by Q. Patrick
But the introduction was never made, for at this point Norris sprang up from his chair with a vigor that made the lugubrious Archer wince:
“Look ’ere! Wot’s to prevent this Lubbock girl from myking a dash for it while we’re jawing ’ere? Let’s leave Burwell for Archer to entertyne, and just pop raownd to Lydy’s Baower and lock the styble door before it’s too lyte. Come on, Archdeacon, I’ve got a premonition, as you might sye.”
The Archdeacon rose pontifically. He hated to admit it, but he felt that Norris was right. In fact, the same thought had just been crossing his own mind.
“All right, Burwell,” he said. “You’d better wait here till things calm down a little. Archer, we shan’t be long. We’ll just make sure of our quarry, and then come back here and lay our plans. Come along, Buss. We still need your help.”
“But wait,” said Burwell plaintively. “‘The will, the will! We will hear Caesar’s will.’”
“This afternoon at the Hall at four o’clock,” said the Archdeacon over his shoulder. And he heard, as he went, an uneasy cough from Archer, and Burwell’s “alas, poor Cynthia!” Within ten minutes the two men had passed through an excited crowd of onlookers to reach Lady’s Bower, and within eleven minutes they had discovered that the cottage was empty!
That same morning had dawned bleakly enough for Lucy Lubbock. Carrie’s presence had been a help in the sense that any living thing would have been a source of comfort and reassurance in that house of death. But beyond this undeniable quality of life Carrie’s resources did not go, and her sympathy and grief-stricken loyalty were such a scatter-brained, incoherent quality that it was almost a relief to Lucy when, early in the morning, the good woman declared that she must go back to the Hall and arrange “the poor dear lady’s things.” Carrie was allowed to slip quietly out, leaving Lucy to sit alone in the window seat downstairs, motionless and stunned as if an excess of grief had been turned, by some merciful alchemy, into obliviousness.
At length she was roused by sounds outside: voices, and the coming and going of automobiles, and the crunching of many footsteps on the gravel path. She got up, looked out the front window, and was startled to see a crowd of hostile, curious people wandering about in the road in front of her own peaceful home. Buss’ broad, blue-clad back at the garden gate was the only reassuring sight in a strange, sinister world, and even he was obviously having none too easy a time with the importunate tribe of reporters and photographers that had gathered here from all over England.
A village boy, catching sight of Lucy’s face at the window, shouted and hurled a stone which crashed through the glass beside her. The cry was taken up on all sides, and it is to the credit of Buss that there were no more stones.
Lucy shuddered and hurried to lock the front door. Then, as if in a daze, she sat down again at the window seat, hidden from the road, and stared out over the garden and meadows behind.
Minutes passed … George Burwell appeared in front of the cottage. The pent-up suspicion of the crowd suddenly concentrated itself and found vent in a rude elbowing and jostling of the newcomer, who had been quickly recognized as the much-talked-of dark stranger. Sounds of hate and scuffle reached Lucy’s ears where she sat. She shivered and buried her face in her hands. As she did so, the rattle of some gravel at the window attracted her attention. She looked out, and saw Christopher. Cautiously and softly she opened the window and leaned out. Christopher glanced fearfully about him with his finger on his lips, but the scuffle in front of the cottage had drawn away all attention, including that of the small boy who had been sent by Buss to watch the back door. Then, with an impish, quizzical expression, but still no word, he whistled softly and pointed to the Morris Cowley which was standing empty by the side of a lane two meadows away.
Lucy smiled a wan, comprehending smile, her first in many hours. Then she nodded and slipped away up the stairs for a hat and veil. In a minute she was letting herself quietly out by the back door, where Christopher stood waiting. He took her arm hurriedly, and together they crossed the garden, crossed the brook, crossed the first meadow, crossed the second, reached the Morris Cowley, and were miles away from Crosby-Stourton by ten-thirty, the hour when Norris and the Archdeacon arrived too late to lock the stable door.
