am sure,” she said. “Do you feel any better? Are you more comfortable?”
“I am in no pain,—if that’s what you mean. Just this wretched nausea. What do the morning papers say about the loss of the Elston, Aunt Frieda?”
“Nothing, I believe. Your uncle says there was no mention of it. I daresay the news has been held up for the time being. Waiting for full details. Wasn’t it fortunate,—wasn’t it providential that the transfer to the Campion was so cleverly accomplished?”
A maid-servant came to the door.
“You are wanted on the telephone, Mrs. Car-stairs. Shall I say you are engaged?”
“Who is it, Wrenn?”
“A gentleman. I couldn’t catch the name, Mrs. Carstairs.”
“I will see who it is.”
After she had closed Louise’s door behind her, Frieda Carstairs stood stockstill in the long corridor. She put her hand to her breast and held it there lightly, as if to transmit its vital strength to the organ which pounded so violently. Her tall figure was tense; her face took on the pallor of death and its rigidity. For as long as fifteen or twenty seconds, she remained motionless. Then her lips moved stiffly; they twitched as in a spasm of pain. The two words they formed hut did not utter were:
“Poor girl!”
Once, as she covered the short distance to her own sitting-room, her figure swayed slightly. She even put out a hand to steady herself against the wall,—a needless precaution, for she instantly regained command of herself.
She closed the door, and, before taking up the receiver, threw in the device which cut out the instrument from other extensions in the apartment,—those in the butler’s pantry, her husband’s study, and the one that stood on the night-table at the head of his bed. Her knees suddenly became weak; they trembled as with the palsy. She sat down at the writing table and dropped her elbow heavily on the top. Again she feared that she was going to faint.
“Yes?” she murmured thickly into the transmitter, and, instantly realizing that her voice betrayed nervousness and even alarm, repeated the word firmly, crisply. “Yes,—this is Mrs. Carstairs.”
“I am speaking for the Evening——” (the name of the newspaper was indistinctly pronounced)—“and I called up, Mrs. Carstairs, to ask if it is true that Captain Derrol Steele was engaged to be married to your niece, Miss Louise Hansbury?”
She did not reply. Her lips parted but no sound issued forth.
Again the voice spoke in her ear. “Are you there?”
The “yes” she uttered in reply was little more than a hoarse gasp. And then: “I hear you quite distinctly.” There was a click at the other end. Slowly, as in a daze, she hung up the receiver. Not another word passed.
She did not leave the apartment that day, but spent most of the time with her niece, whose indisposition was promptly diagnosed as an acute attack of indigestion by the learned and complacent physician, who dosed her and went his way. He ordered her to remain in bed; he would run in and see her in the morning. If anything, ah!—a—alarming turned up, he murmured to Mrs. Carstairs, she was to call him at once. Not likely, of course, said he, nothing to be apprehensive about, but—well, you never can tell. Resistance not yet fully restored,—and, “after all, as I’ve said all along, Mrs. Carstairs, one’s own resistance is the best chemistry going, and one has to fill his own prescription when it comes to that sort of thing, don’t you know.”
Being a very fashionable doctor he gave her pyromedan to bring down the temperature in a hurry, and codeine to quiet the pain.
Davenport Carstairs seldom reached his home before six or half-past. It was his custom,—if business happened to be indulgent,—to drop in at his favourite club about four in the afternoon. On this afternoon, however, he drove straight home from the office. The clock in the hall was striking four as he entered the apartment. The afternoon newspapers were under his arm,—four or five of them.
“Has Mrs. Carstairs come in, Hollowell?” he asked.
“Mrs. Carstairs did not go out today, sir. Miss Hansbury is ill.”
Ordinarily Carstairs would have been disturbed by this information. He had been gravely worried over his niece’s condition. Hollowell’s supplementary statement, however, appeared to have fallen on deaf ears.
“Say that I’m home, Hollowell, and in my room.”
“Very good, sir. Is there anything I can do, sir?”
“Do? What do you mean?”
“I thought perhaps you might be ill, sir. I—”
“Not at all, not at all,” somewhat irascibly. “Ask Mrs. Carstairs to come to my room—Wait! Have you had any news here today?”
“No, sir,—nothink as I am aware of, sir.”
“No—er—commotion?”
“I think not, sir. It isn’t serious. Sort of—ah—what you might call stomach—ah—although cook says it can’t have been anything she ate last—”
“By the way, what made you think I was ill?”
“Well,—since you ask, sir,—you do look a bit seedy, sir,—that is to say pale and—”
“I wish to see Mrs. Carstairs alone. Please avoid mentioning my return in Miss Hansbury’s presence.”
He went at once to his study, where, moved by the remark of the butler, he stared long and hard at his features in a mirror. His face was ashen grey, and suddenly, strangely old.
He had tossed the newspapers on the rare old Italian table in the centre of the room. After a few moments of complete abstraction, his dull, frowning gaze was raised from the floor to sweep the room,—which, for some strange, almost uncanny cause, seemed almost unfamiliar to him. And yet it was the same,—nothing had been changed. Only he had altered—his own perspective had undergone a vast, incomprehensible change. His eyes falling upon the papers, he took them up, one by one, and stared again at a certain headline in each,—a raw caption that fascinated him and hurt him like the cut of a knife.
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