the step. Mr. Rosval had been--since the third day following on
the--ah--development of the illness--ringing the changes between
delirium and--ah--coma. For--as the Doctor had already said--there were
complications----
Mrs. Rosval neatly stopped the ball, for the second time.
“How did you know, if _he_ did not tell you, that there was a Mrs.
Rosval? How did you get at my address?”
The Doctor, swelling with the indignity of being supposed to have
got at anybody’s address, explained that the proprietor of the hotel,
having some faint inkling that Mr. Rosval belonged to the class of
landed gentleman, had looked up the name in _Burke_.
The sharp suspicion faded out of Mrs. Rosval’s eyes as she listened.
It was a perfectly credible, perfectly simple explanation. She tossed
the crumpled telegram into the fire--which devoured it at a gulp--and
began to pull off her gloves. That was her way of intimating that she
accepted the situation. Then she rang the bell. The decorous waiter
appeared, and she gave the man a quiet order, handing him some loose
silver and a slip of paper, upon which she had penciled a few words.
“A cab is waiting at the door. Pay the driver and send him away. A
person who is--not quite a gentleman--is waiting in the vestibule. Say
to him that Mrs. Rosval is satisfied, and there is no need to wait.
Give him that paper at the same moment, or he will not believe you!” As
the waiter vanished she turned to the Doctor with the faintest flicker
of a smile upon her sensitive pale lips. “I thought it wisest to keep
the cab, in case I required to leave this place hurriedly,” said Mrs.
Rosval. “The man waiting downstairs is a detective from a well-known
Agency. I judged it best to enlist his services--he would have proved
useful supposing this business of the telegram to have been a Trap.”
The Doctor spread his large white hands, danglingly, like a seal’s
flappers.
“A trap?” he repeated, helplessly. “My dear madam! You suspected that
some designing person or persons unknown might--possibly use your
husband’s name, invent a story of his illness as a ruse to--entrap you?”
“I suspected,” returned Mrs. Rosval, “no unknown person. The inventor
of the ruse would have been my husband. We separated some years ago
by mutual consent. At least, I refused to live with him any longer,
and he--knowing what grounds I had for the refusal--was obliged to
submit. But he resented my action in the matter.” Mrs. Rosval raised
her delicate dark eyebrows with weary disdain, and imparted to her
shoulders a mute eloquence of contempt which is not the prerogative of
an English-bred woman. “And he has, more than once, had recourse to
what, for want of a better word, I call Traps. That is all. Matilda,”
she addressed the tearful maid, “dry your eyes and tell the people
downstairs that I engage this suite of rooms. Two bedrooms, a bathroom,
and sitting-room at ten guineas a week, I think they said? Horribly
expensive, but it cannot be helped. And now, Doctor”--she turned again
to the Doctor--“when do you wish me to see your patient? At once? It
shall be at once if you say so! I am completely in your hands!”
The Doctor, a little staggered by the deftness of his patient’s wife
in transferring the onus of the situation from her shoulders to his
own, absolutely prohibited any suggestion of her entering the sick-room
until refreshed and rested. Mrs. Rosval acquiesced, with a repetition
of that compromising statement about being completely in his hands--and
the Doctor took his leave, promising to return later that evening. She
gave him her cool fingers, and they parted. He had no sooner reached
the door than she called him back.
“I only wanted to ask---- Of course, you have a library. Does the
catalogue of your library include a file of the _Daily Telegraph_?” It
did, the Doctor admitted. File in question extending some twelve years
back.
“Three will do,” said Mrs. Rosval, warming one slender arched foot
upon the fender. “Next time you are in want of a little light reading,
look in the Law Intelligence, Divorce Division, month of February,
1899, where you will find a case: ‘Ffrench _v._ Ffrench; Rosval cited.’
The details will explain a good deal that may appear puzzling to you
with regard to the strained relations between Mr. Rosval and myself.
Though doctors never allow themselves to be puzzled, do they? _Au
revoir!_”
II
The Doctor had had an unusually busy day of it. But he curtailed his
after-dinner nap in order to glance through the Law Intelligence
records of the month of February, 1899. There was much in the case to
which Mrs. Rosval had referred that went far toward justifying the
“strained relations” she had hinted at. And it is the duty of the
medical profession to rally at the war-cry of the outraged Proprieties.
