Ainslee's Magazine, February 1913 — page 158: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

148 I did not relish even temporarily giv- ing up my comfortable suite of rooms, any more than did three or four other bachelors, but the force of circum- stances was such, owing to the unher- alded arrival for the ball of several prominent personages—among them several ladies—and the dilemma of the proprietor, whom we all liked, that we graciously assented. The result was that I found myself moved for the night from the second floor to a single room on the fourth floor, number eighty- three, diagonally opposite number nine- ty-two, the suite of the Countess of Baylesford, and within a few doors of number ninety-four, the Mawlyns’ room. The colonel and I having taken a brisk walk, I was late in dressing for dinner. I had just finished dressing and turned out my electric light, when I de- tected the sound of a muffled groan across the hall. I opened my door and stood listening intently, noting first that the countess’ door was closed, the light from the transom over it streaming across the otherwise dimly lighted cor- ridor. A few doors beyond I saw that the Mawlyns’ room was dark, and their door ajar. There was no mistaking now where the groaning came from. I strode across the broad corridor and rapped at Mawlyn’s door. ‘“Mawlyn,” I ventured, “can I do any- thing for you? May I come in?” “Yes—come—come in ” he la- bored in reply. “Here’s the light— here by the bed.” I turned the electric button, illumin- ing a single room in disorder. A tray with the remainder of a luncheon still occupied the top of a trunk. Mawlyn lay on his side, with his face toward me, in the double bed, groaning. Flung about were most of Mrs. Mawlyn’s clothes. “For God’s sake!” he gasped, after a moment, “I can’t stand this.” Pain- fully he tugged out from beneath the covers a hot-water bag. “Get it filled, will your” he begged savagely. “I want it hot—hot, under- stand?” he half whimpered, and I saw come into his eyes that hysterical, AINSLEE’S frantic look which accute pain worries a man into. Though the electric-bell button was within his reach, I knew he had rung it in vain for a servant. I went to the bathroom across the corridor—where I filled the bag at the hot-water faucet— returned, and got him comfortable with the bag as hot as he -could stand it against his hip. “Thank you,” he breathed, gritting his teeth in an endeavor to turn over on his back, caught his breath in a fresh spasm of pain, and prudently lay still. Incensed as I was at Mrs. Mawlyn for abandoning him, knowjng that she was downstairs dining with that cad, Cyril Reeves, I held my temper and tried to cheer Mawlyn up a little before leaving him, but he would have none of it, and begged me to leave him di- rectly and go down to dinner—insisting that there was positively nothing more I could do, and that he already felt easier. This, I saw, was the truth, for the intense heat had already had its calming effect, and his eyes had grown drowsy. “T believe I can sleep,” he murmured, and, fearing to rouse him by further talk, I put out the light at his request, and, leaving him, gently closed the door. behind me. As I did so, I thought I distinctly heard through the transom above me the crisp rustle of a silk gown—and was more than half convinced the sound came from the room I had just left. Had Mrs. Mawlyn been in the room during my visit? Impossible, I said to myself, and, dismissing the incident of the rustling silk from my mind, I descended the stairs to dinner. Barely had I reached the ground floor when I suddenly remembered leaving my dispatch box unlocked in my room, with some letters of a purely personal nature in it, and, knowing the inquis- itiveness of hotel servants, I leaped back up the stairs again to the fourth floor, and retraced my way toward my room down the dimly lighted corridor. Not a guest or a servant was in sight. The former, all save poor Mawlyn, I knew were by now at dinner, and the servants Com C nO K (C@