The cost of wings, and other stories

I

THE Doctor, stepping softly forth from the sick-room, paused for a brief confidential parley with the print-gowned, white-capped hospital nurse, who had followed him. That functionary, gliding from his side, evanished, with the falling of a curtain-sheet soaked in disinfectant and the closing of a door, into the Blue-Beard chamber beyond, leaving the man of medicine free to pursue his portly way downstairs.

At the bottom of the second flight one of the hotel servants stopped him with a respectful murmur and a salver with a card upon it; and the Doctor, reading the name thereon by the help of a pair of gold-rimmed glasses, inclined his neatly-shaved, gray-blue chin toward the mourning diamond discreetly twinkling amid the billows of black satin that rolled into the bosom of his capacious waistcoat, saying:

“The wife of my patient upstairs? Certainly; I will see the lady at once. Which way?”

His responsible, square-toed, patent-leather boots had not much farther to carry him. The lady and her maid were waiting in a sitting-room upon the next landing. Under the fashionable physician’s heavy yellow eyelids—livery eyelids, if one might dare to hint so—lay the faculty of keen observation. He noticed, in the moment of recovery from a justly-celebrated bow, that the maid was in tears, and the mistress was not.

He presupposed that he had the pleasure of addressing Mrs. Rosval. Mrs. Rosval answered that he had. Then the maid uttered a sob like the popping of a soda-water cork, and Mrs. Rosval said:

“Matilda, be quiet!”

She was a woman of supple figure and of medium height. She appeared to be elegantly dressed, though no one garment that she wore asserted itself as having been expensive. The eyes that looked at the Doctor through her thick black veil struck him as being unnaturally brilliant. This fact, together with the composure of her voice and manner, confirmed him in the belief that the woman was in a highly-strung condition of emotional excitement. He was mentally evolving a little prescription—with bromide in it, to be taken every three hours—when she lifted her hands and unpinned the veil. Then the Doctor looked in the face of a woman who was as perfectly calm, cool, and composed as he was himself. Even more so because the revelation rather surprised him.

She addressed him in clear, quiet tones:

“A telegraphic message was delivered to me this morning——”

“At Mirkwood Park, near Bradford,” the Doctor unconsciously quoted aloud from the card he still held between his plump white thumb and forefinger.

“It purported to come from the proprietor of this hotel. It said that Mr.—that my husband was dangerously ill—that my presence was urgently needed.” Mrs. Rosval’s lips—delicately chiseled lips, but totally devoid of color—shaped themselves into something that might have been a smile. And as the maid, who nursed a dressing-bag in the background, at this juncture emitted a sniff, the mistress glanced again over her shoulder, and said, with a slight accent of weariness or contempt, or both together: “Really, Matilda, there is no need for that!”

The irrefragable Doctor had gauged the shallow depths of the woman’s nature by this time. She was merely a polished and singularly adamantine specimen of the unfeeling wife. He allowed a tinge of rebuke to color the tone of his explanation.

“The proprietor acted upon my—ah—advice. The condition of my patient may be truthfully described as—er—dangerous. The illness is—in fact—typhoid fever. And your husband has it in a bad form. There are complications which——”

The Doctor stopped short. For Mrs. Rosval was not listening. She was crumpling a piece of pinkish paper into a ball—probably the telegram to which she had alluded—and pondering. Then she leveled those strangely brilliant, narrow-lidded eyes of hers point-blank at the Doctor, and asked: “Am I to understand that Mr. Rosval has nothing to do with—my being sent for?”

The Doctor conveyed the information that Mr. Rosval had not prompted the step. Mr. Rosval had been—since the third day following on the—ah—development of the illness—ringing the changes between delirium and—ah—coma. For—as the Doctor had already said—there were complications——

Mrs. Rosval neatly stopped the ball, for the second time.

“How did you know, if he did not tell you, that there was a Mrs. Rosval? How did you get at my address?”

The Doctor, swelling with the indignity of being supposed to have got at anybody’s address, explained that the proprietor of the hotel, having some faint inkling that Mr. Rosval belonged to the class of landed gentleman, had looked up the name in Burke.

The sharp suspicion faded out of Mrs. Rosval’s eyes as she listened. It was a perfectly credible, perfectly simple explanation. She tossed the crumpled telegram into the fire—which devoured it at a gulp—and began to pull off her gloves. That was her way of intimating that she accepted the situation. Then she rang the bell. The decorous waiter appeared, and she gave the man a quiet order, handing him some loose silver and a slip of paper, upon which she had penciled a few words.

“A cab is waiting at the door. Pay the driver and send him away. A person who is—not quite a gentleman—is waiting in the vestibule. Say to him that Mrs. Rosval is satisfied, and there is no need to wait. Give him that paper at the same moment, or he will not believe you!” As the waiter vanished she turned to the Doctor with the faintest flicker of a smile upon her sensitive pale lips. “I thought it wisest to keep the cab, in case I required to leave this place hurriedly,” said Mrs. Rosval. “The man waiting downstairs is a detective from a well-known Agency. I judged it best to enlist his services—he would have proved useful supposing this business of the telegram to have been a Trap.”