But, when alone and unobserved, doctors have many points in common with
mere men. And as this Doctor stepped into his brougham he said, “Women
are very hard! In all human probability the man was innocent.” He said
again, “Women are hard!” as he creaked up the hotel staircase.
He found her in the sick-room. She had changed her dress for something
that gave out no assertive silken rustle in answer to her movements,
something that draped the charming contour of her figure--she had
a charming figure--with soft, quiet folds, like the wings of a dun
hawkmoth. That fell composure still walled her in as with ramparts of
steel. She held the bed-curtain back as the Doctor stooped over the
livid, discolored face upon the pillow. She took a linen cloth from
the nurse, and deftly, lightly wiped away the froth and mucus that
had gathered about the cracked and bleeding lips. But the hand that
rendered these offices was as steady as though it had been carved out
of white marble.
Disturbed from his lethargy by the invasion of candlelight upon his
haggard eyelids and the Doctor’s bass murmur in his ear, the sick man
began to talk a little. For the most part it was mere gabble, but some
sentences were plain. He moaned piteously for a barber, because he
was unshaven. Rosval had always been foolishly vain of his personal
appearance. And he damned the one glass of bad water, to the imbibition
of which he attributed his disease, promising, if he got well, never
to drink any more. To do him credit, he had never been addicted to
that particular form of liquid refreshment. The Doctor inferred as
much from his diagnosis--and from the faint sarcastic quiver of Mrs.
Rosval’s white lips. Then the tongue of the man ceased wagging--but
the burning head began to thresh to and fro upon the pillow, and the
claw-like hands to scratch at the bed-clothes in a fresh access of the
maddening enteric irritation. Alleviating measures proved as effective
as alleviating measures generally do prove; the head went on rolling,
and the crooked talons continued to tear. All at once they were quiet.
Mrs. Rosval had laid her hand upon the clammy forehead--about as
tenderly, to all appearance, as she would have laid it upon the back of
a chair. And the man was still. She placed the other hand beside the
first--the drawn lines about the nostrils relaxed, the clenched teeth
parted, the breast rose and fell with the indrawing and outgoing of a
sigh of relief. And the man slept. So soundly that she moved from him
presently, without disturbing him, and passed into the room adjoining,
where the Doctor and the nurse were holding a whispered confabulation.
There would be no need to send in another professional attendant, the
nurse said, now that the patient’s wife had arrived. She possessed
a remarkable ability for nursing, and extraordinary self-command.
She shrank from nothing--not even the most repugnant duties of the
sick-chamber. The nurse had met in her time with ladies who took things
coolly; but this lady really surprised her.
The Doctor was in the act of shaking his head--not from side to side,
but up and down--a gesture which expressed indulgent tolerance of the
nurse’s surprise while it repudiated the notion of his entertaining
any on his own account--when he jumped. For a calm, quiet voice at his
elbow said:
“You told me that Mr. Rosval was dangerously ill. Is he dying?”
The nurse had vanished into the carbolic-laden atmosphere of the
Chamber of Horrors.
“My dear madam, your husband is in the Hands----” So the Doctor was
beginning, when the obvious inappropriateness of the stereotyped
formula stopped him short. Then he admitted that the condition of the
man in the other room was very precarious. That he could not, when not
in _articulo mortis_, be said to be dying--but that, toward the small
hours of the morning, he might attain to a pitch of prostration closely
allied to that condition. And that nothing could be done for him but
to give him milk and medicine regularly, and---- The Doctor would have
ended “and trust in Providence,” but for obvious reasons he thought
better of it. Then he went away, feeling quite certain in his own mind
that Mrs. Rosval would be a widow before twenty-four hours were over.
That lady, meanwhile, returning to the sick-room, had persuaded the
fagged nurse to go and lie down. She understood how to do all that was
necessary, she whispered, and would call the attendant if any change
occurred. Then she sat down at the foot of the bed, and prepared to
keep her vigil with unshaken fortitude. The sleeping woman in the next
room breathed heavily, the sounds of rolling wheels and jarring voices
grew less and less--then all fell quiet. About three hours before the
dawn the sleeper awakened. The hollow eyes no longer turned on her with
the blind, glassy stare of delirium. There was reason in Rosval’s look,
and memory.
