It was more than a footfall; there was a following swish of some long garment trailing through the wet. It all came near; it all stopped dead. Dollar had nodded heavily as if in sleep; had jerked his head up higher; seemed to be dropping off again in greater comfort.
The footfalls and the swish came on like thunder now. But now his eyelids were only drooping like the brim above them; in the broad light of their abnormal perceptivity, it was as if his own eyes threw a dreadful halo round the figure they beheld. It was a swaddled figure, creeping into monstrosity, crouching early for its spring. It had draped arms extended, with some cloth or band that looped and tightened at each stride: on the rounded shoulders bobbed the craning head and darkened face of General Dysone.
In his last stride he swerved, as if to get as much behind the chair as its position under the tree permitted. The cloth clapped as it came taut over Dollar’s head, but was not actually round his neck when he ducked and turned, and hit out and up with all his might. He felt the rasp of a fifteen-hours’ beard, heard the click of teeth; the lawn quaked, and white robes settled upon a senseless heap, as the plumage on a murdered pigeon.
Dollar knelt over him and felt his pulse, held an electric lamp to eyes that opened, and quickly something else to the dilated nostrils.
“O Jim!” shuddered a voice close at hand. It was shrill yet broken, a cry of horror, but like no voice he knew.
He jumped up to face the General’s wife.
“It’s not Jim, Mrs. Dysone. It’s I — Dollar. He’ll soon be all right!”
“Captain — Dollar?”
“No — doctor, nowadays — he called me down as one himself. And now I’ve come back on my own responsibility, and — put him under chloroform; but I haven’t given him much; for God’s sake let us speak plainly while we can!”
She was on her knees, proving his words without uttering one. Still kneeling speechless, she leaned back while he continued: “You know what he is as well as I do, Mrs. Dysone; you may thank God a doctor has found him out before the police! Monomania is not their business — but neither are you the one to cope with it. You have shielded your husband as only a woman will shield a man; now you must let him come to me.”
His confidence was taking some effect; but she ignored the hands that would have helped her to her feet; and her own were locked in front of her, but not in supplication.
“And what can any of you do for him,” she cried fiercely— “except take him away from me?”
“I will only answer for myself. I would control him as you can not, and I would teach him to control himself if man under God can do it. I am a criminal alienist, Mrs. Dysone, as your husband knew before he came to consult me on elaborate pretenses into which we needn’t go. He trusted me enough to ask me down here; in my opinion, he was feeling his way to greater trust, in the teeth of his terrible obsession, but last night he said more than he meant to say, so to-day he wouldn’t say a word. I only guessed his secret this morning — when you guessed I had! It would be safe with me against the world. But how can I take the responsibility of keeping it if he remains at large as he is now?”
“You can not,” said Mrs. Dysone. “I am the only one.”
Her tone was dreamy and yet hard and fatalistic; the arms in the wide dressing-gown sleeves were still tightly locked. Something brought Dollar down again beside the senseless man, bending over him in keen alarm.
“He’ll be himself again directly — quite himself, I shouldn’t wonder! He may have forgot what has happened; he mustn’t find me here to remind him. Something he will have to know, and you are the one to break it to him, and then to persuade him to come to me. But you won’t find that so easy, Mrs. Dysone, if he sees how I tricked him. He had much better think it was your nephew. My motor’s in the lane behind these trees; let him think I never went away at all, that we connived and I am holding myself there at your disposal. It would be true — wouldn’t it — after this? I’ll wait night and day until I know!”
“Doctor Dollar,” said Mrs. Dysone, when she had risen without aid and set him to the trees, “you may or may not know the worst about my poor husband, but you shall know it now about me. I wish you to take this — and keep it! You have had two escapes to-night.”
She bared the wrist from which the smallest of revolvers dangled; he felt it in the darkness — and left it dangling.
“I heard you had one. He told me. And I thought you carried it for your own protection!” cried Dollar, seeing into the woman at last.
