At this trial, presided over by my uncle as Judge, which had closely followed the great cholera epidemic at Bridgenorth, the evidence, charging the doctor with the atrocious murder of one of his assistants, had been altogether circumstantial. The murderer when seen had worn a mask, and the identification, always short of certainty, rested on inferences, comparisons, dates, and so forth. Considering the brilliant and plausible efforts of the doctor’s lawyers, the quick verdict surprised everybody; but the sensational feature of the case was a savage speech made by the condemned man, cursing my uncle upon the bench, and threatening impossible vengeance on the inhabitants of Bridgenorth in general.
“What could have been his grudge against a whole city?” I inquired.
“There were facts preceding the trial that must have embittered him,” said my uncle, “ghastly rumors about a cholera serum, tested upon his patients, resulting in the loss of his practice, and finally, a disgraceful flogging by a mob. Owing to the state of popular feeling at the time, when his life was in danger, the reports no doubt influenced the jury. I disbelieved them, and therefore suppressed them from the evidence. Nevertheless, he denounced me.”
“Was his mind deranged?” I asked. “How could he have failed to know that you were only the abstract mouthpiece of the law?”
“There may have been some jealousy,” said my relative. “I had criticised his theories. He was a man of ungovernable temper, and very vindictive. Long before the trial, I had an interview with his supposed victim, and hence could have been associated in his mind with the rumors.”
As my uncle talked on, the storm that howled outside, and shook the room in which we sat, seemed a fit accompaniment for his description of the blasted career of the great man and the furious outburst of diseased eloquence that ended the trial.
In his chivalric way, he touched little upon the personal side of the affair, dwelling rather upon the great talents and well-known discoveries of the fallen man, whose creative genius, wrecked through moral depravity, might have been of high service to mankind.
By the time evening had turned to night, and as the storm died down to distant rumblings, the talk ended in a sketch of the fatal inroads of the scourge of ten years before, from which the city had not yet recovered. Whole streets depopulated, a scattered black list of To Rent placards had given the place the sombre and deserted look which still clung to it.
The dilapidated house in which we then were, said my uncle, as I followed him downstairs, had been since used for storage by its owners. The evil fame of the doctor, more injurious than the aftermath of cholera, having kept off tenants during the whole interval.
“No idea of ghosts, I hope,” said I, as we stepped out upon the wet grass and looked up at a few stars in the still threatening sky.
“I never heard of that. The murder was not committed here, and the doctor has not yet gone to ghostland. He got off with life imprisonment.”
“Where is he?” I asked.
“Serving his sentence in Fetterfield Jail.”
“Is there any chance of pardon?”
“No,” replied my uncle as I left him,—“nor of escape either; the prisoners are well guarded there.”
iii
Several weeks had passed, and I was slowly becoming familiar with my new difficulties, when an incident happened, which, though scarcely noticed at the time, deserves mention as strangely relevant to the events that follow.
It was on a breezy summer afternoon. After mounting the hillside along the shady end of M—— Street, I had stopped to visit my sailor patient above mentioned. His wife, as usual, answered my ring at the door-bell. We had passed through the little stuffy hall, and I was about to turn upstairs, when, glancing through the open kitchen door, I noticed a little white animal dart across the floor, almost too quickly to be seen, and disappear down the cellar stairs.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“It’s one of our rats,” replied the woman, stepping into the kitchen, to close the cellar door.
“But it seems to be white,” I remarked.
“Yes, sir. They are all white.”
“White rats!” I exclaimed. “Are you keeping them as pets?”
“No indeed. No such pets for me, if I have my way. There’s bad stories about those rats, sir.”
“What stories?” I asked.
“Charlie won’t believe them, sir; but it’s about the cholera, years back. They say that the white rats brought it here.”
“What!” said I. “I never heard of such a thing.”
“Yes, sir. It may be all nonsense, I know; but yet, there is something wrong with them. Both our cats were afraid of them, and both died after they came. They say that white rats have pink eyes. These don’t. Not a single one of them.”
I told her that a little rat poison would soon settle the matter, and offered to send her some.
