I
THE Doctor, stepping softly forth from the sick-room, paused for a brief confidential parley with the print-gowned, white-capped hospital nurse, who had followed him. That functionary, gliding from his side, evanished, with the falling of a curtain-sheet soaked in disinfectant and the closing of a door, into the Blue-Beard chamber beyond, leaving the man of medicine free to pursue his portly way downstairs.
At the bottom of the second flight one of the hotel servants stopped him with a respectful murmur and a salver with a card upon it; and the Doctor, reading the name thereon by the help of a pair of gold-rimmed glasses, inclined his neatly-shaved, gray-blue chin toward the mourning diamond discreetly twinkling amid the billows of black satin that rolled into the bosom of his capacious waistcoat, saying:
“The wife of my patient upstairs? Certainly; I will see the lady at once. Which way?�
His responsible, square-toed, patent-leather boots had not much farther to carry him. The lady and her maid were waiting in a sitting-room upon the next landing. Under the fashionable physician’s heavy yellow eyelids—livery eyelids, if one might dare to hint so—lay the faculty of keen observation. He noticed, in the moment of recovery from a justly-celebrated bow, that the maid was in tears, and the mistress was not.
He presupposed that he had the pleasure of addressing Mrs. Rosval. Mrs. Rosval answered that he had. Then the maid uttered a sob like the popping of a soda-water cork, and Mrs. Rosval said:
“Matilda, be quiet!�
She was a woman of supple figure and of medium height. She appeared to be elegantly dressed, though no one garment that she wore asserted itself as having been expensive. The eyes that looked at the Doctor through her thick black veil struck him as being unnaturally brilliant. This fact, together with the composure of her voice and manner, confirmed him in the belief that the woman was in a highly-strung condition of emotional excitement. He was mentally evolving a little prescription—with bromide in it, to be taken every three hours—when she lifted her hands and unpinned the veil. Then the Doctor looked in the face of a woman who was as perfectly calm, cool, and composed as he was himself. Even more so because the revelation rather surprised him.
She addressed him in clear, quiet tones:
“A telegraphic message was delivered to me this morning——�
“At Mirkwood Park, near Bradford,� the Doctor unconsciously quoted aloud from the card he still held between his plump white thumb and forefinger.
“It purported to come from the proprietor of this hotel. It said that Mr.—that my husband was dangerously ill—that my presence was urgently needed.� Mrs. Rosval’s lips—delicately chiseled lips, but totally devoid of color—shaped themselves into something that might have been a smile. And as the maid, who nursed a dressing-bag in the background, at this juncture emitted a sniff, the mistress glanced again over her shoulder, and said, with a slight accent of weariness or contempt, or both together: “Really, Matilda, there is no need for that!�
The irrefragable Doctor had gauged the shallow depths of the woman’s nature by this time. She was merely a polished and singularly adamantine specimen of the unfeeling wife. He allowed a tinge of rebuke to color the tone of his explanation.
“The proprietor acted upon my—ah—advice. The condition of my patient may be truthfully described as—er—dangerous. The illness is—in fact—typhoid fever. And your husband has it in a bad form. There are complications which——�
The Doctor stopped short. For Mrs. Rosval was not listening. She was crumpling a piece of pinkish paper into a ball—probably the telegram to which she had alluded—and pondering. Then she leveled those strangely brilliant, narrow-lidded eyes of hers point-blank at the Doctor, and asked: “Am I to understand that Mr. Rosval has nothing to do with—my being sent for?�
The Doctor conveyed the information that Mr. Rosval had not prompted 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!