“No. It was not for that” — and he knew that she was smiling through her tears. “I did save his life — when my poor dog saved Jim’s — but I carried this to save the secret I am going to trust to you!”
Dollar would only take her hand. “You wouldn’t have shot me, or any man,” he assured her. “But,” he added to himself among the trees, “what a fool I was to forget that they never killed women!”
It turned almost cold beside the motor in the lane; the doctor gave his boy a little brandy, and together they tramped up and down, talking sport and fiction by the small hour together. The stars slipped out of the sky, the birds began, and the same cynic shouted “Pretty, pretty, pretty!” at the top of its strong contralto. At long last there came that other sound for which Dollar had never ceased listening. And he turned back into the haunted wood with Jim Paley.
The poor nephew — still stunned calm — was as painfully articulate as a young bereaved husband. He spoke of General Dysone as of a man already dead, in the gentlest of past tenses. He was dead enough to the boy. There had been an appalling confession — made as coolly, it appeared, as Paley repeated it.
“He thought I knocked him down, and I had to let him think so! Aunt Essie insisted; she is a wonder, after all! It made him tell me things I simply can’t believe.... Yet he showed me a rope just like it — meant for me!”
“Do you mean just like the one that — hanged the gardener?”
“Yes. He did it, so he swears ... afterward. He’ll tell you himself — he wants to tell you. He says he first ... I can’t put my tongue to it!” The lapse into the present tense had made him human.
“Like the Thugs?”
“Yes — like that sect of fiendish fanatics who went about strangling everybody they met! They were what his book was about. How did you know?”
“That’s Bhowanee, their goddess, on top of his bureau, and he has Sleeman and all the other awful literature locked up underneath. As a study for a life of sudden idleness, in the depths of the country, it was enough to bring on temporary insanity. And the strong man gone wrong goes and does what the rest of us only get on our nerves!”
Dollar felt his biceps clutched and clawed, and the two stood still under more irony in a gay contralto.
“Temporary, did you say? Only temporary?” the boy was faltering.
“I hope so, honestly. You see, it was just on that one point ... and even there ... I believe he did want his wife out of the way, and for her own sake, too!” said Dollar, with a sympathetic tremor of his own.
“But do you know what he’s saying? He means to tell the whole world now, and let them hang him, and serve him right — he says! And he’s as sane as we are now — only he might have been through a Turkish bath!”
“More signs!” cried Dollar, looking up at the brightening sky. “But we won’t allow that. It would undo nothing and he has made all the reparation.
“ ... Come, Paley! I want to take him back with me in the car. It’s broad daylight.”
THE DOCTOR’S ASSISTANT
The doctor was coping with his Sunday meal when the telephone went off in the next room. On his ears the imperious summons never fell without a thrill; in his sight, the tulip-shaped receiver became a live thing trumpeting for help; and he would answer the call himself, at any hour of the day or night. It was necessary at night, with the Bartons asleep in the basement like a family in a vault, but it was just the same when they were all on duty, as at the present moment. Back went
the Cromwellian chair, at the head of the bare and solitary trestle table. An excited personage, who might have been just outside the window, was expeditiously appeased in monosyllables. And Dollar returned with an appetite to what had been set before him.
“Send Bobby round to the garage, Barton, to order the car at once. He can tell Albert I shall be ready as soon as he is, but to take his headlights and fill up with petrol.” This was repeated with paternal severity in the wings. “Now, Barton, my little red road-book, and see if you can find Pax Monktons in the wilds of Surrey. It can’t be more than a hamlet. Try the Cobham country if it’s not in the index.”
This took longer — took a survey map and two pairs of eyes before Pax Monktons Chase was discovered in microscopic print, and the light green peppered with dots signifying timber three hundred feet above sea-level.
“Never heard of it in my life before,” said Dollar, as he laced brown shoes before his coffee. “Or of the man either, or his double-barreled name for that matter. You might see if there’s a Dale-Bulmer in Who’s Who.”