The Doctor spread his large white hands, danglingly, like a seal’s flappers.

“A trap?” he repeated, helplessly. “My dear madam! You suspected that some designing person or persons unknown might—possibly use your husband’s name, invent a story of his illness as a ruse to—entrap you?”

“I suspected,” returned Mrs. Rosval, “no unknown person. The inventor of the ruse would have been my husband. We separated some years ago by mutual consent. At least, I refused to live with him any longer, and he—knowing what grounds I had for the refusal—was obliged to submit. But he resented my action in the matter.” Mrs. Rosval raised her delicate dark eyebrows with weary disdain, and imparted to her shoulders a mute eloquence of contempt which is not the prerogative of an English-bred woman. “And he has, more than once, had recourse to what, for want of a better word, I call Traps. That is all. Matilda,” she addressed the tearful maid, “dry your eyes and tell the people downstairs that I engage this suite of rooms. Two bedrooms, a bathroom, and sitting-room at ten guineas a week, I think they said? Horribly expensive, but it cannot be helped. And now, Doctor”—she turned again to the Doctor—“when do you wish me to see your patient? At once? It shall be at once if you say so! I am completely in your hands!”

The Doctor, a little staggered by the deftness of his patient’s wife in transferring the onus of the situation from her shoulders to his own, absolutely prohibited any suggestion of her entering the sick-room until refreshed and rested. Mrs. Rosval acquiesced, with a repetition of that compromising statement about being completely in his hands—and the Doctor took his leave, promising to return later that evening. She gave him her cool fingers, and they parted. He had no sooner reached the door than she called him back.

“I only wanted to ask—— Of course, you have a library. Does the catalogue of your library include a file of the Daily Telegraph?” It did, the Doctor admitted. File in question extending some twelve years back.

“Three will do,” said Mrs. Rosval, warming one slender arched foot upon the fender. “Next time you are in want of a little light reading, look in the Law Intelligence, Divorce Division, month of February, 1899, where you will find a case: ‘Ffrench v. Ffrench; Rosval cited.’ The details will explain a good deal that may appear puzzling to you with regard to the strained relations between Mr. Rosval and myself. Though doctors never allow themselves to be puzzled, do they? Au revoir!”

II

The Doctor had had an unusually busy day of it. But he curtailed his after-dinner nap in order to glance through the Law Intelligence records of the month of February, 1899. There was much in the case to which Mrs. Rosval had referred that went far toward justifying the “strained relations” she had hinted at. And it is the duty of the medical profession to rally at the war-cry of the outraged Proprieties. But, when alone and unobserved, doctors have many points in common with mere men. And as this Doctor stepped into his brougham he said, “Women are very hard! In all human probability the man was innocent.” He said again, “Women are hard!” as he creaked up the hotel staircase.

He found her in the sick-room. She had changed her dress for something that gave out no assertive silken rustle in answer to her movements, something that draped the charming contour of her figure—she had a charming figure—with soft, quiet folds, like the wings of a dun hawkmoth. That fell composure still walled her in as with ramparts of steel. She held the bed-curtain back as the Doctor stooped over the livid, discolored face upon the pillow. She took a linen cloth from the nurse, and deftly, lightly wiped away the froth and mucus that had gathered about the cracked and bleeding lips. But the hand that rendered these offices was as steady as though it had been carved out of white marble.

Disturbed from his lethargy by the invasion of candlelight upon his haggard eyelids and the Doctor’s bass murmur in his ear, the sick man began to talk a little. For the most part it was mere gabble, but some sentences were plain. He moaned piteously for a barber, because he was unshaven. Rosval had always been foolishly vain of his personal appearance. And he damned the one glass of bad water, to the imbibition of which he attributed his disease, promising, if he got well, never to drink any more. To do him credit, he had never been addicted to that particular form of liquid refreshment. The Doctor inferred as much from his diagnosis—and from the faint sarcastic quiver of Mrs. Rosval’s white lips. Then the tongue of the man ceased wagging—but the burning head began to thresh to and fro upon the pillow, and the claw-like hands to scratch at the bed-clothes in a fresh access of the maddening enteric irritation. Alleviating measures proved as effective as alleviating measures generally do prove; the head went on rolling, and the crooked talons continued to tear. All at once they were quiet. Mrs. Rosval had laid her hand upon the clammy forehead—about as tenderly, to all appearance, as she would have laid it upon the back of a chair. And the man was still. She placed the other hand beside the first—the drawn lines about the nostrils relaxed, the clenched teeth parted, the breast rose and fell with the indrawing and outgoing of a sigh of relief. And the man slept. So soundly that she moved from him presently, without disturbing him, and passed into the room adjoining, where the Doctor and the nurse were holding a whispered confabulation.

