“Your wife,” the other curtly informed him, “has developed pneumonia.”
Hulings steadied himself with a hand against a wall.
“Pneumonia!” he repeated, to no one in particular. “Send again for John Wooddrop.”
He was seated, a narrow, rigid figure, waiting for the older man, in the midst of gorgeous upholstery. Two facts hammered with equal persistence on his numbed brain: one that all his projects, his dream of power, of iron, now approached ruin, and the other that Gisela had pneumonia. It was a dreadful thing that she had come on in the Mills tract! The Columbus System must triumphantly absorb all that he had, that he was to be. Gisela had been chilled to the bone; pneumonia! It became difficult and then impossible to distinguish one from the other—Gisela and the iron were inexplicably welded in the poised catastrophe of his ambition.
Alexander Hulings rose, his thin lips pinched, his eyes mere sparks, his body tense, as if he were confronting the embodied force that had checked him. He stood upright, so still that he might have been cast in the metal that had formed his vision of power, holding an unquailing mien. His inextinguishable pride cloaked him in a final contempt for all that life, that fate, might do. Then his rigidity was assaulted by John Wooddrop's heavy and hurried entrance into the room.
Hulings briefly repeated the doctor's pronouncement Wooddrop's face was darkly pouched, his unremoved hat a mere wet film, and he left muddy exact footprints wherever he stepped on the velvet carpet.
“By heaven!” he quavered, his arms upraised.
“If between us we have killed her——” His voice abruptly expired.
As Alexander Hulings watched him the old man's countenance grew livid, his jaw dropped; he was at the point of falling. He gasped, his hands beating the air; then the unnatural color receded, words became distinguishable: “Gisela!... Never be forgiven! Hellish!” It was as if Death had touched John Wooddrop on the shoulder, dragging a scarifying hand across his face, and then briefly, capriciously, withdrawn.
“Hulings! Hulings,” he articulated, sinking weakly on a chair, “we must save her. And, anyhow, God knows we were blind!” He peered out of suffused rheumy eyes at Alexander, appalling in his sudden disintegration under shock and the weight of his years. “I'm done!” he said tremulously. “And there's a good bit to see to—patent lawyer tomorrow, and English shipments. Swore I'd keep you from it.” He held out a hand, “But there's Gisela, brought down between us now, and—and iron's colder than a daughter, a wife. We'd best cover up the past quick as we can!”