The House of Dr. Edwardes

by Francis Beeding

  II

  At that instant he caught sight of Constance. For just an instant he paused, and she was aware of his eyes looking deeply for a moment into her own. Then he held out his hand.

  “I am sorry,” he said simply. “This is hardly a good beginning.”

  “You are Doctor Murchison, of course,” she answered.

  “And you are Doctor Sedgwick,” he replied.

  He fell into step by her side, and they began to descend the hill together.

  “I am glad you have come,” he went on. “I may hope now to share my responsibility.”

  It was kindly said. She felt grateful to the man who welcomed her, almost on equal terms, as a colleague, and looking at him in the light of his observations, she was disposed to be less critical than usual. Not that she had anything to criticize. The man was good looking, and he carried himself sufficiently well to obliterate the effect of the clothes he wore. She could not say that, even on that mountain side, his frock coat made him ridiculous or definitely out of place. He moved easily, and with a curious precision. The eyes, which she had seen very directly for a moment, were observant, but they were the eyes of a man who, in his time, had visions. His features were very regular, in fact, almost inhumanly faultless; and his hair was dark, with a tendency to curl which apparently he helped it to resist.

  He surprised her in the course of her covert inspection just as she was noting again the strip of plaster over his right eye.

  “You have had an accident?” she said, as though to justify her interest in his appearance.

  “Why, of course,” he answered, in some surprise. “Is it possible you don’t know what has happened?”

  “I have only just arrived.”

  “But the chauffeur,” he began.

  “He was not very talkative.”

  “But you passed the place where it happened.”

  His eyes which had been looking at her with curiosity suddenly contracted.

  “Don’t you remember,” he added, “down there in the Valley—the Gorge du Diable?”

  “Yes. I remember the Gorge.”

  “I was bringing a patient out from England. He took me by surprise and killed one of the keepers—Jules, poor fellow, who has just been laid to rest this afternoon. I had to handle him at last myself.”

  The young doctor appeared to be much moved by his memory of the scene. She saw that he was trembling, and that his hands were tightly shut.

  “How perfectly dreadful,” she said, feeling at once that her words were curiously stilted.

  “It was all over in a minute,” he assured her.

  Then with an effort, as though he were trying hard to recover control of his nerves, and to be normal again, he added almost jauntily:

  “I laid him out with a spanner.”

  Constance gave a little cry of horror, and Doctor Murchison ran on hastily.

  “It was the only thing to do,” he said. “Luckily the man was not severely hurt—just a slight concussion. But I shall have to be specially careful of him in future.”

  He looked at her a moment, as though to see how she was taking it.

  “I told you it was a bad beginning,” he said.

  They were still walking down the hill, and Constance noted that the villagers along the road drew well aside, affecting for the most part not to notice them at all as they passed.

  “You will understand my distress,” continued the doctor, almost as though he were trying to account for his previous emotion.

  “Why, of course,” she replied, feeling now that she had herself been rather callous.

  “You see,” he went on eagerly, “this is my first real chance, and I was naturally very anxious that everything should go well from the start. And then this happens.”

  She felt herself suddenly warm to the young man. He was, it seemed, in the same position as herself. This was also his start in life.

  “Anything I can do,” she murmured.

  For a while they were silent. They had left the last of the villagers behind them on the road, and Constance felt strangely relieved to be rid of them. No one had saluted them, and their aloofness, obviously not mere indifference, for she was conscious all the while of their furtive interest, had begun to get on her nerves.

  She would, however, have made no comment on their behavior, if it had not been for her encounter—for it seemed almost like an encounter, though no word was spoken—with the woman who during the ceremony by the graveside had drawn her child away from contact with the doctor. This woman had preceded them down the hillside and had already reached the door of her house, a wretched structure of wood. As they passed it she raised her head and looked at Constance with something like an appeal in her eyes. Constance met them steadily, but the woman’s eyes did not fall as she had expected. They continued to stare at her. Then, all at once, the poor creature shook her head violently two or three times, as though reproving a naughty child from a distance. Constance passed on, but as she walked down the road, she felt that the appealing eyes still followed her, so that it needed a distinct effort of self-control to prevent her turning round.

  “What curious people these are,” she said almost involuntarily. “They seem to be—how shall I put it—hostile.”

  “Oh, the villagers,” replied Doctor Murchison, indifferently. “That, after all, is only natural. You must remember that the people in these remote villages are still in the Middle Ages. They believe even now in witchcraft and are full of curious superstitions. They don’t like us, or Doctor Edwardes for that matter. They are afraid of Château Landry and of our patients there, and nothing would induce any one of them to go near it after dark. They are convinced that mad people are possessed by devils. Indeed, Doctor Edwardes told me that when he first began his work here the village priest called on him to offer his services as an exorcist.”

  “But that hardly explains their hostility to us,” replied Constance. “You can’t describe them as friendly, can you?”

  Doctor Murchison smiled.

  “No,” he answered. “They are, as you say, hostile, but I find it only natural. They cannot understand the great work Doctor Edwardes is doing in Château Landry. To them it is full of terrors, and we, who live there, are suspected of I don’t know what—commerce with the Evil One at the very least. Then, of course, this last affair has made a very bad impression. The man who was killed was a native of the village—very popular in spite of his being a servant of Doctor Edwardes. I am told that he used to laugh at the misgivings of his friends, who said no good would come of his service at the castle. I suppose they regard his death as a kind of judgment.”

  He turned to her with an engaging smile.

  “You see we shall have to stand together,” he concluded. “We are not likely to make many friends outside.”

