Under cover of the darkness Essex hurried down the street toward where the city passed from a place of homes to a business mart. He had at first no fixed idea of a goal, but after a few moments’ rapid march, realized that habit was taking him in the direction of Bertrand’s. An illumined clock face shining on him over the roofs told him it was some time past his dinner hour. He obeyed his instinct and bent his steps toward the restaurant, throwing the cloak over the fence of a vacant lot and wiping the trickle of blood from his cheek with his handkerchief.
He was cool and master of himself once more. His brain was cleared, as a sky by storm, and he knew that to-night’s interview must be one of the last he would have with the woman who had come to stand to him for love, wealth, success and happiness. He must win or lose all within the next few days.
Bertrand’s looked invitingly bright after the tempestuous blackness of the streets. Many of the white draped tables were unoccupied. His accustomed eye noted that the lady in the blue silk dress and black hat, and her companion with the bald head and cross-eye, who always sat at the right-hand corner table, were absent. He had fallen into the habit of bowing to them, and had more than once idly wondered what their relations were.
“Monsieur Esseex” to-night ate little and drank much. Etienne, the waiter, a black-haired, pink-cheeked garçon from Marseilles, noticed this and afterward remarked upon it to Madame Bertrand. To the few other habitués of the place, the thin-faced, handsome man with an ugly furrow down his cheek, and his hair tumbled on his forehead by the pressure of his hat, presented the same suavely imperturbable demeanor as usual. But Madame Bertrand, as a woman whose business it was to observe people and faces, noticed that monsieur was pale, and that when she spoke to him on the way in he had given a distrait answer, not the usual phrase of debonair, Gallic greeting she had grown to expect.
She looked at him from her cashier’s desk and reflected. As Etienne afterward repeated, he ate little and drank much. And how pale he looked, with the lamp on the wall above him throwing out the high lights on his face and deepening the shadows!
“He is in love,” thought the sentimental Madame Bertrand, “and to-night for the first time he knows that she does not respond.”
He sat longer than he had ever done before over his dinner, blowing clouds of cigarette smoke about his head, and watching the thin blue flame of the burning lump of sugar in the spoon balanced on his coffee-cup.
Everybody had left, and he still sat smoking, leaning back against the wall, his eyes fixed on space in immovable, concentrated thought. Bertrand came out of his corner, and in his cap and apron stood cooling himself in the open door watching the rain. Etienne and Henri, the two waiters apportioned to that part of the room, hung about restless and tired, eagerly watching for the first symptoms of his departure. Even Madame Bertrand began to burrow under the cashier’s desk for her rubbers, and to struggle into them with much creaking of corset bones and subdued French ejaculations. It was after nine when the last guest finally pushed back his chair. Etienne rushed to help him on with his coat, and Madame Bertrand bobbed up from her rubbers to give him a parting smile.
A half-hour later he was lighting the gas in his own room in Bush Street. The damp air of the night entered through a crack of opened window, introducing a breath of sweet, moist freshness into the smoke-saturated chamber. He threw off his coat and lit the fire. As soon as it had caught satisfactorily he left the room, crossed the hall noiselessly, and with a slight preliminary knock, opened Harney’s door. The man was sitting there in a broken rocking-chair, reading the evening paper by the light of a flaming gas-jet. He had the air of one who was waiting, and as Essex’s head was advanced round the edge of the door, he looked up with alert, expectant eyes.
“Come into my room,” said the younger man; “there’s work for you to-night.”