He seemed to beckon, and she came near. She had to stoop to catch the
moaning whisper that asked: “How--did you--come here?”
She answered steadily, “They sent for me.”
“They’d not have--if _I_ had known!” Rosval gasped.
“If I annoy you,” said Mrs. Rosval, with icy tolerance, “I can go!” She
turned, meaning to call the nurse; but a claw-like hand went weakly
out and caught at her skirts. The grasp was no stronger than that of a
newborn child, but, just for that it _was_ so feeble, it held her.
“You’ll not go! Three years--you’ve treated me--like a leper! Never
would--listen to what I’d got to say. But now ... I--tell you, she--sat
on--my knee and--kissed me! Before I knew it--and then--the husband
came in! A plant, by Gad!”
Mrs. Rosval said, “You must not talk. The Doctor says you are not to
talk,” and busied herself with the bottles and glasses that occupied a
little stand near the bedside.
Rosval condemned the Doctor. Mrs. Rosval measured out his medicine,
raised his head with professional skill, and offered him the glass. He
clenched his teeth, and defied her with gaunt eyes across the brim.
“No! No milk--no doctor’s stuff. I’ve been going to the devil--for
three years past,” proclaimed the sinner, feebly. “Why not go--at
once--and have done with it?” Then he fell back heavily on the pillow.
Mrs. Rosval summoned the nurse. The nurse could do nothing. For the
moribund was obdurate, and every fresh manifestation of obduracy
drove not one, but half a gross of nails into his coffin. That casket
was fast progressing toward completion, when Mrs. Rosval conceived
a desperate idea. The execution of it cost her a severe struggle.
Stooping down, she whispered to the sinking man:
“Jack!”
His faded eyes rolled in their sunken sockets until they rested on her.
He said with difficulty:
“Well?”
“What will make you take it?”
Something like a gleam of cunning came into the face. The answer came:
“Kiss me!”
She battled with herself for a moment silently, and then, bending
closer, touched his forehead with her lips.
“That isn’t all! You must say: ‘_I forgive you!_’”
“I can’t!”
“All--right, then!”
Silence ensued. The angles of the features were growing pinched and
sharp; a bluish shade was creeping about the mouth. She cast a glance
of scorn at her own reflection, caught in a mirror that hung against
the opposite wall, and said the words:
“I forgive you! Isn’t that enough?”
“Not quite. ‘_I love you--and----_’”
The voice was getting very faint.
“I love you--dear--and----”
“And ‘_I take you back!_’”
“I take you back.” Her iron fortitude was broken. She said it with a
sob, and gathered the weak head to her bosom, being the kind of woman
who does not do things by halves.
* * * * *
A month later the Doctor received a check. It was a handsome check,
enclosed with the thanks and compliments of Mr. and Mrs. Rosval, on
leaving London.
“Carried him off with her into the country,” said the Doctor, tapping
his teeth with a paper-knife as he closed the volume of the _Daily
Telegraph_ which contained the case “Ffrench _v._ Ffrench; Rosval
cited.” “In other words, taken him back. And in all human probability
the man was guilty. Women are very weak!”
THE MAN WHO COULD MANAGE WOMEN
Or thought he could. Which comes to the same thing. His name was
Yethill, and he was a Junior Captain in the R. A.
Yethill belonged to the New School; he was a specimen of the latest
military development of the age. By their smoked spectacles shall ye
know Yethill and his peers; by the right foot, which is broadened
by the lathe; by the right thumb, which is yellowed with acids and
sticky with collodion; by the hard-bitten, pragmatical, theoretical,
didactic way of treating all mysteries in heaven--a locality which
is interesting only in virtue of the opportunities afforded to trick
aviators--and earth, in which mines may be dug, and upon which
experiments may be carried on. These men wake themselves in the
morning, and heat their shaving water by means of electrical machines
of their own invention. They carry kodaks in their bosoms, and are, in
the matter of imparting information, human volcanoes continually in
eruption.
