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Page 55

"This has come for the child," he said in quite good English. He
was obliged to speak English. Day by day he taught in the clinics
Americans who scorned his native tongue, and who brought him the
money with which some day he would marry. He liked the English
language; he liked Americans because they learned quickly. He
held out an envelope with a black border and Peter took it.

"From Paris!" he said. "Who in the world--I suppose I'd better
open it."

"So I thought. It appears a letter of--how you say it? Ah, yes,
condolence."

Peter opened the letter and read it. Then without a word he gave
it open to the Dozent. There was silence in the laboratory while
the Dozent read it, silence except for his canary, which was
chipping at a lump of sugar. Peter's face was very sober.

"So. A mother! You knew nothing of a mother?"

"Something from the papers I found. She left when the boy was a
baby--went on the stage, I think. He has no recollection of her,
which is a good thing. She seems to have been a bad lot."

"She comes to take him away. That is impossible."

"Of course it is impossible," said Peter savagely. "She's not
going to see the child if I can help it. She left because--she's
the boy's mother, but that's the best you can say of her. This
letter--Well, you've read it."

"She is as a stranger to him?"

"Absolutely. She will come in mourning--look at that black
border--and tell him his father is dead, and kill him. I know the
type."

The canary chipped at his sugar; the red beard of the Dozent
twitched, as does the beard of one who plots. Peter re-read the
gushing letter in his hand and thought fiercely.

"She is on her way here," said the Dozent. "That is bad. Paris to
Wien is two days and a night. She may hourly arrive."

"We might send him away--to another hospital."

The Dozent shrugged his shoulders.

"Had I a home--" he said, and glanced through the door to the
portrait on the stand. "It would be possible to hide the boy, at
least for a time. In the interval the mother might be watched,
and if she proved a fit person the boy could be given to her. It
is, of course, an affair of police."

This gave Peter pause. He had no money for fines, no time for
imprisonment, and he shared the common horror of the great jail.
He read the letter again, and tried to read into the lines
Jimmy's mother, and failed. He glanced into the ward. Still Jimmy
slept. A burly convalescent, with a saber cut from temple to ear
and the general appearance of an assassin, had stopped beside the
bed and was drawing up the blanket round the small shoulders.

"I can give orders that the woman be not admitted to-day," said
the Dozent. "That gives us a few hours. She will go to the
police, and to-morrow she will be admitted. In the mean time--"

"In the mean time," Peter replied, "I'll try to think of
something. If I thought she could be warned and would leave him
here--"

"She will not. She will buy him garments and she will travel with
him through the Riviera and to Nice. She says Nice. She wishes to
be there for carnival, and the boy will die."

Peter took the letter and went home. He rode, that he might read
it again in the bus. But no scrap of comfort could he get from
it. It spoke of the dead father coldly, and the father had been
the boy's idol. No good woman could have been so heartless. It
offered the boy a seat in one of the least reputable of the Paris
theaters to hear his mother sing. And in the envelope, overlooked
before, Peter found a cutting from a French newspaper, a picture
of the music-hall type that made him groan. It was indorsed
"Mamma."

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Books | Photos | Paul Mutton | Wed 24th Dec 2025, 1:55

The Street of Seven Stars by Mary Roberts Rinehart