Neither Lucy nor Chritsopher spoke till Crosby-Stourton lay well behind them. Christopher drove carefully, but there was a subdued excitement and elation in his whole bearing. At length Lucy asked him where they were going, and he answered her lightly:
‘Somebody’s wedding, my dear. Don’t ask me whose!” Then he added gravely, “Lucy, do you remember your promise? You said you’d come when I whistled, and you’d give me a chance to show you that I’m anything but a catch in the marriage market. All I asked, you know, was a chance to show you. Well, we’re on our way.”
Lucy sank back and closed her eyes, too tired to utter the questions at her lips, too happy in Christopher’s mere presence to unravel the reasons for their journey.
But Christopher soon roused her from her reverie to ask her a great many trivial, intimate questions which surprised her; questions about the daily life at Lady’s Bower, the clothes she and her mother had worn, the things they had eaten, the hours they had kept, the visits they had made and received. She was surprised, and, at first, perfunctory in her answers. She soon saw, however, that he had a purpose in the things he was asking; for, with every answer she gave him, he paused and frowned a little, as though testing out her words in relation to some hidden theory of his own. And Lucy, stormtossed and exhausted, allowed herself the grateful luxury of answering as best she could, and never for a minute questioning his purpose.
Nor did he stop with Lady’s Bower. He asked her about the old days when the four Lubbocks had lived together at the Hall, while Mrs. Lubbock had been nursing his grandmother, and Lucy had been little more than a child. He asked her about her sisters, their relations to each other and to herself, the relations of all of them to the other servants at the Hall and to his mother. Finally, he asked her many questions about her own mother, and at length, with a sigh of relief, he leaned back in his seat and was silent, while meadows and villages fell away into the distance as they passed.
When at last they drove across the Clifton Suspension Bridge, a graceful span rising high and majestic above the winding Avon, he turned again to Lucy.
“Do you remember Dr. Crampton?” he asked her as he slowed down for the staid traffic of Clifton and the interminable “crocodiles” of schoolgirls which they met at every corner.
“Yes, I ought to. He taught me the first things I ever learned about nursing.”
“And me about doctoring,” said Christopher. “Well, he lives here in Clifton now, you know. Came here when he retired from his Crosby-Stourton practice two years ago.”
“Yes,” said Lucy thoughtfully, “so I heard. But we aren’t going to see him, are we? I don’t see what he has to do with—with the present and our troubles.”
“The present has roots in the past,” said Christopher simply, and was silent.
They drove on through the residential town of Clifton to Victoria Park, the happy hunting ground of gouty Indian Colonels, arthritic widows and aged doctors such as Harold Crampton, who, until two years before, had played the part of doctor, guide, philosopher and friend to young and old in Crosby-Stourton.
The Morris Cowley drew up in front of a grey stone house facing the square, and Christopher was out of the car in a second, offering his hand to Lucy as she stepped down onto the pavement.
“Come on, Lucy,” he said, and his voice was deeply serious. “This is Dr. Crampton’s house—and when we’ve heard all that he has to say—it will be time for you to decide my fate.”
XI
“Yes, Dr. Crampton is in his Consulting Room, but I don’t know if he can see you just now….” The trim little housemaid looked at Christopher and Lucy with the condescending eyes of one who is used to turning away princes and potentates daily.
“Have yo
u an appointment? … No … then I’m afraid … you see there are several patients waiting….”
“Perhaps if you would give him my card and say it’s urgent—I think he’ll see me.” The maid took his card with obvious reluctance.
“Very well, sir—if you will kindly wait.” The voice was polite but uncompromising.
She returned in the twinkling of an eye—breathless with apologetic embarrassment.
“Why, yes,” she said, now smiling and humble, “Dr. Crampton will be dee-lighted to see you. I’m sorry, but I didn’t know you were such an old friend of the doctor’s. Will you please wait in the study? He won’t be a moment. You wouldn’t want to go in with the patients, would you?” She added this in a confidential whisper as though she were speaking of some strange and unpredictable species of wild animal.
