Hilda uttered a laugh which expressed hideously a variety of emotions—mollification, for his dismay was disarming; amusement, for his innocence was laughable, and even a little shame. Stephen's mind was clean; he looked at her as his good father might have looked.
For a short time she seemed a little disturbed; she regarded him with uneasy inquiry as though she suspected his horror and his inability to forget her outbreak. But he found presently that she watched the coming and going of his patients and that she interrogated his employees with such clever slyness that they did not know they were being questioned. Her jealousy noted only the women with whom he was connected professionally, especially those who were alone with him in his office, and between them, young, middle-aged, or old, she did not distinguish. His dismay at her ignorance had not escaped her; it was the center of her consciousness, the idée fixe of her madness. She misinterpreted the present and falsified the past, ascribing to Stephen infidelities in the days of their courtship. Her obsession was hideous, but by no means unprecedented; frequently the newspapers rejoiced in the airing of similar or more sordid cases. Recently an innocent patient waiting in a doctor's office had been shot dead by a suspicious wife.
Mayne, hearing his story from a terrified Stephen, grew white, then shook his head. He laid the case before his intimate friend Dr. Good, who was an alienist and brought him once or twice to Harrisburg to spend the night. It might be necessary eventually to have Hilda go—Dr. Good always put his prescriptions as delicately as possible—to a sanatorium, but there was no immediate danger. Mayne breathed more freely, and only Stephen knew by what eternal vigilance over himself and her the peace was kept, or apprehended the unpleasant and even perilous results which might follow upon its breaking.
His life was not entirely without pleasures, unhappy as it appeared to him. After the first rush of Hilda's fashionable acquaintances, who came filled with curiosity and went away baffled and irritated by his gravity and silence, there applied a more desirable clientèle. He treated the poor in the city hospital, serving them with a pleasure which he did not analyze, but which had its source partly in the satisfaction of returning some of the service which hundreds of working men and women poured out upon Hilda and her kind, and partly in a deep and unrecognized discontent with his own life. He thought often of his father with a childish turning to the one human being who had loved him deeply and unselfishly. He believed that he still regarded his father's devotion to others with impatience, his life, based upon a simple and childlike sense of duty, as wasted. He did not know that unhappiness had begun to alter the opinions which were the product of youth and good health and material prosperity.
He performed cures which astonished himself. A Mrs. Fetzer, a plain little Pennsylvania German woman, suffered at the hands of a drunken husband a gunshot wound in her face, and he was called to the hospital when it seemed that the sight of both eyes was lost. A nurse, Miss Knowlton, who had frequently attended his patients, faced him one day with defiance and told him that she was going blind and that according to half a dozen doctors there was no help for her. A Miss MacVane came to his office and laid her case before him—she was a private secretary with no other means of support than her own earnings, and her eyes were failing.
He saved one of Mrs. Fetzer's eyes and found for her a place in his house, of which she gradually took entire charge in a manner which suggested now a guardian angel, now a watchful dragon. He cured Miss Knowlton and she replaced a younger nurse in his office. Miss MacVane became his secretary; she could not be entirely cured, but with expert treatment and unremitting watchfulness she might retain a measure of vision for a long time.
He thought, grimly contemplating his assistants, that Hilda could find no fault with these ladies. Fetzer, as Hilda called her after an English fashion, was irremediably disfigured; the insertion of an artificial eye was out of the question and she wore a black patch. Miss Knowlton was tall, her features were large, her red hair was no Titian glory, but was thin and pale, and she had pale blue eyes and skin without color. Miss MacVane was short and heavy and her dim vision increased her natural awkwardness. All three women were of the type by which the world's tasks are accomplished, who take little or no recreation, who do without all luxuries, who desire apparently but one reward, the consciousness of duty done.
Stephen's sense of safety, however, was founded upon a mistaken analysis of Hilda's jealousy. He did not realize that she attributed to him no lust of the eyes, that she believed that it was intellect only which attracted him. She hated Miss Knowlton and Miss MacVane and every one with whom he talked about his profession. She hated even Fetzer, though she could not do without her.
He had begun, not without a chastening recollection of his first contribution, to send articles to medical magazines, and he believed that if he could have a year uninterrupted by idle journeying he could produce a valuable work on infectious diseases of the eye. When his first article was finished he thought of sending a copy to Edward Levis, but Levis seemed as far away as his father, and he could not renew the acquaintance in so informal a way. He would some day—no, soon—look him up.