“I wish you would,” said she; “but Charlie wouldn’t hear of it. He says there’s a mint of money in white rats, and he is going to trap and sell them as soon as he gets well.”
iv
About a week after this I met my uncle on one of his evening strolls, and as I walked home with him by way of a dismal suburb near the river, which had been notably depopulated by cholera, I inquired as to the origin of the great epidemic, for which, he said, no reasonable theory had been advanced. There had been East Indian ships in port, but they had been well quarantined.
“Did you ever hear that the infection had been brought in by white rats?” I asked.
He had been looking out across the harbour, and turned to inquire, with surprise: “Who told you that?”
“One of my patients seems to have heard a report to that effect. She tells me that her cellar is full of the animals.”
As we walked onward in the deepening twilight, I related my experience, at which my uncle seemed very much impressed.
“That white rat story,” said he, “was at the bottom of the rumors that ruined doctor Gooch. One of those wild fancies that get possession of the popular imagination in moments of fear and lead to outrageous injustice. As I told you, I got the details of it from the murdered man before the trial, but suppressed them from the evidence. He declared that the doctor, during the panic, had discovered a method of sprinkling rats with a serum containing cholera germs, whereupon their fur turned white, and they became wholesale absorbents of the contagion.”
“One way of exhausting its virulence,” I remarked.
“Possibly, provided he had no other motive, but though otherwise non-infectious, his rats could still contaminate human food. Therefore the discovery would have been a highly dangerous secret, a carte blanche for universal murder, with perfect safety to the murderer.
“The man’s charge to me was that the doctor had not only boasted of his serum, but had proved it, by foul play upon several of his patients. In other words, he had introduced his white rats into the houses of his victims, in order to infect their food.”
“Frightful idea,” said I, “but almost too atrocious to believe.”
“So it struck me at the time. Considering that the informer had had a quarrel with the doctor, I was not disposed to put too much faith in the story. It was late one night when I heard it, and, as some of the details seemed insufficient, I postponed the interview. The result was that I never saw the man again. He was found dead in his bed about a week later. When the post mortem disclosed poison, suspicion fell upon the doctor; hence the accusation and trial.”
I suggested that if white,—or whitened,—rats had existed at the time, those seen by my patient might be survivors of the old breed.
“Hardly,” said my uncle. “The town was overrun with rats, but the general opinion, as I heard it later, is that the white ones died out long ago. Still,” he added as I left him at his door step, “rat
s are very curious creatures, particularly the breed of so-called albinos. Suppose we go down and investigate the cellar you speak of.”
Whereupon, after arranging an appointment with me for a rat hunt several days later, we parted.
v
My house, a rambling building on high ground, rather too much shaded by trees, was far too large for my needs. With its musty outer office and laboratory, ending in a ruined greenhouse, it had taken a long time to clean, but at length the work was done. I had congratulated myself upon the final junk-heap and the final bonfire on the lawn, when, one afternoon, on my return from a long tramp, my housekeeper, a thin, neatly-dressed woman, with tightly plaited hair and gold earrings, met me in the office.
“I hope it won’t offend you, sir,” said she in a hesitating voice as I took off my coat and threw it on a chair; “but I am afraid I can’t stay here.”
“Why not?” I asked, somewhat hurt at the sudden news, for I thought I had done my best to treat her well and make her comfortable.
“It’s nothing against you, sir,—not at all; and I did like the house well enough, though I must say it’s damp. But I’m frightened here; so I am, sir; and I can’t help it.”
“Frightened!” I repeated. “What do you mean? Who frightens you?”
“There is somebody prowling about the house at night, when you are away and I am all alone, and I don’t think I can stand it sir.”
“Haven’t you made a mistake?” I asked. “It sounds impossible. Nothing has been stolen. Who would want to come here at night?”
“It’s a man,” said she, after looking uneasily out of the windows into the trees. “I’ve heard him several times; and I believe he gets into the cellar.”
“Have you seen him?”
“Never but once. He was coming out of the greenhouse, carrying something on his back; but it was too dark, and I couldn’t make out what it was.”
I tried to reassure the woman, told her I would inform the police, and finally satisfied her by promising to employ her niece to sleep in the house with her until we could get the thing looked into.