Christopher and Lucy had not waited more than four minutes in Dr. Crampton’s comfortably upholstered study before the door was thrown open and a brisk, cheerful little old man literally ran into the room with a happy smile of welcome. He gave the impression of an amiable robin which had just discovered a particularly tasty worm.
“My dear Christopher, this is indeed a pleasure—and Lucy Lubbock too—my dear child! I’m delighted, delighted—you’ll stay awhile, of course….” As he chirped out these little staccato phrases of welcome, he seized their hands in turn and worked them up and down like a pump handle.
“Alice,” he called, and the trim little housemaid came bustling in, “I won’t see any more patients today. Send ’em away—right away—and say I’m called off on a—let’s see—on an important consultation. Oh, Alice, and bring in the sherry and three glasses—here’s an old friend of mine—two old friends—here’s the cellar key—and, Alice—some biscuits—”
Hopping around from one to the other with surprising agility, the little doctor lit an Abdullah cigarette for Lucy and forced an enormous Corona-Corona on Christopher. He looked so happy and cheerful over his activities that it was obvious to his young guests that he had heard nothing of the tragedies which had caused their visit. If he felt any surprise at seeing the son of Sir Howard Crosby arriving at his house with the daughter of a servant, he kept it to himself. Or, perhaps, being a neurologist, and therefore accustomed to the unaccountable vagaries of the human race, he did not give it a second thought. In any case, his welcome to his two old friends from Crosby-Stourton could not have been warmer or more sincere.
The maid brought in a decanter and three glasses. As Dr. Crampton poured out the clear amber liquid and circulated the biscuits, he talked eagerly to his visitors, and his small bird-like eyes darted from one to the other with a happy twinkle.
“Well, Christopher, I hear you’re up at Guy’s now. Good work, my boy! Should call you Dr. Crosby, I suppose! Well, well, God bless my soul, it seems only yesterday that you were a little red-headed boy sneaking into my office in Crosby-Stourton in the vain hopes of catching a glimpse of a guinea pig’s insides or the viscera of a frog! Quite the scientist, you were, even at that tender age!…. And you, Lucy, my dear—a full-fledged nurse. Good, good. I could use you—I could use you—could give you lots of work here. A cool, capable girl like you”
He rattled pleasantly on, and if his trained eyes noticed the anxiety and strain on their pale young faces, he carefully avoided making any reference to it. Not without good reason had Dr. Crampton become one of the leading mental specialists of his day.
“Weil, well,” he said at length, seeing Christopher’s eyes wander appraisingly round the well-furnished room, “I suppose you are wondering how I attained to all this magnificence after my humble practice in Crosby-Stourton—” he chuckled gleefully. In spite of the fact that the conversation appeared to have no bearing whatsoever on the recent events in the village, Lucy noticed with some astonishment that Christopher was not only listening with almost preternatural interest, but was obviously drawing Dr. Crampton on to talk more about himself.
“It happened this way, my boy,” continued the neurologist with egotistical enjoyment, “you remember the book I was writing when I was with you—that voluble and voluminous tome entitled Newer Aspects of Neurology—well, it came out, finally—and actually made quite a hit, especially in America! No one was more surprised than yours truly, and I almost became one of my own patients when they asked me to go out there and lecture at their best medical schools—Harvard, Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins. It was a stunner—at my age and weight, as they say across the Herring Pond—but I went, and I learnt a lot too….” Christopher was listening eagerly.
And well he might listen, for Dr. Harold Crampton was one of the many interesting anomalies of the medical profession. He had spent the thirty most active years of his career rusticating (but not rusting) at Crosby-Stourton—outwardly an able and kindly country practitioner, but inwardly an ardent scientific theorist. His bent had always been towards neurology and the alleviation of mental suffering, and gradually he had accumulated enough. knowledge and clinical data for the book which he had just mentioned to Christopher. At the age of sixty he had been a busy, capable man, paying a round of calls in the morning, attending to hospital patients in the afternoon, with evening surgery hours from six to seven-thirty. A country doctor, unhonored and unsung. Now, at sixty-two, since the publication of his book and some rather startling articles in the British Medical Journal, he bid fair to become one of the leading neurologists of his day, and patients were referred to him from all over creation. By some he was considered a harmless quack, to others he was an amiable charlatan, but to all he was important, and the patients kept pouring in. There were even whispers of a knighthood, and the doors of Harley Street were open at his bidding—truly a remarkable achievement (as he himself put it) “at his age and weight!”
