The Crime Doctor Part 16

"He had his own suspicions, you must remember. I had confirmed them--and _her_ first words left no more to be said, that he could bear to hear!

If only he had waited another minute! If only I had dragged him back to face it out!" groaned Dollar, in a bottomless pit of self-reproach. "I call myself a crime doctor, yet I let my patient creep into s.p.a.ce with a bottle of prussic acid, and commit the one crime I had to prevent!"

"Why prussic acid, I wonder?"

The idle question was not asked for information, but it happened to be one that Dollar could answer, and it brought him to his book-shelves with a certain alacrity.

"I know," he said, "though I never thought of it till this minute! I was trying to write him a prescription on Sunday night, when the poor chap suddenly remarked that Sh.e.l.ley was right, and I found him dipping into these Letters, and had the luck to spot the very bit he'd struck. It was this"--and he read out the pa.s.sage beginning: "You, of course, enter into society at Leghorn: should you meet with any scientific person, capable of preparing the _Prussic Acid, or essential oil of bitter almonds_, I should regard it as a great kindness if you could procure me a small quant.i.ty"--down to "it would be a comfort to me to hold in my hands that golden key to the chamber of perpetual peace."

Topham Vinson's only comment was to pick up the book, which had fallen to the floor with the concluding words. Dollar was swaying where he stood, glancing in horror toward the door; at that moment it opened, and Mrs. Barton entered with the tea-tray.

"Mrs. Barton," said the doctor, in a voice that failed him as it had not done all night, "I don't want to hurt your feelings, but did that boy of yours speak the truth when he told me he had seen Mr. Edenborough out?"

"He did not, sir, and his father thrashed him for it!" cried the good woman. "And that was very wrong of Barton, because I was as bad as the boy, in not telling you at the time. So we've all done wrong together, and we don't deserve to stay, as I told the both of them!"

The poor soul was forgiven and consoled, with an unconscious sympathy not lost on Topham Vinson, to whom it was extended a moment later.

"Take a drink of your tea," said Dollar. "It will do you good."

"What about you?"

"I'm going up-stairs first."

"You've thought of something!"

"I have," replied Dollar in a tragic whisper. "I've thought of my 'chamber of perpetual peace.'"

That sanctuary was on the second floor, and it had triple doors so s.p.a.ced that each could be shut in turn before the next was opened. The house might have been in an uproar, and yet one might have entered this room without admitting the slightest sound by the door. The window was of triple gla.s.s that would have deadened an explosion on its sill, and the walls were thickly wadded behind an inner paneling of aromatic pine.

The first sensation on entering was one of ineffable peace and quiet; next came a subtle, soothing scent, as of all the spices of Arabia; and lastly a surprising sense of scientific ventilation, as though the four sound-proof walls were yet not impervious to the outer air, but as though it were the pungent air of pine-clad mountains, in miraculous circulation here in the heart of London.

All this would have struck the visitor by degrees; but to John Dollar, who had devised and superintended every detail, it all came home together and afresh as he entered softly with the Home Secretary; and a certain composite effect, unforeseen in the beginning and still unexplained, fell upon him even now, and with it all the weight of his own fatigue; so that he could have flung himself on bed or couch as a doomed wretch sinks into the snow, but for the light in the room and what the light revealed.

It was light of a warm, strange, coppery shade, that he had found for himself by dyeing frosted electric lamps as children dye Easter eggs; it was the very softest and yet least sensuous shade that eyes ever penetrated with perfect ease, and it turned the room into a little hall of bronze. The simple curtains might have been golden lace, richly tarnished with age; the furniture solid copper; the bed an Eastern divan, and the form upon the bed a sleeping Arab.

It was George Edenborough lying there in all his clothes, a girl's photograph beside him on the coverlet, and beside the photograph a tiny phial that caught the light.

"Stay where you are!" whispered Dollar in a voice that thrilled his companion to the core. And he stole to the bed, stooped over it for a little lifetime, and so came stealing back.

"How long has he been dead?" said Topham Vinson, harshly; but in realty his blood was freezing at an unearthly smile in that unearthly light.

"Dead?" was the doctor's husky echo. "Don't you know the smell of bitter almonds, and have you smelt it yet? Here's the golden bottle he hadn't opened when he lay down--perhaps for the first time since he was here on Sunday night--and this is his wedding morning, and he's only--only fast asleep!"

V

A SCHOOLMASTER ABROAD

It is a small world that flocks to Switzerland for the Christmas holidays. It is also a world largely composed of that particular cla.s.s which really did provide Doctor Dollar with the majority of his cases.

He was therefore not surprised, on the night of his arrival at the great Excelsior Hotel, in Winterwald, to feel a diffident touch on the shoulder, and to look round upon the sunburned blushes of a quite recent patient.