Yethill was not behind his fellows in this respect. When he had said
his little say upon the Theory of Wireless Photophony, the Detection
of Subterranean Mines by the K Rays, and the irresponsibility of the
bedbug in connection with beri-beri; when he had told the Head of the
Electrical Department how many watts are equivalent to a horse-power,
and explained to the Colonel, who is sinfully proud of his men, that
the employment of the uneducated inferior in warfare will cease with
the century, and that the army of the future will consist entirely of
officers, he would drop his voice to a confidential whisper and control
his elbows. He talked heliographically as a rule, and if a man were
left to listen to him--he could, as a rule, clear the Mess smoking-room
in ten minutes from the start--he would dilate at length upon his
best-loved hobby, the art of managing women.
* * * * *
Yethill was no Adonis. He had a knobby, argumentative head, a harlequin
set of features, each separate one belonging to a different order and
period of facial architecture; and a figure which was not calculated,
as his tailor observed with bitterness, to do justice to a good cut.
But it was wonderful to hear him talk in that conquering, masterful
way of his. He had an appalling array of statistics to prove that
the majority of marriages were miserable; that life, connubially
speaking, was dust and ashes in the mouths of nineteen Benedicts out
of twenty. But the darkest hour presaged the dawn. Let the man about
to marry, let the already-married, but adopt the Yethill system of
sweetheart-and-wife breaking, and thenceforth all would be well. And
thousands of voices arising from the uttermost ends of the civilized
earth would hail with one accord Yethill as their deliverer.
Then came an essay on the New Art of Courtship.
“To a man,” Yethill would say, jerking his knee and stammering a
little, as his custom was when excited, “who is a reasonable being,
the woman he loves is a woman--only spelt with a big ‘W’; the woman he
likes is a woman spelt in the ordinary way; and the woman he doesn’t
like is a mere creature of the female sex. To a woman,” Yethill
would continue, “who is, nineteen times out of twenty, a perfectly
unreasonable being;--the man she loves is a demi-god; the man she
doesn’t love is a man;--and the man she dislikes is a gorilla. She
quite overlooks the fact that in every individual human male these
three may be found united. And man is weak enough to humor her. So
that out of so many marriages that take place, a majority--a frightful
majority--are founded upon illusions. And the subsequent state of
conjugality may be called a state of evolution, in which these
primary illusions, after undergoing a process of disarrangement and
disintegration, are finally reduced to impalpable powder, and the Bed
Rock of Reality is laid bare. We know what happens after that!”
The listening man generally knew enough to grunt an affirmative. And
Yethill would, with many weird facial jerks and twitches, go on to
explain the system.
The great system was, like all other wonderful discoveries, involved
in a very simple plan of procedure. It consisted only in reversing
the accepted order of things. A man, supposedly desirous of getting
married, recognizing in himself the existence of the trinity above
mentioned, should assert the existence of the third person from the
very outset--suppress the demi-god, show the gorilla. Let the woman you
were about to make your wife see the worst of you before you showed her
the best. Let her pass through the burning fiery furnace before you
admitted her into the Paradise that is the reward of proved devotion.
Let her know what bullying meant before you took to petting--blame her
weaknesses before you praised her virtues. Under this _régime_ there
would be no illusions to commence with; and married life, instead
of being full of disappointments, would be replete with delightful
surprises. Your wife married you, believing you to be a gorilla.
“There’s the weak point,” the listener would interpolate. “What woman,
unless a lunatic of sorts, _would_ marry a gorilla?”
Yethill would not hear of this objection. He was always deaf when you
came to it. He would pound on--dilate on the surprise and joy with
which she found that she had married a man, and the rapture with which
she would greet the final discovery that she had got hold of a demi-god.
“It sounds splendid,” the other men would say, “but it won’t wash.
Look here, I’m going to take Miss So-and-So up to a Gaiety _matinée_
to-morrow. To follow up your system I ought to call for her in my worst
clothes, be surly on the way to the station, and neglectful in the
tunnels. I ought to dump her into her stall like a sack, go out to ‘see
a man’ between every act, and take it for granted that she doesn’t want
cool tea and warm ices. You know that’d never do! She’d give me the bag
to-morrow. And she’d be right!”