There would be no need to send in another professional attendant, the nurse said, now that the patient’s wife had arrived. She possessed a remarkable ability for nursing, and extraordinary self-command. She shrank from nothing—not even the most repugnant duties of the sick-chamber. The nurse had met in her time with ladies who took things coolly; but this lady really surprised her.

The Doctor was in the act of shaking his head—not from side to side, but up and down—a gesture which expressed indulgent tolerance of the nurse’s surprise while it repudiated the notion of his entertaining any on his own account—when he jumped. For a calm, quiet voice at his elbow said:

“You told me that Mr. Rosval was dangerously ill. Is he dying?”

The nurse had vanished into the carbolic-laden atmosphere of the Chamber of Horrors.

“My dear madam, your husband is in the Hands——” So the Doctor was beginning, when the obvious inappropriateness of the stereotyped formula stopped him short. Then he admitted that the condition of the man in the other room was very precarious. That he could not, when not in articulo mortis, be said to be dying—but that, toward the small hours of the morning, he might attain to a pitch of prostration closely allied to that condition. And that nothing could be done for him but to give him milk and medicine regularly, and—— The Doctor would have ended “and trust in Providence,” but for obvious reasons he thought better of it. Then he went away, feeling quite certain in his own mind that Mrs. Rosval would be a widow before twenty-four hours were over.

That lady, meanwhile, returning to the sick-room, had persuaded the fagged nurse to go and lie down. She understood how to do all that was necessary, she whispered, and would call the attendant if any change occurred. Then she sat down at the foot of the bed, and prepared to keep her vigil with unshaken fortitude. The sleeping woman in the next room breathed heavily, the sounds of rolling wheels and jarring voices grew less and less—then all fell quiet. About three hours before the dawn the sleeper awakened. The hollow eyes no longer turned on her with the blind, glassy stare of delirium. There was reason in Rosval’s look, and memory.

He seemed to beckon, and she came near. She had to stoop to catch the moaning whisper that asked: “How—did you—come here?”

She answered steadily, “They sent for me.”

“They’d not have—if I had known!” Rosval gasped.

“If I annoy you,” said Mrs. Rosval, with icy tolerance, “I can go!” She turned, meaning to call the nurse; but a claw-like hand went weakly out and caught at her skirts. The grasp was no stronger than that of a newborn child, but, just for that it was so feeble, it held her.

“You’ll not go! Three years—you’ve treated me—like a leper! Never would—listen to what I’d got to say. But now ... I—tell you, she—sat on—my knee and—kissed me! Before I knew it—and then—the husband came in! A plant, by Gad!”

Mrs. Rosval said, “You must not talk. The Doctor says you are not to talk,” and busied herself with the bottles and glasses that occupied a little stand near the bedside.

Rosval condemned the Doctor. Mrs. Rosval measured out his medicine, raised his head with professional skill, and offered him the glass. He clenched his teeth, and defied her with gaunt eyes across the brim.

“No! No milk—no doctor’s stuff. I’ve been going to the devil—for three years past,” proclaimed the sinner, feebly. “Why not go—at once—and have done with it?” Then he fell back heavily on the pillow.

Mrs. Rosval summoned the nurse. The nurse could do nothing. For the moribund was obdurate, and every fresh manifestation of obduracy drove not one, but half a gross of nails into his coffin. That casket was fast progressing toward completion, when Mrs. Rosval conceived a desperate idea. The execution of it cost her a severe struggle. Stooping down, she whispered to the sinking man:

“Jack!”

His faded eyes rolled in their sunken sockets until they rested on her. He said with difficulty:

“Well?”

“What will make you take it?”

Something like a gleam of cunning came into the face. The answer came:

“Kiss me!”

She battled with herself for a moment silently, and then, bending closer, touched his forehead with her lips.

“That isn’t all! You must say: ‘I forgive you!’”

“I can’t!”

“All—right, then!”

Silence ensued. The angles of the features were growing pinched and sharp; a bluish shade was creeping about the mouth. She cast a glance of scorn at her own reflection, caught in a mirror that hung against the opposite wall, and said the words:

“I forgive you! Isn’t that enough?”

“Not quite. ‘I love you—and——’”

The voice was getting very faint.

“I love you—dear—and——”

“And ‘I take you back!’”

“I take you back.” Her iron fortitude was broken. She said it with a sob, and gathered the weak head to her bosom, being the kind of woman who does not do things by halves.

A month later the Doctor received a check. It was a handsome check, enclosed with the thanks and compliments of Mr. and Mrs. Rosval, on leaving London.

“Carried him off with her into the country,” said the Doctor, tapping his teeth with a paper-knife as he closed the volume of the Daily Telegraph which contained the case “Ffrench v. Ffrench; Rosval cited.” “In other words, taken him back. And in all human probability the man was guilty. Women are very weak!”