George Edenborough had taken Winterwald on his wedding trip, and nothing would suit him and his nut-brown bride but for the doctor to join them at their table. It was a slightly embarra.s.sing invitation, but there was good reason for not persisting in a first refusal. And the bride carried the situation with a breezy vitality, while her groom chose a wine worthy of the occasion, and the newcomer explained that he had arrived by the afternoon train, but had not come straight to the hotel.

"Then you won't have heard of our great excitement," said Mrs.

Edenborough, "and I'm afraid you won't like it when you do!"

"If you mean the strychnine affair," returned Dollar, with a certain deliberation, "I heard one version before I had been in the place an hour. I can't say that I did like it. But I should be interested to know what you both think about it all."

Edenborough returned the wine-list to the waiter with sepulchral injunctions.

"Are you telling him about our medical scandal?" he inquired briskly of the bride. "My dear doctor, it'll make your professional hair stand on end! Here's the local pract.i.tioner been prescribing strychnine pills warranted to kill in twenty minutes!"

"So I hear," said the crime doctor, dryly.

"The poor brute has been frightfully overworked," continued Edenborough, in deference to a more phlegmatic front than he had expected of the British faculty. "They say he was up two whole nights last week; he seems to be the only doctor in the place, and the hotels are full of fellows doing their level best to lay themselves out. We've had two concussions of the brain and one complicated fracture this very week.

Still, to go and give your patient a hundred times more strychnine than you intended----"

And he stopped himself, as though the subject, which he had taken up with a purely nervous zest, was rather near home after all.

"But what about his patient?" adroitly inquired the doctor. "If half that one hears is true, he wouldn't have been much loss."

"Not much, I'm afraid," said Lucy Edenborough, with the air of a Roman matron turning down her thumbs.

"He's a fellow who was at my private school, just barely twenty-one, and making an absolute fool of himself," exclaimed Edenborough, touching his gla.s.s. "It's an awful pity. He used to be such a nice little chap, Jack Laverick."

"He was nice enough when he was out here a year ago," the bride admitted, "and he's still a sportsman. He won half the toboggan races last season, and took it all delightfully; he's quite another person now, and gives himself absurd airs on top of everything else. Still, I shall expect Mr. Laverick either to sweep the board or break his neck.

He evidently wasn't born to be poisoned."

"Did he come to grief last year, Mrs. Edenborough?"

"He only nearly had one of his ears cut off, in a spill on the ice-run.

So they said; but he was tobogganing again next day."

"Doctor Alt looked after him all right then, I hear," added Edenborough, as the champagne arrived. "But I only wish _you_ could take the fellow in hand! He really used to be a decent chap, but it would take even you all your time to make him one again, Doctor Dollar."

The crime doctor smiled as he raised his gla.s.s and returned compliments across the bubbles. It was the smile of a man with bigger fish to fry.

Yet it was he who came back to the subject of young Laverick, asking if he had not a tutor or somebody to look after him, and what the man meant by not doing his job.

In an instant both the Edenboroughs had turned upon their friend. Poor Mr. Scarth was not to blame! Poor Mr. Scarth, it appeared, had been a master at the preparatory school at which Jack Laverick and George Edenborough had been boys. He was a splendid fellow, and very popular in the hotel, but there was nothing but sympathy with him in the matter under discussion. His charge was of age, and in a position to send him off at any moment, as indeed he was always threatening in his cups. But there again there was a special difficulty: one cup was more than enough for Jack Laverick, whose weak head for wine was the only excuse for him.

"Yet there was nothing of the kind last year," said Mrs. Edenborough, in a reversionary voice; "at least, one never heard of it And that makes it all the harder on poor Mr. Scarth."

Dollar declared that he was burning to meet the unfortunate gentleman; the couple exchanged glances, and he was told to wait till after the concert, at which he had better sit with them. Was there a concert? His face lengthened at the prospect, and the bride's eyes sparkled at his expense. She would not hear of his s.h.i.+rking it, but went so far as to cut dinner short in order to obtain good seats. She was one of those young women who have both a will and a way with them, and Dollar soon found himself securely penned in the gallery of an ambitious ballroom with a stage at the other end.

The concert came up to his most sardonic expectations, and he resigned himself to a boredom only intensified by the behavior of some crude humorists in the rows behind. Indifferent song followed indifferent song, and each earned a more vociferous encore from those gay young G.o.ds. A not unknown novelist told dialect stories of purely territorial interest; a lady recited with astounding spirit; another fiddled, no less courageously; but the back rows of the gallery were quite out of hand when a black-avised gentleman took the stage, and had not opened his mouth before those back rows were rows of Satan's reproving sin and clapping with unsophisticated gusto.