Mr. Bernstein rose also. He was very pale, but the small eyes in the creases of his fat face looked honest. They even looked indignant.
“No offense, colonel,” he said, “no offense. If you’re a friend of the lady, I think you ought to know. Corwin’s been persecuting her before. I’ve heard he drove her out of London. He’s after her again, he means mischief. I know Aristide! If you’re—”
He stopped with his mouth open. The colonel had walked away and left him.
“Well, I’ll be darned!” said Mr. Bernstein, staring after the old man’s erect figure. “I’m darned! Now, Sammy Bernstein, that comes of trying to help a woman. Never again!”
He selected a cigar from the box that Colonel Denbigh had unwittingly left upon the table, and, having lit it with the colonel’s match, he went slowly and thoughtfully away. As he went, he sighed.
“Too bad, too bad!” he muttered. “Take him all around, the lean way he stands—with striped trousers an’ that property coat—he’d make just an ideal close-up! I wonder”—he rubbed his bald head thoughtfully—“I wonder if he’d have dropped if I’d offered him three thousand dollars to play Uncle Sam opposite to Rosy’s Liberty?”
XII
Mrs. Johnson Carter sat in the old rocker in the library, rocking nervously, her feet tapping the floor. Her usually placid face had of late become as troubled as an inland lake assailed by contrary winds. It was growing full of new puckers and furrows between the eyes.
She crossed and uncrossed her hands in her lap, and glanced absently from time to time toward the window. She happened to be alone in the house except for Miranda. An occasional sound from the region of the kitchen informed her that the colored maid of all work was at the helm; but not even the recklessness of Miranda’s slams and thumps moved Mrs. Carter from her chair. She was waiting for some one to come in—some one to whom she could unbosom herself.
As the time passed and she heard the monotonous ticking of the clock on the mantel, she was seized with a kind of panic. She dreaded Mr. Carter’s arrival. If he came first, she might break down and tell him, and she was afraid to tell him. She wanted Daniel. Unconsciously, in her hour of need, she always turned to Daniel now. William had been her mainstay, but it was obvious that William could not be her mainstay any longer. The old saw about a son marrying a wife held good in his case.