But Yethill hearkened not. There was excitement at the Arsenal, and
much babbling in barracks, the day on which it was publicly made known
that Yethill contemplated giving an object-lesson in support of his
great system very shortly.
The object was Miss Sallis.
Miss Sallis was a fluffy little pink-and-white girl, the daughter of a
retired Admiral, who lived near the Dockyard.
Men had dined with Miss Sallis, and played tennis with Miss Sallis,
and flirted with Miss Sallis, during several seasons past. Some of
them had asked for her hand--she wore fives in gloves--and had not got
it. Thus, Yethill’s announcement was received with a certain degree of
risibility. No bets were made upon the chances of Yethill’s getting
her, the odds against his acceptance were too tremendous. Yethill
proposed. He mentioned that his prospects of advancement in the Service
were not very promising; that his scientific pursuits would have to be
relinquished if he were to set up an establishment on even a moderate
scale, and that he did not intend to relinquish those pursuits; that
there were several hereditary diseases in his family; that, while
bestowing upon the lady he honored with the offer of his hand a regard
which justified his proposal, he should not have made that proposal
had the lady been poor--with other statements of equal candor. A more
wonderful proposal was never made.
What was more wonderful still, Miss Sallis accepted him! He bought
her a ring, containing three small fragments of petrified red-currant
jelly, embedded in fifteen-carat gold; and when she asked him to put it
on her finger said, “Oh, rot!” and wouldn’t. He spent a certain amount
of time with his betrothed, but invariably carried a scientific work in
his pocket, wherein he might openly take refuge when the primrose paths
of love proved wearisome. He forbade her to dance with other men, and
did not dance with her himself. He snubbed her when she asked questions
about his camera, his lathe, his batteries, and tried timidly to be
interested in magnets and inductors, acids and cells, because they
interested _him_. He carried out his system thoroughly. If Miss Sallis
_had_ any illusions about Yethill he bowled the poor little thing over,
right and left, like ninepins, long before the wedding day.
With the loss of her illusions went some of her good looks. She made a
pretty-looking little bride. With her fluffy pale hair, her pink nose,
and her pink eyelids, a not remote resemblance to an Angora kitten
was traced in her. She was married in a traveling-gown, without any
bridesmaids; and after the wedding-breakfast Captain and Mrs. Yethill
drove home to their lodgings on the Common. The wedding-trip had been
abandoned--from no lack of money, but because Yethill said he had had
enough of traveling, and the custom of carrying a bride away, as if
in triumph, to the accompaniment of rice and slippers, was “guff.” He
certainly played the gorilla as if to the manner born. The poor little
woman loved him; he loved her. But as his skull was made of seven-inch
armor-plate, he went on knocking it against his system. He had got
used to the gorilla-business, and couldn’t leave it off. Yet, out of
his wife’s sight and hearing, he was a doting husband. The Duke in the
_Story of Patient Griseldis_ must have been a man of Yethill’s stamp.
Mrs. Yethill, as time went on, began to be a walking manifestation of
the effects of the system. She lost her gaiety and her pink cheeks;
her smile became nervous and her dress dowdy. The little vanities, the
little weaknesses, the little affectations, which had helped to make
Miss Sallis charming, had been bullied out of Mrs. Yethill’s character
until it was as destitute of any blade of verdure as a skating-rink.
She had proved herself the most patient, loving, tolerant of wives; but
Yethill went on trying her. She stood the trials, and he invented new
tests--exactly as if she had been a Government bayonet or a regulation
sword-blade. A bright man Yethill!
They were called upon, and returned visits, at intervals. A taste for
society was one of the tendencies which were to be chastened. Female
friends were prohibited, as being likely to sow the seed of incipient
rebellion against the system.
“I don’t care, Tom, if I have you!” said Mrs. Yethill, patting her
gorilla, who, mindful of his own tenets, was careful not to exhibit any
appreciation of her attention. But he made up for it by boasting that
evening in the smoking-room, until those who hearkened with difficulty
prevented themselves from braining him with legs of chairs. Their wives
would have commended them for the deed. Yethill had not many admirers
about this period.