The Crime Doctor Part 11

"I was putting the fear of a foreign jail upon him to the last. But he had a confederate in the train; he was in reserve outside your berth until I lured him into mine and laid him out. Otherwise I should have been with you sooner; but in one way it was better to take our man with your jewels on him--there was no getting out of it. The two of them were only too glad to be kicked out at the first station. And the other fellow was a man who broke into my house to see Croucher the first night we had him there."

"Did they tell you so?"

"No. I knew it at the time. I heard the whole thing, even to fragments of a conversation from which it was possible to reconstruct the plan they actually brought off last night. I make it a rule not to listen at patients' doors, any more than one would at other people's, but I'm not going to blush for this particular exception."

Her soft wet eyes were looking him through and through.

"Yet you kept him on--for my sake!"

"Not altogether, Lady Vera." They were an honest couple. "It put me on my mettle; it gave me something to prevent. At first--as I'm afraid you knew--I really didn't want to touch the fellow with a pole. He was an obvious incurable; he would have been better hanged--justly or unjustly."

"Don't speak of that--or do!" exclaimed the girl. "It makes me forgive him everything!"

"Well, my first idea was about right. He was beyond reclaim. But I never thought he would give me a definite move to block; that, as you know; is one's chief job after all, and it put a new complexion on the case. It was as though--as though one took a man on for cancer and found him plotting to shoot the Chancellor of the Exchequer before he died! I apologize for the a.n.a.logy, Lady Vera," said Dollar, making the most of their laugh, "but the man became a new proposition on the spot. And the funny thing is that I believe I almost might have cured him after all--done him some good, anyhow--but for the very thing that bucked me up!"

Lady Vera looked out at a flying brake of naked trees, the color of cigar-ash. He had lost her attention for the moment.

"I was a little fool," she said at length. "I should have listened to you, and been content to help in some other way. I am sorry."

"I'm not!" replied Doctor Dollar. "It was a very sporting folly--but everything you ever did was that!"

She shook her head sadly, as a brown river, girt with olives, flashed under the train like a child's skipping-rope.

"I haven't changed my opinions," she said, just a trifle aggressively.

"But I would give my life to undo many of my actions--not only that one--many, many!" and she looked him bravely and humbly in the eyes. "So the whole thing has served me right, and will if it happens all over again."

"If what does?"

"This blackmailing of me by that poor man!"

"It won't. I've frightened him."

"He will think of some subtler way."

"There's no subtlety in him, no power, no initiative, no anything but mere brute force," said Dollar, with a touch of that same strength and weakness in his unusually emphatic a.s.sertion. "The fellow is a deadly tool and nothing more. He knuckled under to me in a moment."

Lady Vera shook her head again, but this time she was looking firmly in his face.

"I feel," she said, with a stoical conviction, "that I shall be fair game to him as long as we are both in the world. And it's what I deserve."

Dollar abandoned his attempt at disingenuous disabuse; the extreme to which he flew instead was a little startling, but these two knew each other.

"You must marry, Lady Vera," he was moved to say. But his manner was eminently uninspired. He might have been telling her she must hand her keys to the hotel porter at Rome. That was in fact the note he meant to take, only he sang it louder than he knew.

"I can never marry," she answered calmly. "I have blood upon my hands."

"You can marry a man who knows!"

And the unaltered note took on a tremolo of which he was both aware and ashamed; but still their eyes were frankly locked.

"I can marry n.o.body, Doctor Dollar."

"The man I mean isn't fit to black your boots! But he'd protect you, he'd help you, and you would be the making not only of him but of his dream--and not only _his_ little dream----"

It was her hand that stopped him. It had taken his across the little table.

"The man you mean is worth ten million of me! But I can never marry him or anybody. And you, and you alone, know why!"

She bent her brave eyes back on the Campagna; a pale tufted heath was swimming by; gum-trees hardly heightened the prevailing neutral tint; a modern corrugated roof, pinned in place by a few primeval boulders, held her attention on its swift course across the window-panes; and when she looked round, Lady Vera was all alone.

IV

THE GOLDEN KEY

"Sh.e.l.ley was quite right!" exclaimed the young man at the book-shelf, with the prematurely bent back turned upon Doctor Dollar at his old oak desk.

"He was never wrong when he stuck to poetry," said the doctor, looking up from an unfinished prescription on which the ink was nevertheless dry.

The other gave a guilty start. He was an immaculate young wreck, with the fas.h.i.+onable glut of hair plastered back from a good enough face, as if to make the most of its haggard pallor. And he was in full evening dress, for the crime doctor's patients came at all hours.

"Did I say anything?" he asked with exaggerated embarra.s.sment.

"You thought something aloud," said Dollar, smiling. "Don't let it worry you; that's not one of the straws that shows an ill wind. What is it of Sh.e.l.ley's, Mr. Edenborough?"

"Only a bit of one of his letters," said the young man. "I just happened to open them at something that rather appealed to me." And the book shot back into its place.

"Not the bit about the prussic acid, I hope?" suggested the doctor, for all the world as if in fun.

"What was that?" said Edenborough, with a face that would not have imposed upon an infant.

"A little commission from Sh.e.l.ley to Trelawny, for a small quant.i.ty of the 'essential oil of bitter almonds,' as he called it, so that he might 'hold in his possession that golden key to the chamber of perpetual peace.'"

"That was it," said the youth at length. "I may as well be honest about it. But I don't know how on earth you knew!"

The doctor gave a kindly little laugh.

"Only by knowing the book," he a.s.sured the patient. "It's rather a notorious pa.s.sage--and you had just been clamoring for at least a silver key to some chamber of temporary peace!"

"You said you would give me one, Doctor Dollar."

"And now I think I won't," said the doctor, rising from his aged chair.

"No; you shall not go without hearing my reasons, and what I am going to propose to you instead. These keys, Mr. Edenborough"--and he tore the unfinished prescription into little bits--"gold or silver, they are not keys at all, but burglars' jemmies that injure and vitiate the chambers they break into. It certainly is so with the night's rest you want at any price; it may be the same with the perpetual peace that Sh.e.l.ley took for granted. Yet I happen to have a Chamber of Peace of sorts here in this house. It's my latest fad. You've found it a name, and in return I should like to offer it to you for the night."

"Do you mean a room that sends you off instead of drugs?"