“Why, yes,” he continued happily, pleased by Christopher’s very obvious interest, “I gave lectures at the best Universities out there, and I entitled the series, ‘Neurotics are Human Beings.’ I flatter myself they made quite a hit….” The bright, bird-like eyes twinkled humorously. “You see, my pet theories happen to fit in pretty well with theirs, and that’s always a good foundation. Let me fill up your glass, my boy.”
“I’d very much like to hear something of those theories of yours,” said Christopher, as he puffed valiantly at the Corona-Corona.
“Well,” the little doctor continued, “it’s not so easy to give them to you in a nutshell, but they are all founded on the idea that a mental case, especially in the earlier stages, must never be treated as an invalid, and the doctor must never be a doctor—just a valued friend. We can do a lot for them, of course, but we mustn’t let them know we are doing it. In other words, neurotics are human beings, first and foremost. Take the question of drugs, for example—no mental case should ever know that he is taking medicine or drugs of any kind. If he knows he is ill, the battle is as good as lost in most instances. I use drugs, of course—far be it from me to be one of these therapeutic nihilists—but I have contrived a thousand ingenious little ways to give them without the patient’s knowledge. Why—with the cooperation of the family or friends, one can get any amount of medication into a patient without his even knowing that he is being treated. It’s a fascinating game—as
Habermehl was saying the other day—”
“Habermehl!” interrupted Christopher, “I saw him the day before yesterday, I was—”
“You saw Habermehl!” the little doctor was visibly impressed. “The greatest brain specialist in the world, in my humble opinion. Why don’t you take up neurology, my boy, and go in with him? Couldn’t do better. He’s been showing a very flattering interest in my theories, especially my theory on drugs—very flattering—”
“Let me get this straight,” said Christopher with undiminished enthusiasm. “I have a particular reason for asking. You believe in giving drugs and medicine without the patient’s knowledge. Is that right?” The neurologist nodded.
“Well, that’s only a very small part of a big scheme—but, so
far, so good….”
“All right. Now let’s take hyoscine, for example. That’s used frequently in mental cases, isn’t it?” The neurologist nodded again. “Could you give that—or, say, atropine—without the patient’s knowledge?”
“Why, yes, indeed—that’s a good case in point, my boy. Hyoscine is very easily given without the knowledge of the patient. Easier than a great many others, in fact, as the therapeutic dose is almost infinitesimal. One-sixtieth of a grain at the very most. A valuable drug too—I use it constantly, and so does Habermehl, I believe. It works like a charm in the ordinary anxiety neurosis, functional neurosis, delirium tremens and to control the palsy in the Parkinsonian syndrome. The relief is only symptomatic, of course, and doesn’t touch the real root of the trouble, but it means a lot to those poor devils—”
“But—” interrupted Christopher, “if you leave the administration of hyoscine to the patient’s family—and, of course, you can’t always be at hand to supervise it—isn’t there always the danger that someone might make the dose just a little bit too strong—intentionally or otherwise. It’s terribly poisonous, as you know, and—well, there’s the possibility not only of criminal negligence, but also of criminal intentions—”
“Pooh, pooh! my dear Christopher, you are being quite unnecessarily dramatic—of course, one gives minute instructions and the utmost care has to be exercised. Of course, of course. Here, I’ll make you a present of my book—read it at your leisure—you’ll find it all in Chapter 14, see—‘The Rôle of Drugs in Neurology.’ I grant you that criminal negligence is always possible. One runs across it all the time. But—criminal intentions—well, you seldom have to cope with that situation outside of the penny dreadfuls and detective stories. People haven’t the brains—haven’t the knowledge—haven’t the courage to fool around with ‘Doctor’s Orders’….”