The Crime Doctor Part 3

"At any rate I'm responsible for what happened, and it's going to cure him. It was a case of undisciplined imagination acting on a bonnet with just one bee in it. He had never realized what a h.e.l.l let loose a fire really was; now he _knows_ through his own skin."

The statesman's eyebrows were like the backs of two mutually displeased cats.

"But surely that's an old wives' trick pushed beyond all bounds?"

"Pushed further than I intended, Mr. Vinson, I must confess. I only meant him to see a serious fire. So I arranged with the brigade to ring me up when there was a really bad one, and with my man to take the boy out at night for all his walks. There was another good reason for that; and altogether nothing can have seemed more natural than the way they both appeared on the scene of this ghastly riding-school affair."

"I know what's coming!" cried the Home Secretary. "This is the fellow who dashed in to help save the horses, and got away afterward without giving his name!"

"That's it. He says he'll hear those horses till his dying hour! He was in the thick of it before Barton or anybody else could stop him--they only succeeded in stopping poor Barton from following. Well, I can take no credit for the very last thing I should have dreamt of allowing; but I fancy the odds are fairly long that the tempting element will never, never again tempt our young friend up-stairs!"

They had drifted down again during this recital; and he who had led the way stood staring at the crime doctor, in his monkish cell, with that intent inscrutability which was one of Topham Vinson's most effective masks; but now it was a mask imperfectly adjusted, with the warm light of admiration breaking through, and the shadow of something else interfering with that light. When Doctor Dollar had marched upon the loaded revolver, talking down the barrel as to an infant pointing a popgun--daring another daredevil to shoot him dead--the same admiring look had come over the face behind him, qualified in precisely the same fas.h.i.+on. But then the doctor had not seen it, and now it made him wince a little, as though he dreaded something that was bound to come.

This was what came:

"Doctor Dollar, I should prefer not to ask you to show me or tell me any more. I know a good man when I see one, and I know good work when I catch him at it. Perhaps that was necessary in the case of such extraordinary work as yours; yet you say it was a sheer coincidence that I caught you at it to-night--or rather that such tough work was waiting for you when we got here?"

"Do you still doubt it? Why, you yourself insisted on coming round to see the place in the middle of this blessed night!"

"Exactly. That establishes your second coincidence; but with all respect, doctor, I don't believe in two of the same sort on the same night to the same two people!"

"What was the other coincidence?" demanded the doctor, huskily.

"Your catching _any_ old pickpocket with my watch--and letting him off!

Come, doctor, do one more thing for me, and I'll do all in my power for you and your great work. That is, of course, if you still want me to take the interest I certainly should have taken if I had seen your letters."

"If!" cried the young man from the fulness of his heart. "Your interest is the one thing I do want of you, and you are the one person I want to interest!"

His eyes shone like big brown lamps, straight enough now in their intensity, and dim with the glory of their vision. He could tremble, too, it seemed, where the stake was not dear life, but a life's dearer work. And Topham Vinson was almost moved himself; he really was absorbed and thrilled; but not to the detriment of his penetrative astuteness, his political instinct for a bargain.

"Come, then," said he: "show me the fellow who sneaked my watch."

"Show him to you? What do you mean?"

The doctor had not started. But the injured eye showed its injury once more.

"It was one of your patients who picked my pocket," said the Home Secretary, with as much confidence as though he had known it all the time. "Would you have been in such a hurry to wash your hands of anybody else, and to undo what he'd done?"

Dollar made no answer, no denial; but he glanced at a venerable one-handed clock, whose unprotected pendulum shaved the wall with noisy sweeps. It was two o'clock in the morning, but already night must have been turned into dreadful and disturbing day for all the inmates. The doctor abandoned that excuse unmade, and faced his visitor in desperation.

"So you want to see him--now?"

"I do. I have my reasons. But it shall end at that--if I do see him.

_That_ won't nip my goodwill in the bud!" It was obvious what would.

"You shall see him," said the doctor, as though racking his mind once more. "But there are difficulties you perhaps can't quite appreciate. It means giving away a patient--don't you see?"

"Perfectly. It seems to me a very proper punishment, since it's all he'll get. Yet you don't want to lose your hold. Couldn't you send him down here on some pretext, instead of taking me up to him?"

The crime doctor's face lit up as if by electricity.

"I can and I will!" he cried. "Wait here, Mr. Vinson. He's another reader; he shall come down for a book!"

The great man waited with the satisfaction of a slightly overbearing personality for once very nearly overborne. He was now intensely interested in the crime doctor and his unique establishment. It was an interest that he had no intention of sharing with his closest colleague, until he had gone deeper into a theory and practise that were already a revelation to him. They might both prove unworkable on any large scale, and yet they might light the way to sensational legislation of the very type that Topham Vinson was the very man to introduce. Boundless ambition was one of the forces of a nature that responded to the call of any sufficiently dazzling crusade; but the pa.s.sion for adventure ran ambition hard; and a crusade calculated to gratify both appet.i.tes was dazzling even to eyes of triple steel!

