[CHAPTER V.]
MAMA,” said Bera to me, “Mrs. Ainslee is not nearly so well today, and Mr. Hathaway said when he came down from the hospital this afternoon that she wanted to see you sure this evening about seven o’clock.” Mrs. Ainslee had been desperately ill at Providence Hospital for weeks and she was a woman of whom I had known in earlier days and whose sad plight—her husband was dead and she was alone in the world—had induced me to do all I could for her.
It was scarcely more than a week following the evening that Swiftwater and Mr. Hathaway was host at dinner at the hotel, that Bera took, what I realized afterwards, was an unusual and unexpected interest in Mrs. Ainslee’s case. Since the dinner engagement, Swiftwater had been just ordinarily attentive to myself and my two daughters, although frequently asking us to go to the theatre with him and sending flowers almost daily to our apartments. I had not seen Mrs. Ainslee for two or three days, and my conscience rather troubled me about her, so that when, on this day—a day that will never fade from my mind as long as I live, nor from that of Bera or Swiftwater—I quickly fell into Bera’s plans and determined to get some things together for Mrs. Ainslee, including a bunch of roses from a vase on my dresser, and go to the hospital after dinner.
Providence Hospital was scarcely more than five blocks from our apartments. I had not seen anything of Swiftwater or Hathaway all day. Tired even beyond the ordinary—it had been a long, hard fight to get my affairs in shape for the northern trip—I left the apartments a little before seven o’clock that fateful evening and walked up Second Avenue to Madison and thence up to Fifth Avenue to Providence Hospital.
“Mrs. Ainslee is feeling some better, Mrs. Beebe, but the doctor is in there now and you will have to wait for a few minutes,” the head nurse told me at the landing on the second floor. The steamer “Humboldt” was sailing for Alaska that night, and I had managed to get off a few things consigned to myself at Dawson and had seen them safely placed aboard ship.
As I sat waiting for the signal to come into Mrs. Ainslee’s room—it must have been a half hour or more before the nurse came to me and said I should enter—a curious feeling came over me regarding Bera. I had never known of her speaking about Mrs. Ainslee and somehow or other I could not get out of my mind the thought that possibly Swiftwater and his friend Hathaway might leave for Skagway on the “Humboldt.”
Philosophers may talk of a woman’s sixth sense as some people talk of the cunning of a cat. Whatever it was, as the nurse beckoned me to come into Mrs. Ainslee’s room, I quickly arose, went in and said to the sick woman:
“Mrs. Ainslee, I am awfully glad to see that you are better and I wanted to visit with you for an hour, but I have overstayed my time already and I must hurry back to my rooms.”
Then I quickly turned and in another minute I was hurrying down the Madison Street hill to the Hinckley Block. In every step I took nearer my home there came a keener and more tense pulling at my heart strings—a feeling that something had happened in my own home. It was no wonder that the elevator boy in the Hinckley Block was dumb-founded to see me rush across Second Avenue and half way up the stairs to the second floor before he could call to me, saying he would take me up in the car if I was not in too big a hurry.