“I don’t know.” The doctor gave a characteristic shrug. “It’s not my job; as it was, I’d done all the detective business, which I loathe.”
“I remember,” cried Scarth. “I shall never forget the way you went through that prescription, as though you had been looking over the blighter’s shoulder! Not an expert — modest fellow — pride that apes!”
And again Dollar had to laugh at the way Mr. Jingle wagged his head, in spite of the same slightly caustic undercurrent as before.
“That was the easiest part of it,” he answered, “although you make me blush to say so. The hard part was what reviewers of novels call the ‘motivation.’”
“But you had that in Schickel’s spite against Alt.”
“It was never quite strong enough to please me.”
“Then what was the motive, doctor?”
“Young Laverick’s death.”
“Nonsense!”
“I wish it were, Mr. Scarth.”
“But who is there in Winterwald who could wish to compass such a thing?”
“There were more than two thousand visitors over Christmas, I understand,” was the only reply.
It would not do for Mostyn Scarth. He looked less than politely incredulous, if not less shocked and rather more indignant than he need have looked. But the whole idea was a reflection upon his care of the unhappy youth. And he said so in other words, which resembled those of Mr. Jingle only in their stiff staccato brevity.
“Talk about ‘motivation’! — I thank you, doctor, for that word — but I should thank you even more to show me the thing itself in your theory. And what a way to kill a fellow! What a roundabout, risky way!”
“It was such a good forgery,” observed the doctor, “that even Alt himself could hardly swear that it was one.”
“Is he your man?” asked Scarth, in a sudden whisper, leaning forward with lighted eyes.
The crime doctor smiled enigmatically. “It’s perhaps just as lucky for him, Scarth, that at least he could have had nothing to do with the second attempt upon his patient’s life.”
“What second attempt?”
“The hand that forged the prescription, Scarth, with intent to poison young Laverick, was the one that also filed the flaw in his toboggan, in the hope of breaking his neck.”
“My dear doctor,” exclaimed Mostyn Scarth, with a pained shake of the head, “this is stark, staring madness!”
“I only hope it was — in the would-be murderer,” rejoined Dollar gravely. “But he had a lot of method; he even did his bit of filing — a burglar couldn’t have done it better — in the domino Jack Laverick had just taken off!”
“How do you know he had taken it off? How do you know the whole job wasn’t one of Jack’s drunken tricks?”
“What whole job?”
“The one you’re talking about — the alleged tampering with his toboggan,” replied Scarth, impatiently.
“Oh! I only thought you meant something more.” Dollar made a pause. “Don’t you feel it rather hot in here, Scarth?”
“Do you know, I do!” confessed the visitor, as though it were Dollar’s house and breeding had forbidden him to volunteer the remark. “It’s the heat of this stove, with the window shut. Thanks so much, doctor!”
And he wiped his strong, brown, beautifully shaven face; it was one of those that require shaving more than once a day, yet it was always glossy from the razor; and he burnished it afresh with a silk handkerchief that would have passed through a packing-needle’s eye.
“And what are you really doing about this — monster?” he resumed, as who should accept the monster’s existence for the sake of argument.
“Nothing, Scarth.”
“Nothing? You intend to do nothing at all?”
Scarth had started, for the first time; but he started to his feet, while he was about it, as though in overpowering disgust.
“Not if he keeps out of England,” replied the crime doctor, who had also risen. “I wonder if he’s sane enough for that?”
Their four eyes met in a protracted scrutiny, without a flicker on either side.
“What I am wondering,” said Scarth deliberately, “is whether this Frankenstein effort of yours exists outside your own imagination, Doctor Dollar.”
“Oh! he exists all right,” declared the doctor. “But I am charitable enough to suppose him mad — in spite of his method and his motive.”
“Did he tell you what that was?” asked Scarth with a sneer.
“No; but Jack did. He seems to have been in the man’s power — under his influence — to an extraordinary degree. He had even left him a wicked sum in a will made since he came of age. I needn’t tell you that he has now made another, revoking — —”
“No, you need not!” cried Mostyn Scarth, turning livid at the last moment. “I’ve heard about enough of your mares’ nests and mythical monsters. I wish you good morning, and a more credulous audience next time.”
“That I can count upon,” returned the doctor at the door. “There’s no saying what they won’t believe — at Scotland Yard!”
ONE POSSESSED
Lieutenant-General Neville Dysone, R.E., V.C., was the first really eminent person to consult the crime doctor by regular appointment in the proper hours. Quite apart from the feat of arms which had earned him the most coveted of all distinctions, the gigantic General, deep-chested and erect, virile in every silver-woven hair of his upright head, filled the tiny stage in Welbeck Street and dwarfed its antique properties, as no being had done before. And yet his voice was tender and even tremulous with the pathetic presage of a heartbreak under all.
“Doctor Dollar,” he began at once, “I have come to see you about the most tragic secret that a man can have. I would shoot myself for saying what I have to say, did I not know that a patient’s confidence is sacred to any member of your profession — perhaps especially to an alienist?”
“I hope we are all alike as to that,” returned Dollar, gently. He was used to these sad openings.