But again Barton was unsuccessful; and here his services ended, though through no fault of his own, or failure of unselfish zeal for one of those more than probable adventures which made him hate the chauffeur who was always in them, and curse the duties that kept other people out.
“Will you take your flask, sir?”
“Lord, no! I’m not going to the North Pole.”
“Or your — or one of those revolvers, sir?”
“What on earth for? Besides, they’re not mine; they ought to be in the Black Museum at Scotland Yard.” The nucleus of a branch exhibition was forming itself in Welbeck Street. “Don’t you give way to nerves, Barton! I’m only going down to see a man who seems anxious to see me, but I shouldn’t be going to him if we had anybody up-stairs. You three make an afternoon of it somewhere; never mind if I’m back first; go out and enjoy yourselves.”
And he was off as if on a deliberate jaunt; but an involuntary chuckle in the voice over the telephone, the hint of a surprise, the possibility of a trick, made lively thinking after the doldrums of the dog-days; and the fine September afternoon seemed expressly ordered for motorists with time upon their hands. Dollar had only been thinking so when the call came through, to supply just the object which gives a run its zest, and nothing else mattered in the least. However frivolous the end and errand, the means and the meantime were so much to the good on such a day.
It was warm, yet delightfully keen at thirty miles an hour; clear as crystal within rifle-shot, and deliciously hazy in the distance; the bronze upon the trees seldom warming to a premature red, often lapsing into the liquid greens of midsummer; but all the way an autumnal smear of silver in the sunlight. Dollar divided his mind between a sensuous savoring of the heavenly country, and more or less romantic speculations on the case in store. Some people’s notions of a crime doctor’s functions were so much wider even than his own; ten months out of the twelve, he could not have afforded to come so far afield without a distastefully definite foreword about fees.
This afternoon he was prepared to do almost anything for next to nothing: and after twenty sedentary miles he was on his legs as often as not in the next two or three, asking his way at likely lodges, or from strolling bands of shaven yokels, all Sunday collars and cigarettes.
“Pax Monktons Chase?” at last said one who seemed to have heard the name before. “Straight as ever you can go, and the first lodge on the left. But there’s no one there.”
“No one there!” echoed Dollar. “Do you mean the place is empty?”
“I believe there’s workmen there on week-days, but you won’t find anybody now, unless the chap that’s bought it’s motored over.”
“Isn’t he living there, then?”
“Not yet; there’s alterations being made; and I don’t know where he does live, or anything at all about him, except that he motors over sometimes on a Sunday.”
Dollar felt dashed until he remembered to appreciate one of the few possibilities for which he had not come quite prepared. There was some promise in a surprise thus early and so complete. But it made Pax Monktons Chase fall a little flat when found. It robbed the dreary lodge of all its value as an eye-opener; it made the chase itself look vast and desolate for nothing, and a noble pile of seasoned stone fling but drab turrets and ineffective battlements against a silver sky, which the sun had ceased to polish in the last tortuous mile.
It was all the pleasanter to find a ruddy, genial, bearded face, mounted on a spotted tie that went twice round a nineteen-inch neck, smiling a welcome under the entrance arch. The man introduced himself as Dale-Bulmer, bolting a mouthful made for rolling on the tongue. Dollar was much taken with the humor and simplicity of his address and bearing. A smart chauffeur waited with a plutocratic car in the sweep of the drive. And there was no third sign of life about the place.
“Awfully good of you to come,” said Dale-Bulmer, with apologetic warmth. “I thought you might, from what I’d heard of you, and you seemed to jump at it when I rang you up. I haven’t known anybody take so kindly to a trip since I left the bush.”
“An Australian?” asked the doctor, with all a doctor’s readiness to make talk; but he was more curious than ever to learn the secret of his summons.