The information worried me for a while, but I heard nothing further from the woman, and by the time the little girl had been with her several days, I had dismissed the subject from my mind.
vi
As autumn approached, the increasing range of my nocturnal practice often led me past my uncle’s house, and one night on my way home from a tiresome round of late visits, when the usual gleam from his study windows beaconed through the trees, I stopped and crossed the street.
Unlike some students, whose talents quicken in the flush of morning and who tax the patience of servants and housekeepers with breakfast-calls at peep-of-day, my uncle worked at night. For him memories, waking with the silent hours, brought an inspiration, which kept his light aglow long beyond the bedtime of common men. That night, as on many a night before, the mellow ray, with its sure promise of welcome, cheered me, and I stepped across the little lawn and rang his doorbell. The housekeeper had long since gone to bed, and he let me in himself.
“Come upstairs, Ned. I have something to tell you,” said he.
His brilliantly-lit study, lined with bookcases, was on the second floor, and there, at one end of a large table, piled with law reports and manuscripts, a punch bowl, with some lemons and a glass stood on an outspread napkin.
He went to the cupboard for another glass, ladelled it full of punch, and pointed to a sofa against the outer wall.
“My boy, you look tired,” he said. “Lie down there.”
A refreshing sea-breeze, blowing in the open window, was lifting the chintz curtains and rattling the manuscripts on the table as I drank his health and sank back upon the comfortable couch.
“I have just had a curious bit of news,” said he presently, after sitting down at the table and helping himself. “Speak of the Devil, and he is sure to appear. It seems that Dr. Gooch has broken out of Fetterfield Jail.”
“What!” I exclaimed. “Didn’t you tell me that Fetterfield was supposed to be proof against escapes?”
“Yes,” he replied; “but it seems it’s not. The thing happened nearly a year ago,” he continued, as he filled my empty glass; “but it has been kept out of the newspapers by the police. I only heard of it in tonight’s mail.”
“He has left the country, of course,” I remarked.
“I doubt it,” said my uncle. “Men of that type rarely do. There is a sort of moth-and-candle infatuation that seems to lure them back to their old haunts. I shouldn’t be surprised if he were in Bridgenorth now.”
“If he is,” said I, laughing, “I hope he won’t pay his old house a visit. I can’t say that I want to meet him.”
“Don’t concern yourself,” said my uncle; “my house rather than yours would be his first objective point. Read that.”
He picked up a letter lying on the table and handed it to me. Written on a small blue-lined half-sheet of paper, in a disguised hand, in imitation of printed letters, I read the following words:
If you think you are safe, you will know better when you read this. Dr. Gooch is out of Fetterfield Jail. You know him, and he knows you. BEWARE.
The last word was written in double-sized letters in red ink.
“What an infernal thing an anonymous letter is,” I exclaimed, after looking at the unsigned paper on both sides. “The more you read it, the worse it gets. Why don’t you destroy it? Though perhaps you had better show it to the police first. In any case, I hope you won’t worry about it.”
“Not a bit of it,” said my host; “I have encountered too much of that sort of thing in my time; but I wanted you to see it as a curious sequence to our conversation about the doctor the other night.”
“The doctor would hardly have written it himself,” said I.
“No; it is someone who knows his history. Some fellow-criminal, perhaps, whose motive may not be altogether unfriendly.”
Declaring that he would make an effort to learn the particulars of the doctor’s escape, he enlarged, as he had done before, upon the brilliant attainments, prostitution of talents, and so on, of the great chemist, and finally the danger to society involved in the freedom of a genius, unrestricted by any inborn principle.
But I was almost too tired to listen; and, after nearly falling asleep twice as my uncle talked on, got up, at last, and bade him good-night.
vii
My first summer at Bridgenorth was ending in a growing practice, with bright hopes for the future, when the city, which had not yet lived down its past, was startled by the reported appearance of several cases of Asiatic cholera. The sudden threatenings, breaking out in widely diverging districts and at first doubtful, soon showed their well-known symptoms; and when more than one death had turned suspicion into certainty, the whole city was in a panic. Wealthy persons left town, houses were quarantined, and elaborate precautions taken. Meanwhile, a rush of fresh work had soon monopolized my time and interrupted my visits to my uncle. For at least a week I had seen nothing of him, when, late one afternoon, I called at his house.