“I ought not to have said it; but it hardly is my secret, that’s why I feel such a cur!” exclaimed the General, taking his handkerchief to a fine forehead and remarkably fresh complexion, as if to wipe away its noble flush. “Your patient, I devoutly hope, will be my poor wife, who really seems to me to be almost losing her reason” — but with that the husband quite lost his voice.
“Perhaps we can find it for her,” said Dollar, despising the pert professional optimism that told almost like a shot “It is a thing more often mislaid than really lost.”
And the last of the other’s weakness was finally overcome. A few weighty questions, lightly asked and simply answered, and he was master of a robust address, in which an occasional impediment only did further credit to his delicacy.
“No. I should say it was entirely a development of the last few months,” declared the General emphatically. “There was nothing of the kind in our twenty-odd years of India, nor yet in the first year after I retired. All this — this trouble has come since I bought my house in the pine country. It’s called Valsugana, as you see on my card; but it wasn’t before we went there. We gave it the name because it struck us as extraordinarily like the Austrian Tyrol, where — well, of which we had happy memories, Doctor Dollar.”
His blue eyes winced as they flew through the open French window, up the next precipice of bricks and mortar, to the beetling sky-line of other roofs, all a little softened in the faint haze of approaching heat. It cost him a palpable effort to bring them back to the little dark consulting-room, with its cool slabs of aged oak and the summer fernery that hid the hearth.
“It’s good of you to let me take my time, doctor, but yours is too valuable to waste. All I meant was to give you an idea of our surroundings, as I know they are held to count in such cases. We are embedded in pines and firs. Some people find trees depressing, but after India they were just what we wanted, and even now my wife won’t let me cut down one of them. Yet depression is
no name for her state of mind; it’s nearer melancholy madness, and latterly she has become subject to — to delusions — which are influencing her whole character and actions in the most alarming way. We are finding it difficult, for the first time in our lives, to keep servants; even her own nephew, who has come to live with us, only stands it for my sake, poor boy! As for my nerves — well, thank God I used to think I hadn’t got any when I was in the service; but it’s a little hard to be — to be as we are — at our time of life!” His hot face flamed. “What am I saying? It’s a thousand times harder on her! She had been looking forward to these days for years.”
Dollar wanted to wring one of the great brown, restless hands. Might he ask the nature of the delusions?
The General cried: “I’d give ten years of my life if I could tell you!”
“You can tell me what form they take?”
“I must, of course; it is what I came for, after all,” the General muttered. He raised his head and his voice together. “Well, for one thing she’s got herself a ferocious bulldog and a revolver.”
Dollar did not move a doctor’s muscle. “I suppose there must be a dog in the country, especially where there are no children. And if you must have a dog, you can’t do better than a bulldog. Is there any reason for the revolver? Some people think it another necessity of the country.”
“It isn’t with us — much less as she carries it.”
“Ladies in India get in the habit, don’t they?”
“She never did. And now — —”
“Yes, General? Has she it always by her?”
“Night and day, on a curb bracelet locked to her wrist!”
This time there were no professional pretenses. “I don’t wonder you have trouble with your servants,” said Dollar, with as much sympathy as he liked to show.
“You mayn’t see it when you come down, doctor, as I am going to entreat you to do. She has her sleeves cut on purpose, and it is the smallest you can buy. But I know it’s always there — and always loaded.”
Dollar played a while with a queer plain steel ruler, out of keeping with his other possessions, though it too had its history. It stood on end before he let it alone and looked up.
“General Dysone, there must be some sort of reason or foundation for all this. Has anything alarming happened since you have been at — Valsugana?”
“Nothing that firearms could prevent”
“Do you mind telling me what it is that has happened?”
“We had a tragedy in the winter — a suicide on the place.”
“Ah!”
“Her gardener hanged himself. Hers, I say, because the garden is my wife’s affair. I only paid the poor fellow his wages.”
“Well, come, General, that was enough to depress anybody — —”
“Yet she wouldn’t have even that tree cut down — nor yet come away for a change — not for as much as a night in town!”
The interruption had come with another access of grim heat and further use of the General’s handkerchief. Dollar took up his steel tube of a ruler and trained it like a spy-glass on the ink, with one eye as carefully closed as if the truth lay at the bottom of the blue-black well.
“Was there any rhyme or reason for the suicide?”
“One was suggested that I would rather not repeat.”
The closed eye opened to find the blue pair fallen. “I think it might help, General. Mrs. Dysone is evidently a woman of strong character, and anything — —”
“She is, God knows!” cried the miserable man. “Everybody knows it now — her servants especially — though nobody used to treat them better. Why, in India — but we’ll let it go at that, if you don’t mind. I have provided for the widow.”
Dollar bowed over his bit of steel tubing, but this time put it down so hastily that it rolled off the table. General Dysone was towering over him with shaking hand outstretched.
“I can’t say any more,” he croaked. “You must come down and see her for yourself; then you could do the talking — and I shouldn’t feel such a damned cur! By God, sir, it’s awful, talking about one’s own wife like this, even for her own good! It’s worse than I thought it would be. I know it’s different to a doctor — but — but you’re an old soldierman as well, aren’t you? Didn’t I hear you were in the war?”