“Yes! I come from that enlightened land, where Labor runs the show and Women have the Vote. In fact,” the big man added, with the fat chuckle heard over the telephone, “that’s precisely why I have come from Australia — as I was fool enough to say the other night at a meeting in these parts. But I seem to have jumped out of the frying-pan into the fire.”
There was no sign of life
“I’m sorry to hear that,” observed Dollar, with polite forbearance.
“Well, not quite into the fire, as it happens,” said Dale-Bulmer, chuckling again in his noble neck. “Come inside, and you’ll see.” He led the way into a broad central corridor, choked with ladders and builders’ tools, pipes and tubing, curtain-rods, and a stack of boards; but a model of order compared with the chaos visible through an open door at which he paused. Here were more bare joists than navigable floor, and a forest of scaffolding therefrom to the crisscrossed plaster ceiling. “Look you here!” said the man from Australia, and pointed to a heap of shavings on a remnant of the floor.
“The British workman’s such a careless dog,” sighed Dollar, shaking a sententious head, for a box of vestas had been spilt about the place.
“British workman be hanged!” cried the other bluntly. “The British workman’s got a job here that will keep him in beer and betting-money till Christmas, and as much longer as he can spin it out. This is the little game of another sporting type — the British lady burning for the vote!”
“So that’s it! But are you sure?” asked Dollar, though he wanted to ask if that was all.
“Certain. I met a flaming brace of ‘em on bicycles, just outside my boundary. This is what I was to get for speaking out about them the other night.”
“I don’t see their literature, and I can’t smell their paraffin.”
“It’s in that bottle on the mantelpiece. Something must have scared them at the last moment — all but one sportswoman.”
“What about her?”
“I’ve got her,” said Dale-Bulmer, with sepulchral excitement.
“Got her prisoner?”
“I should hope so! Why, I caught her on the very point of setting fire to that very heap of shavings — and me without a hose-pipe in the house! Those are her matches on the floor; she wasn’t going to turn tail till she’d done her job — and didn’t till I nearly trod on it! You could hardly expect me to bow her out of the front door after that!”
Dollar could only stare into the jovial face wreathed in rubicund grins, but no longer free from a certain serio-comic compunction and concern.
“But, my dear sir — —”
“Don’t pitch into me!” pleaded Dale-Bulmer, pathetically. “I had to do something; if I hadn’
t thought of you, and one or two things I’ve heard about you, doctor, I should only have telephoned to the police; and what’s the good of putting these young women in the jug, to be poured out again within a week? I heard you ran a nursing-home for criminals, worth all the prisons in the world.”
“But I don’t run people into it,” said the doctor; “they’ve got to come in of their own free will. What have you done with this young woman?”
“I? Nothing; it’s her own doing entirely. She chose her cover — I only turned the key.”
“You’ve locked her up in some room?”
“Yes — more or less — rather more.”
And Dale-Bulmer laughed a rather nervous, guilty laugh.
“Up-stairs somewhere?”
“Yes — look you here! She was picking up those matches when I spotted her from this door, and out she streaked through that one over there. Come and have a look at her line of country, doctor.”
It led into an anteroom or inner hall, or the well of some staircase still to come, with a lashed ladder towering in its midst, but not quite reaching a skeleton landing of yawning joists. Dale-Bulmer gazed aloft, wagging a horizontal beard.
“Surely she didn’t go up there?” said Dollar.
“Like a lamplighter, doctor! I went the way we’ll both go now, if it’s all the same to you.”
A fine forked staircase bore them from the lower corridor to its counterpart above. And here the leader trod gently, a finger laid across his lips.
“That’s the room,” he whispered, pointing to a shut door in a side passage. “I — I almost think I’ll leave her to you, doctor. It’s not locked — not the door.”
“I thought she was your prisoner?”
“Yes — but you’ll see where she’s hidden herself. I did turn that key, doctor, but that’s all I did. Still, I think I’d rather you let her out.”
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 513