The old housekeeper let me in, and as she fixed her red and swollen eyes upon me, I saw that she had been crying.
“Oh, Mr. Edward, I hope you have brought good news!”
“What’s the matter?” I asked,—“what news? I don’t know what you mean.”
“It’s your Uncle James,” she said, in a frightened, trembling voice. He went out after supper day before yesterday, and he never came back. It’s that dreadful cholera, Mr. Edward,—I know it is. Oh, what shall I do?”
No ordinary devotion spoke in the appealing look of the aged and wrinkled face; and the eyes, swimming with tears, told of half a lifetime warmed in a genial flame of kindness and sympathy.
I tried to cheer her as she wept. Probabl
y he had gone to the country with some of his friends. We would look for a letter at any moment. I would tell the police. The cholera was well in hand,—so I said.
But, utterly unprepared for the news, and knowing the range of my uncle’s walks, I found it hard to sham a confidence I did not feel; and, dreading the worst, hastened home, only to hear of a sudden accident to one of my patients in Rockhaven, which hurried me supperless over the river, into the sister city.
viii
It took me a long time to finish with my Rockhaven patient. There were instruments needed, which I had forgotten to bring with me and had to borrow from a neighboring surgeon, so that it was past midnight when, after a hasty sandwich at a tavern, I had gone down Tower Street to cross the North Ferry Bridge.
The wind was blowing almost a gale, with a wild whirling of moonlit clouds, and, in the chasm below me, out of which towered the great wooden bridge and pile-built warehouses on the Bridgenorth side, I saw that the tide was running out fast. I was walking rapidly; but before I got half way across I heard the click of machinery, the rattling of chains, and then the ringing of a ship’s bell, which I knew preceded the opening of the draw.
Whoever remembers the place may know that the drawbridge, turning horizontally, opens on the river, where the channel runs close upon the south waterfront. I saw the circling of lanterns as the great turnstile swung out from the roadway, but my yearning thoughts were with my uncle,—the time lost, the things left undone for his help. I remembered the long delays that often occurred at such moments; and, without waiting to calculate my chances, sprang forward, and, leaping across the widening gap, ran along the draw. But though just in time at one end, I was too late at the other. The moving streetway had cleared the opening, and I stopped at the corner and looked out along the railing at the oncoming mass of spars and rigging. I heard the whistle of the tug boat, the hoarse orders of the captain, and, blending with the noise of the wind, a loud scraping, as of a projecting spar along the bridge-rail. Then suddenly came an irresistible thrust that swept me out into the darkness. With a rush of air, I felt a pounding plunge, a wild mental turmoil, and the stifling instinctive submarine struggle, with gulps of water, that at last brought me swimming to the surface. I saw a ship’s hull glide past; but, being at home in the water, kept my distance in the light of the bridge lamps, and, as the tide swept me towards the forest of piles ahead, I swam with it until I reached one of the barnacle-covered posts. For a moment I clung to it; then, letting go, floated on into the darkness. Clutching or grazing the prickly pillars, I followed the current, and after several kicks in deep water, my feet touched bottom. I felt a steeply-sloping bank of mud, and waded slowly through it, upward, until at length I stood waist-deep and looked around me. Save for the water-gleams and dim-lit patches of river seen beyond the posts, the place was pitch dark. I felt a dry slope of earth above me, but in vain looked along it and up at the blackness overhead, for an opening. For a while I wallowed and clambered onward through wedged masses of slimy flotsam and ramparts of mud and pebbles. Then I got up on the bank. The roof of the place,—in other words, the floor of the warehouses under which I had been swept,—was still high above me, and I stopped continually, to feel my way across deep hollows and over blocks of stone. At length, passing round a muddy cape, I halted at sight of a gleam of light ahead,—a faint ray of lamplight, which, as I got nearer, showed the rungs of a ladder reaching downward through a bright opening in the planks above. I approached it cautiously. The ladder rested on the bank, a few feet above the water, and the trap-door through which it penetrated showed a very large, dimly-lit room, with blackened beams and roof-lines lost in shadow. I looked and listened for some time, but heard no noise.
November Night Tales Page 4