“I was.”
“Well, then,” cried the General, and his blue eyes lit up with simple cunning, “that’s where we met! We’ve run up against each other again, and I’ve asked you down for this next week-end! Can you manage it? Are you free? I’ll write you a check for your own fee this minute, if you like — there must be nothing of that kind down there. You don’t mind being Captain Dollar again, if that was it, to my wife?”
His pathetic eagerness, his sensitive loyalty — even his sudden and solicitous zest in the pious fraud proposed — made between them an irresistible appeal. Dollar had to think; the rooms up-stairs were not empty; but none enshrined a more interesting case than this sounded. On the other hand, he had to be on his guard against a weakness for mere human interest as apart from the esoteric principles of his practise. People might call him an empiric — empiric he was proud to be, but it was and must remain empiricism in one definite direction only. Psychical research was not for him — and the Dysone story had a psychic flavor.
In the end he said quite bluntly:
“I hope you don’t suggest a ghost behind all this, General?”
“I? Lord, no! I don’t believe in ‘em,” cried the warrior, with a nervous laugh.
“Does any member of your household?”
“Not — now.”
“Not now?”
“No. I think I am right in saying that.” But something was worrying him. “Perhaps it is also right,” he continued, with the engaging candor of an overthrown reserve, “and only fair — since I take it you are coming — to tell you that there was a fellow with us who thought he saw things. But it was all the most utter moonshine. He saw brown devils in flowing robes, but what he’d taken before he saw them I can’t tell you! He didn’t stay with me long enough for us to get to know each other. But he wasn’t just a servant, and it was before the poor gardener’s affair. Like so many old soldiers on the shelf, Doctor Dollar, I am writing a book, and I run a secretary of sorts; now it’s Jim Paley, a nephew of ours; and thank God he has more sense.”
“Yet even he gets depressed?”
“He has had cause. If our own kith and kin behaved like one possessed — —” He stopped himself yet again; this time his hand found Dollar’s with a vibrant grip. “You will come, won’t you? I can meet any train on Saturday, or any other day that suits you better. I — for her own sake, doctor — I sometimes feel it might be better if she went away for a time. But you will come and see her for yourself?”
Before he left it was a promise; a harder heart than John Dollar’s would have ended by making it, and putting the new case before all others when the Saturday came. But it was not only his prospective patient whom the crime doctor was now really anxious to see; he felt fascinated in advance by the scene and every person of an indubitable drama, of which at least one tragic act was already over.
There was no question of meeting him at any station; the wealthy mother of a still recent patient had insisted on presenting Doctor Dollar with a fifteen-horse-power Talboys, which he had eventually accepted, and even chosen for himself (with certain expert assistance), as an incalculable contribution to the Cause. Already the car had vastly enlarged his theater of work; and on every errand his heart was lightened and his faith fortified by the wonderful case of the young chauffeur who sat so upright at the wheel beside him. In the beginning he had slouched there like the worst of his kind; it was neither precept nor reprimand which had straightened his back and his look and all about him. He was what John Dollar had always wanted — the unconscious patient whose history none knew — who himself little dreamed that it was all known to the man who treated him almost like a brother.
The boy had been in prison for dishonesty; he was being sedulously trusted, and so taught to trust himself. He had come in March, a sulky and suspicious clod; and now in June he could talk cricket and sixpenny editions from the Hounslow tram-lines to the wide white gate opening into a drive through a Berkshire wood, with a house lurking behind it in a mask of ivy, out of the sun.
But in the drive General Dysone stepped back into the doctor’s life, and, on being directed to the stables, he who had filled it for the last hour drove out of it for the next twenty-four.
“I wanted you to hear something at once from me,” his host whispered under the whispering trees, “lest it should be mentioned and take you aback before the others. We’ve had another little tragedy — not a horror like the last — yet in one way almost worse. My wife shot her own dog dead last night!”
Dollar put a curb upon his parting lips.
“In the night?” he stood still to ask.
“Well, between eleven and twelve.”
“In her own room, or where?”
“Out-of-doors. Don’t ask me how it happened; nobody seems to know, and don’t you know anything if she speaks of it herself.”
His fine face was streaming with perspiration; yet he seemed to have been waiting quietly under the trees, he was not short of breath, and he a big elderly man. Dollar asked no questions at all; they dropped the subject there in the drive. Though the sun was up somewhere out of sight, it was already late in the long June afternoon, and the guest was taken straight to his room.
It was a corner room with one ivy-darkened casement overlooking a shadowy lawn, the other facing a forest of firs and chestnuts on which it was harder to look without an instinctive qualm. But the General seemed to have forgot his tragedies, and for the moment his blue eyes almost brightened the somber scene on which they dwelt with involuntary pride.
“Now don’t you see where Tyrol comes in?” said he. “Put a mountain behind those trees — and there was one the very first time we saw the house! It was only a thunder-cloud, but for all the world it might have been the Dolomites. And it took us back ... we had no other clouds then!”
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 511