“First of all, don’t tell Mrs. Belmore you’re a doctor.”
Immediately, I had a lurid vision of Mrs. Belmore as a dangerous maniac, whose confidence I was to gain. But he at once took the melodrama out of it.
“There’s nothing the matter with her,” he explained, “except that her stomach was upset this morning. Couldn’t eat her breakfast. Day before yesterday, same thing.”
“Are you sure she needs a doctor? Maybe a simple laxative—”
“That could be,” he conceded, and then with a, for him, strange embarrassment: “You don’t think she might be — pregnant?”
This was the first question anyone had ever asked me professionally, and it gave me something of a thrill. It made me pause, too, for I wanted the answer to be right. So I thought for a moment. He must be about 60, the age my father would have been, had he lived. If Mrs. Belmore were, say, twenty years his junior — well, it could be. “Would this be Mrs. Belmore’s first child?” I asked.
“Of course,” he answered, with something like annoyance. “We’ve only been married a month.”
“Oh. I beg your pardon. May I ask, then, how old is Mrs. Belmore?”
“Nineteen.”
That flabbergasted me. Then, in quick succession, it filled me with anger at the outrage against Nature, horror at this monster who had perpetrated it, contempt for what must have been a cash transaction; finally sardonic amusement, and even a little pity. I searched for something to say that would not be tactless, and at last came up with: “If she will come to my office, there are certain tests—”
“She won’t do it. Positively refuses to let a doctor examine her.”
“Why?”
“She gives no reason. She just won’t cooperate. That’s why I thought you — There might be some clever way you could question her, or symptoms you could detect, or something. She may not take you for a doctor, because you’re young. People sometimes do think that way, you know. And of course you and I will consider it a professional visit, and any bill you care to send—”
Well, it was a business offer of a kind, though I could have wished that my first applicant valued my ability, not my youthful appearance. And I am frank to say I also wished that I could seize this chance to earn my first fee, and a fat one at that. But of course I couldn’t.
“There is no magical way to tell, merely by looking at her,” I replied. “Not for months. If there were, we wouldn’t need laboratories. If she won’t tell you herself—”
“She won’t. You can’t imagine how stubborn she is.”
“Then you’ll just have to wait, until it either happens or doesn’t.” I tried to be jocular. “What’s wrong with waiting? It may be a delightful surprise.”
He did not join in my attempted levity. “I understand,” he said, very soberly, “that the birth of a child does not always occur in precisely nine months.”
“Sometimes it’s a little more or a little less. What has that to do with it?”
“If I could only find out exactly—”
“Why?”
His geniality abruptly vanished, and he snapped at me, almost viciously: “Why do you suppose?!” He did not add “—you idiot!” but he might as well have, and I think I would have deserved it. I should have known what he was after, from what I had already seen of him and his. This great collector of every kind of treasure — antiques, objets d’art, marble mansions, and banks — wanted to know that his forthcoming possession, his child-to-be — if such it was — would be his and no one else’s, as surely as if a bill of sale came with it.
This dawned on me three or four seconds later than it should have, because of the silent fury that followed his outburst. It was deep and frightful. Nothing less than the future of his kingdom and the legitimacy of the heir-apparent could possibly account for it. His face turned red, his temple vein swelled, and I saw that he really was the apoplectic type, probably with his blood pressure already at a dangerous point.
He got control of himself, calmed down, and apologized. “I’m under a strain,” he said, “and this has been preying on my mind. Tell you what we’ll do. I’ll ask you for nothing definite, and I’ll expect nothing at all, so whatever you find out will be that much to the good. I’ll have you over here more than once, and manage to leave you alone with her; then you just put two and two together if you can. In return, I’ll get you started. I know Jots of people. We’ll let it go at that. It’s evidently all you can do, and God knows it’s all I can do. It’s driving me crazy.”
I agreed, on those terms, to start my sleuthing that evening, if he would leave Mrs. Belmore and me alone after dinner. The next moment I was glad I had agreed, because she came into the library.
It would be dishonest for me to say she is beautiful. I can say, more accurately, that she will soon be ugly, as a flower grows ever more beautiful until its very excess of splendor somehow repels. I don’t mean that she has quite reached the point where the transition to ugliness begins, but — Wait a minute. Let me stop this nonsense and tell the truth. She is the loveliest creature I ever saw, and I am trying to find fault with her only because she isn’t mine. Same as everything in that dreadful house.
Her eves are violet and her hair is black. She is delicate. She is gentle. She is graceful. She is a little timid, too; after all, she has been a woman for only a very few years, and can scarcely yet be used to it. Her figure — I think I’d rather not go on describing her.
He saw the effect she had on me, and it pleased him, just as when I admired his handsome books. He went to her, put his jelly-fish of a hand on her arm, and introduced us. He called me neither “Doctor” nor “Mister,” just “Mickey, the son of my old college-pal.”
My mouth acknowledged the introduction, but my insides were trying to shout: “How did this happen? How did this terrible thing ever happen?”
In turn, she murmured her pleasure at having me with them, smiled, and offered me her hand. The habits of my century restrained me from kissing it.
Then the perfect, understanding, old-world butler brought in cocktails, just when I needed one. The gin and vermouth carried me down to their own humbler level of exhilaration.
It was evident to me at once that her husband — I hate to call him that, but I suppose that’s what he is — is entirely bewitched. Despite his greater age, inevitably vaster experience, and power as a financial figure, he took second place to her; he did this immediately upon her entrance, and without question, as the natural thing to do. After introducing us, he stopped speaking and contented himself with watching her, rapt, as if he had never seen her before, his lips moving in silent imitation of whatever she was saying. He, the lord of the manor and the keeper of the seals! You wouldn’t have thought it possible that a spider could be caught by a butterfly.
She presently led the way in to dinner, this lovely child who had to be the lady of the house. Her husband fell behind for an instant, so that he might look appealingly at me, unperceived by her. It was as if he said, “Please! Please! You are an expert, and this is the most valuable of all my treasures! Appraise it, and reassure me!” I did not respond to his worm-like supplication. He had no right to be there. Neither God nor magistrate had really joined them, and I would gladly have put them asunder.
The dinner was peculiarly pleasant, with no one there but the three of us, if you count him. As we sat around their museum-piece of a dining-room table, the evening moved smoothly and gracefully, because it all flowed on the gentle stream of music that was her speech. Her voice was not, as one might suppose from looking at her, either warm or contralto, but cool, refreshing, lyric-soprano, almost Arcadian, like a flute-solo by Gluck. And she showed such kindness in its use! Yes, kindness. She knows that her sweet tones contrast with her vivid beauty, and are, as it were, an antidote to it. So whenever she saw me looking at her too long and fixedly, she spoke, relaxed the tension, and put me at ease.