The Dominant Strain

by Anna Chapin Ray

"This morning, between seven and eight o'clock."

"It must have been very sudden?" The accent was plainly interrogative.

"Yes, at the last. He had been quite ill for twenty-four hours. He was overtired with his walk of the day before, and then ate something that disagreed with him. He suffered terribly, and, at the last, heart failure developed." Thayer ended his fable with a deep breath of relief.

"But they had no doctor," the man objected.

Thayer raised his eyes and looked at him steadily for an instant.

"No," he said quietly. "Mr. Lorimer has had a number of such attacks, and Mrs. Lorimer had all the proper remedies. Until within a few moments of the end, there was no indication that this attack was any more serious than the others had been, and there had never before been any tendency to heart failure." He paused for a moment, deliberately challenging another question. Then he added, "If your telephone is not in use, I must send word to Mrs. Lorimer's friends." And he walked away to the telephone closet in the corner of the office.

He called up three numbers in New York. The first one was Mr. Dane's office, and to him Thayer announced the bare fact of Lorimer's death and of Beatrix's need for her parents. His talk with Bobby Dane was longer, and at intervals it became interjectional in its terseness. To Bobby, Thayer went over the story in all its detail, yet in such guarded phrases that no one else, listening, could have gained an inkling of the true cause of Lorimer's death. After the first shock was over, Thayer and Beatrix had discussed the matter fully and in all its bearings. The attendant had his own reasons for wishing to keep the secret, and the butler could be relied upon implicitly. Accordingly, they had decided that there was no need of acquainting the world with the true version of the case, and they had agreed that Bobby should be the one person to be put in possession of all the facts. He was just; he had no sentimental ideals to be dispelled in regard to Lorimer, and he was utterly trustworthy.

Thayer's third message was the shortest of all.

"Not in? Very well. I am Mr. Thayer. Tell him that I will be in his office at ten o'clock on Saturday morning."

It was then late on Thursday afternoon. Thayer had calculated that the Danes would come in, the next day, and that the sleigh which brought them in would also carry him out in season for the night train to New York. There was another illness in the opera company. Faust was to be sung on the following Wednesday night, and Thayer, in sending that last message, had given his tacit consent to singing the part of Valentine. Even in the midst of his trouble, he smiled grimly to himself, as he thought back to that far-off night in Berlin when the chord which closes Valentine's cavatina also closed his long indecision and left him sitting with his face definitely turned towards the artist's life. It had seemed to him then that the decision was threatening to undermine his Puritanism; nevertheless, he had temporized with that Puritanism. In resolving to become an artist, in so far as the possibility of art lay in his keeping, he had likewise resolved to hold himself a man, virile and of steady nerve. To his young enthusiasm, the two ideals had not seemed incompatible. To his maturer judgment, they had appeared in no sense to be at war, yet together they had been by no means easy of attainment. All in all, he had preferred to leave to the recording angel the balancing of his psychological accounts. He had lacked the time and the perspective to do it for himself. But, meanwhile, he believed he recognized the hand of fate in this second summons to sing the part of Valentine. Fate and his old maestro both had declared themselves for opera. Their united will should be done.