That night the stars, dim and distant, were scattered like specks of
frost on some wide, blue window-pane. 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 gazing through the paper he held at the
wall opposite, and out of it into the future beyond.
Since that day, the previous spring, on which he had set out to visit a
relative, many things had happened, yet but few that were of importance
to him. On his return from the trip, during one fleeting second, for the
first time since he had known Justine, it seemed to him that she avoided
his eyes. To this, in other circumstances, he would have given no
thought whatever; as matters were, it made him feel that his excursion
should not be regarded as time ill-spent. Whether it had been wholly
serviceable to his project, he could not at the time decide. He waited,
however, very patiently, but he seldom waited within the apartment
walls. At that period he developed a curious facility for renewing
relations with former friends. Once he took a run to Chicago with an
Englishman he had known in Japan; and once, with the brother of a lady
who had married into the Baxter branch of the house of Mistrial, he went
on a fishing trip to Canada. These people he did not bring to call on
his wife. He seemed to act as though solitude were grateful to her. Save
Mrs. Metuchen, Thorold at that time was her only visitor, and the visits
of that gentleman Mistrial encouraged in every way that he could devise.
Through meetings that, parenthetically, were more frequent on the stair
or in the hallway than anywhere else, the two men, through sheer force
of circumstances, dropped into an exchange of salutations--remarks about
the weather, reciprocal inquiries on the subject of each other's health,
which, wholly formal on Thorold's part, were from Mistrial always civil
and aptly put. After all, was he not the host? and was it not for him to
show particular courtesy to anyone whom his wife received?
To her, meanwhile, his attitude was little short of perfection itself.
He was considerate, foresighted, and unobtrusive--a course of conduct
which frightened her a little. Two or three months after he had struck
her in the face she made--_a propos_ of nothing at all--an announcement
which brought a trace of color to her cheeks.
The following afternoon he happened to be entering the house as Dr.
Thorold was leaving it. Instead of greeting him in the nice and amiable
fashion which he had adopted, and which Thorold had ended by accepting
as a matter of course, he halted and looked at the physician through
half-closed eyes. Thorold nodded, cavalierly enough it is true, and was
about to pass on; but this Mistrial prevented. He planted himself
squarely in his way, and stuck his hands in his pockets.
"Mrs. Mistrial has no further need of you," he said. "Send your bill to
me."
He spoke from the tips of his lips, with the air and manner of one
dismissing a lackey. At the moment nothing pertinent could have occurred
to Thorold. He stared at Mistrial, dumbly perplexed, and plucked at his
cuff. Mistrial nodded as who should say, "Put that in your pipe;" and
before Thorold recovered his self-possession he had passed up the stairs
and on and out of sight.
It was then that season in which July has come and is going. The city
was hot; torrid at noonday, sultry and enervating at night. Fifth Avenue
and the adjacent precincts were empty. Each one of the brown-stone
houses had a Leah-like air of desertion. The neighborhood of Madison
and of Union Squares was peopled by men with large eyes and small feet,
by women so deftly painted that, like Correggio, they could have
exclaimed, "_Anch' io son pittore_." In brief, the Southern invasion had
begun, and New York had ceased to be habitable.
But Newport has charms of its own; and to that lovely city by the water
Mistrial induced his wife; and there, until summer had departed, and
autumn too, they rested and waited. During those months he was careful
of her: so pleasantly so, so studious of what she did and of what she
ate, that for the first time since the honeymoon she might have, had she
tried, felt at ease with him again. But there were things that prevented
this--faith destroyed and the regret of it. Oh, indeed she had regrets
in plenty; some even for her father; and, unknown to Mistrial, once or
twice she wrote him such letters as a daughter may write. She had never
been in sympathy with him; as a child he had coerced her needlessly;
when she was older he had preached; later, divining that lack of
sympathy, he had striven through kindlier ways to counteract it. But he
had failed; and Justine, aiding in the endeavor, had failed as well.
When father and child do not stand hand-in-hand a fibre is wanting that
should be there.
In December Mistrial and his wife returned to town. A date was
approaching, and there was the _layette_ to be prepared. Hour after hour
Justine's fingers sped. The apartment became a magazine of
swaddling-clothes. One costume in particular, a worsted sack that was
not much larger than a coachman's glove, duplicated and repeated itself
in varying and tender hues. Occasionally Mistrial would pick one up and
examine it furtively. To his vagabond fancy it suggested a bag in which
gold would be.
But now the hour was reached. And as Mistrial sat staring into the
future, the goal to which he had striven kept looming nearer and ever
nearer yet. Only the day before he had learned that Dunellen was
failing. And what a luxury it would be to him when the old man died and
the will was read! Such a luxury did it appear, that unconsciously he
manifested his contentment by that sound the glutton makes at the
mention of delicious food.
His companion--the physician--turned and nodded. "I know what you are
thinking about," he announced; and with the rapt expression of a seer,
half to Mistrial, half to the ceiling, "It is always the case," he
continued; "I never knew a father yet that did not wonder what the child
would be; and the mothers, oh! the mothers! Some of them know all about
it beforehand: they want a girl, and a girl it will be; or they want a
boy, and a boy they are to have. I remember one dear, good soul who was
so positive she was to have a boy that she had all the linen marked with
the name she had chosen for him. H'm. It turned out to be twins--both
girls. And I remember--"
But Mistrial had ceased to listen. He was off again discounting the
inheritance in advance--discounting, too, the diabolism of his revenge.
The latter, indeed, was unique, and withal so grateful, that now the
consummation was at hand it fluttered his pulse like wine. He had
ravened when first he learned the tenour of the will, and his soul had
been bitter; but no sooner had this thing occurred to him than it
resolved itself into a delight. To his disordered fancy its provisions
held both vitriol and opopanax--the one for Thorold, the other for
himself.
The doctor meanwhile was running on as doctors do. "Yes," Mistrial heard
him say, "she was most unhappy; no woman likes a rival, and when that
rival is her own maid, matters are not improved. For my part, the moment
I saw how delicate she was, I thought, though I didn't dare to say so, I
thought her husband had acted with great forethought. The maid was
strong as an ox, and in putting her in the same condition as his wife he
had simply and solely supplied her with a wet-nurse. But then, at this
time particularly, women are so unreasonable. Not your good lady--a
sweeter disposition--"
Whatever encomium he intended to make remained unfinished. From the room
beyond a cry filtered; he turned hastily and disappeared. The cry
subsided; but presently, as though in the interval the sufferer had
found new strength or new torture, it rose more stridently than before.
And as the rumor of it augmented and increased, a phrase of the
physician's returned to Mistrial. "Everything is going very nicely," he
told himself, and began to pace the floor.
A fraction of an hour passed, a second, and a third. The cry now had
changed singularly; it had lost its penetrating volume, it had sunk into
the rasping moan of one dreaming in a fever. Suddenly that ceased, the
silence was complete, and Mistrial, a trifle puzzled, moved out into the
hall. There he caught again the murmur of her voice. This time she was
talking very rapidly, in a continuous flow of words. From where he stood
Mistrial could not hear what she was saying, and he groped on tip-toe
down the hall. As he reached the door of the room in which she was, the
sweet and heavy odor of chloroform came out and met him there; but still
the flow of words continued uninterruptedly, one after the other, with
the incoherence of a nightmare monologuing in a corpse. Then, without
transition, in the very middle of a word, a cry of the supremest agony
rang out, drowning another, which was but a vague complaint.
"It's a boy," the nurse exclaimed.
And Justine through a rift of consciousness caught and detained the
speech. "So much the better," she moaned; "he will never give birth."