walls like a living spirit of the dead!
Gosh! What a place! Why did he stay? He could go home and telephone later. Nobody was compelling him to stay. Bessie was a poor girl with nobody to take her side. Nobody but her mother!
He halted in his excited walk. Her mother! If anything happened to Bessie, somebody would have to tell her mother!
A door opened far away in the upper marble regions, and the echo of a delirious cry shivered down through the corridors. Rubber wheels somewhere rolled a heavy object down a space and out of hearing; voices rose in a subdued murmur as if they passed a certain point and drifted away from the main speech, drifted down the stairs, vague, detached words. Then all was still again.
Something dragged at his heart. He had thought they were coming, and now suddenly he was afraid to have them come. What a relief! Just a little longer respite till he could get a hold of himself. He wasn’t at all fit, or things wouldn’t get a hold of him this way. He had been going pretty hard since he left college. Too many highballs! Too late at night!Too many cigarettes! The old man was right! If he hadn’t been so infernally offensive in the way he put it! But one couldn’t of course go that pace forever and not feel it.
What was it he had been thinking about when those voices passed that point above the stairs? Oh! Yes! Her mother! Someone would have to tell her mother! She was a woman with a kind twinkle in her eyes. One would find it terrible to quench that twinkle in her eyes! He remembered how she had bandaged his cut finger one day and given him a cookie. Those were happy days!Ah! There! There was that sound of an opening door again!Voices!Footsteps! Listen! They were coming! Yesthey were coming! Rubber heels on marble treads! And now he was in a frenzy of fear.
Bessie, little blue-eyed Bessie with the gold hair all about her white face!
The steps came on down the hall, and he held his breath in the shelter of a heavy tan-colored velvet curtain. He must get himself in hand before he faced anyone. If he only hadn’t left his flask in the car! Oh, but of course! The car was wrecked! What was he thinking about? But there would be other flasks! If only he could get out of this!
The nurse came on down the hall. He could see her reflection in the plate glass of the front door that was within his vision as he stood with his back toward the desk. She was going straight to the desk with a message!
The front doorknob rattled.
He glared impatiently at the blurred interruption to his vision of the nurse. A sallow man with a bandaged head was fumbling with the doorknob, and the white uniform of the nurse was no longer plain. He held his breath and listened:
“Well, is there any change?” asked the voice behind the rolltop desk, impassively.
“Yes, she’s dead!” answered the nurse.
“Well, you’d better go down to that man in the reception room. He’s been pestering the life out of me. He thinks he’s the only one
“I can’t!” said the nurse sharply. “I’ve got to call up the police station first. The doctor said” She lowered her voice inaudibly. The man with the bandaged head had managed the doorknob at last.
The door swung wide, noiselessly, on its well-oiled hinges, letting in the bandaged man; and as he limped heavily in, a shadow slipped from the folds of the heavy curtain and passed behind him into the night.
CHAPTER II
In the big white marble house on the avenue that Murray Van Rensselaer called home, the servants were lighting costly lamps and drawing silken shades. A little Pekingese pet came tiptoeing out with one man to see what was the matter with the light over the front entrance, stood for a brief second glancing up and down haughtily, barked sharply at a passerby, and retreated plumily into the dark of the entrance hall with an air of ownership, clicking off to find his mistress. Sweet perfumes drifted out from shadowy rooms where masses of hothouse flowers glowed in costly jardinieres, and a wood fire flickered softly over deep-toned rugs and fine old polished woods, reflected from illuminated covers of many rare books behind leaded panes of glass. It flickered and lighted the dreary face of the haughty master of the house as he sat in a deep chair and watched the flames, and seemed to be watching the burning out of his own life in bitter disappointment.
The great dining room glittered with crystal and silver, and abounded in exquisite table linen, hand-wrought, beautiful and fine as a spider’s web or a tracery of frost. The table was set for a large dinner, and a profusion of roses graced its center.
Ancestral portraits looked down from the walls.
At one end of the room, in a screened balcony behind great fronds of mammoth ferns, musicians were preparing to play, arranging music, speaking in low tones.
The footsteps of the servants were inaudible as they came and went over the deep pile of ancient rugs.
A deep-throated chime from a tall old clock in the hall called out the hour, and a bell somewhere in the distance rang sharply, imperatively.
A maid came noiselessly down the stairs and paused beside the library door, tapping gently.
“Mr. Van Rensselaer, Mrs. Van Rensselaer would like to see you at once if you’re not busy.”
The wistful look in the master’s eyes changed at the summons into his habitual belligerence, and he rose with a sigh of impatience. He mounted the stairs like one going to a familiar stake.
Mrs. Van Rensselaer sat at her dressing table fresh from the hands of her maid, a perfectly groomed woman in the prime of her life. Not a wrinkle marred the loveliness of her complexion, not a line of tenderness, or suffering, or self-abnegation gave character to her exquisite features. She had been considered the most beautiful woman of the day when Charles Van Rensselaermarried her, and she still retained her beauty. No one, not even her bitterest enemy, could say that she had aged or faded. Her face and her figure were her first concern. She never let anything come between her and her ambition to remain young and lovely.
If her meaningless beauty had long since palled upon the man who had worked hard in his younger days to win her hand, he nevertheless yielded her the pomp which she demanded; and if there was sometimes a note of mock ceremony in his voice, it was well guarded.
He stood in the violet shadow of her silken-shrouded lamp and watched her with a bitter sadness in his eyes. It was a moment when they might have met on common ground and drawn nearer to one another if she had but sensed it. But she was busy trying the effect of different earrings against her pearly tinted neck. Should it be the new rock crystals or the jade, or should she wear the Van Rensselaer emeralds after all?
She turned at last, as if just aware that he had come in, and spoke in an annoyed tone: “Charles, you really will have to speak to Murray again.”
She turned to get the effect of the jewel and tilted her chin haughtily.
“He is simply unspeakable!”
She held up her hand mirror and turned her head the other way to get a look at the other ear.
Her husband drew a deep, fortifying breath, wet his lips nervously with the tip of his tongue the way a dog does when he is expecting a whipping, and braced himself for action.