Only, he must show this new ally his power before they struck up their alliance; that was the great reason for insisting on seeing the pickpocket. But there was a little reason besides. An excellent memory had supplied Mr. Vinson with a kind of post-impression of the pickpocket. And within one minute of the doctor's departure, and one second of the patient's prompt appearance, a certain small suspicion had been confirmed.

"I think we've met before, my man?" he had begun. His man started stagily--was altogether of the stage--a bearded scarecrow in rags too ragged to be true. Vinson found the switches and made more light. "Not half a bad disguise," he continued, "whoever you may be! I suppose they're supplied on the premises for distinguished patients?"

"How do you know it's a disguise?" croaked the hairy man, with downcast eyes.

"Well, you don't look a distinguished patient, do you?" said the Home Secretary airily. "On the other hand, your kit doesn't convince me at all; looks to me as if it would fall to pieces but for what the ladies call a foundation--eh?"

And he swooped down on the ragged tails as their owner turned a humiliated back. And the "foundation" was a perfectly good overcoat turned inside out; moreover, it was a coat that Topham Vinson seemed to know; it was a coat that he suddenly remembered, as he shot up to his full height and then stood deadly still.

The pickpocket had not turned round. But his wig and beard lay at his elbow on the mantelpiece; his diminished head had sunk into his hands; and the electric light blazed upon a medallion of silver hair, up above one burning ear.

"Doctor--Dollar!" exclaimed Topham Vinson. And the ingenuous ring of his own startled voice only added to his sense of outrage.

"Yes! I was the man.... It was only to get at you--you know that!"

It was a hoa.r.s.e voice muttering to the wall, in a dire discomfiture that had its effect on the insulted Minister.

"So that was your weakness!" The plain comment was icier than any sneer.

"Picking and stealing--and your hand still keeps its cunning!"

"Yes. That was how my wound had taken me." There was less shame in the hoa.r.s.e voice, thanks to the bracing coldness of the other. "It started in the field hospital--orderlies laughed and encouraged me--nurses at Netley just as bad! Everybody treated it as a joke; the doctor used to ask for his watch or his handkerchief after every visit; and the great score was when he thought I had one, and it was really the other--or both--or the keys out of his trousers pocket! It amused the ward and made me popular--made me almost suicidal--because I alone knew that I couldn't help doing it to save my life.... And the rest _you_ know."

"I do, indeed!"

"This beastly kit, I had it made on purpose so that I could run after you one minute with what I'd taken from you the minute before! It was a last attempt to gain your ear--to get you interested. And now----"

"And now," said Topham Vinson, with a kind hand on the bent shoulders, yet a keen eye on the bent head--"and now I suppose you think you've put the lid on it? So you have, my dear doctor--on any sneaking doubts I had about you! You've struck a job after my own heart, and you've led me into it as I never was led into anything in my life before. Well, you've just got to keep me in it now; and I'm conceited enough to believe I shall be worth my place. Don't you think you might turn round, Doctor Dollar, and let us shake hands on that?"

II

THE LIFE-PRESERVER

The Lady Vera Moyle had made herself notorious in a cause that scored some points through her allegiance. She it was who cajoled the Home Secretary outside Palace Yard, and sent him about his weighty business with the colors of a hated Union pinned to his unconscious back. It is true that some of her excesses had less to redeem them, but all were committed with a pious zest which recalled the saying that the Moyles were a race of Irish rebels who had intermarried with the saints. It was reserved for Lady Vera to combine the truculence of her forefathers with the serene solemnity of their wives, and to enact her devilments, as she took their consequences, with a buxom austerity all her own.

But she was not at her best when she went to see Doctor Dollar on Christmas Eve; for it was just two months after the autumn raid, which had caused the retirement of Lady Vera Moyle, and some of her political friends, for precisely that period. Otherwise, the autumn raid had been a triumph for the raiders, thanks to a fog of providential density, which had fought on their side as the stars in their courses fought against Sisera for the earliest militant. Never had private property been destroyed on so generous a scale, with fewer casualties on the side of the destroying angels; and yet there had been one unnecessary blot on the proceedings, which they were the first to repudiate and condemn.

A vile male member of the common criminal cla.s.ses had not only taken occasion to loot a jeweler's window, broken by some innocent lady, but had coolly murdered a policeman who interfered with him in the perpetration of his selfish crime. Fortunately the wretch had been traced through the stolen trinkets, expeditiously committed and condemned, and was on the point of paying the supreme penalty. No sane person could doubt his guilt, and yet there were those who sought to fix a certain responsibility on the women! The charge of moral complicity had disgraced and stultified both Press and platform, and the Home Secretary, pestered for a reprieve, had only sealed the murderer's fate at the eleventh hour. Even the steel nerves of the Vinsons had suffered under a complex strain: it was just as well that he was on the point of departure for the holidays.