She had to pause a moment to recover herself, before opening the door of the room into which the visitor had been shown. But at last she turned the handle, and entered—and there was Dr Bonito facing her.
CHAPTER II
She had seen something of this man before; had heard—to loathe—more of him than she had seen. He was not one to be forgotten, once encountered—least of all by gentle souls. Only her memory of him could not somehow reconcile his past and present habits. A threadbare pedant, dull-eyed and malefic; a godless truckler to the vicious, prostituting his learning for a dog’s wages, abject while starving—that was how knowledge and report had painted him to her. Here, indeed, was the frame, but how reinvested! Snuff as of old, seamed the wrinkles of the jaw; but now that wagged upon a lace cravat. The hands were as skeleton and unclean; but rings sparkled on their frowsy knuckles. The brown mouldy duds had given place to a gold-laced coat and breeches of black velvet. There was something evilly potential, something suggestive of chartered mischievousness in the change, she thought: so instinctively do we estimate all human authority by the quality of its cloth.
She curtsied, and stood up frigidly to await his explanation. This sinister vision did nothing to allay the tumult of emotions which had accompanied her from the bedroom. Her heart was foreboding she knew not what; the chill of her manner hid a nameless fear. She could not analyse its nature, nor trace it to its source in herself. She did not know how, during all these months, it had really existed in her as a germ, which had shrunk from its own quickening to some unspeakable disclosure. Whispers, perhaps, half heard and put away; shadows in conscience-troubled eyes, cast down on half-betrayals of their secrets—to the faint record of such faint percussions on her soul, maybe, was due that vague sense of uneasiness. And here, all in a moment, the seed in her was stirring—swelling—touched into life by what? and to what monstrous birth? Was this ominous presence accountable for the change—this dark spirit, associated solely in her mind with a dead and gone abomination? What spectre could he be, risen from that grave to curse her later peace? What power in his hand, to have struck her love with terror through that far recognition? For to that recognition, she could not doubt, was due her husband’s state.
He did not keep her long in suspense. The old dreary wolf in him was quick to sharp conclusions. His tooth was his special pleader, and he showed it at the outset, without a thought of compromise.
He just essayed to make a responsive leg to her; but, even in the clumsy act, grinned in derision of his own mockery, and flung his hands behind his back, humping his shoulders bullyingly.
“You know me?” he snapped.
“I have seen you, Monsieur,” she answered.
“I was physician,” he said loudly, “to your late husband. That is something to you. You owe me your present one. That is more to you.”
She held on to herself, bravely, a little longer.