  III

  By this time they had reached the car in which Constance had traveled from Thonon. They entered it, and, turning to the right just short, of the village, soon found themselves climbing a steep road which ran in a series of zigzags up the mountain side, first through upland meadows of short, unbelievably green grass starred with flowers, and then, as they mounted higher, through the first outposts of the fir trees, which in serried ranks marched up to meet the naked rock at the summit of all. And as they slipped from the afternoon sunlight into the shadow of the forest, Constance felt suddenly an emotion to which she could give no name or cause. It seemed as though she entered into another world, a world of clean air and sweetest fragrance, shut in by mountain tops of stone which she knew (and the knowledge was in itself a pang of swift delight) would soon turn orange and rose till they faded to somber gold and a violet shadow.

  She turned impulsively to the doctor at her side, who, as though he had followed and shared the feeling which possessed her, pointed silently ahead to where the road, which had been running through a narrow gash in the hillside, turned abruptly and disclosed a tiny mountain valley, an offshoot of the one by which they had come.

/>   Constance caught her breath, for, indeed, it was beautiful. Before her ran the road, climbing once more in two loops towards a large mound on which stood an antique castle. Battered and harsh, but set in the shadow of the fir trees, it lost in those surroundings all fierce suggestions, and stood as a pathetic reminder of the age of chivalry. Here on the smooth grass, on which the road lay coiled like the white neck of a swan, “ladies dead and lovely knights” had walked and quarreled and loved. Here had lived the barons of Château Landry since the end of the tenth century—Geoffrey of the Arrow, who had leapt second on the walls of Jerusalem, and who had died in the moment of victory; Fulk the Black, who had fought at Zara, and lay buried within the shadow of Santa Sofia; Cosimo, Condottiere of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, and a hundred others. They had learned the handling of weapons, the rude art of war on that upland meadow. Here had passed Jacques de Landry, the friend of Molière, here the pale Aminte, mistress of Louis XIV. Here, finally, another Geoffrey, last of his race, had seen the smoke curling from the roof as he was dragged by his own peasants to the guillotine at Chambéry.

  All this and more Doctor Murchison told her as they sat there in the car, which had stopped at his orders, and looked at the place which was to be her home for a time indefinite.

  The castle had been carefully restored by a rich banker in the late nineties, who had died suddenly, and, after many vicissitudes, it had been bought by Doctor Edwardes and converted to its present purpose. But he had been careful to change in no respect its essential form and character. The central donjon still stood isolated in the midst of it, reached only by a drawbridge. The drawbridge led to a balcony, which surrounded an inner stone court of the early sixteenth century, with a famous winding stair up which a man might ride a horse.

  She wondered at first why anyone had thought of building a castle in that far corner of the mountains. But she ceased to wonder when she saw the sheer walls of rock which led up on each side to the naked hilltops, only just too low to escape perpetual snow. The castle must have been impregnable, the only way in being the narrow cleft through which the road ran like an arrow aimed at the heart of it. Doubtless that way had once been barred in the old days by some form of fortified gate or barbican. Today a whitepainted gate and a strong fence of steel wire, twenty feet high and too closely meshed for climbing, blocked the entrance to the castle and the grounds surrounding it. There was a little lodge by the white gate, from which issued an elderly man in the dark green uniform or livery worn by all the male servants of Doctor Edwardes’ establishment. The steel fence went right and left till it was lost among the pine trees and cemented into the naked rock.

  The gate was always kept closed and could only be opened by a special electrical contrivance controlled from the lodge and from the desk in the study of Doctor Edwardes in the castle.

  All this Doctor Murchison explained as the car stood stationary before the gate. Then, just as he was about to give the word to move forward again, Constance put out a hand and stopped him.

  “No,” she said, “this is all so beautiful that I would like to walk on alone, if you don’t mind. I won’t be more than half-an-hour.”

  Doctor Murchison at once assented, and he drove on, leaving Constance standing by the white gate. She turned her back on the castle and walked a few steps away from it down the road, drawn by the view of the little valley with its village and the distant mountain peaks beyond, whose names she did not yet know. She stood there for some minutes, and was about to turn round and pass through the gate, when she became aware of footsteps and heavy breathing. She paused, and, at that moment, round the corner of the road came a peasant woman, her face red from the effort of climbing the slope.

  It was the woman who had stared at Constance a short time before from the door of her house in the village. On catching sight of Constance by the gate she stopped, and came to a halt a yard away, breathing heavily, with two broad hands pressed to her laboring heart.

  “Qu’est-ce que vous voulez?” said Constance, but the woman had no breath to speak. She stood in the road, shaking her head, as she had done in the village, and pointing, as she did so, to the castle.

  Constance turned and looked in the direction indicated, but saw nothing except the building itself, mellow with age and with the light of the dying day.

  Then suddenly the woman began to speak, a thick harsh patois, and Constance, who found ordinary French difficult enough to follow, could not understand one word in ten. The creature was immensely in earnest and she seemed afraid. That much Constance perceived.

  “What is it you want?” said Constance, feeling very helpless. “Is any one ill or in need of help?”

  The woman shook her head and broke out again into vehement observations.

  “Je ne comprends pas,” said Constance. “Je vais chercher le gardien ou le médecin.”

  This seemed greatly to trouble the woman. She became even more voluble and difficult to follow.

  “No, no,” she said with an increasing vehemence. “I will speak to you alone.”

  Then followed a further exhortation of which Constance caught only a sentence here and there.

  “It is for your good, mademoiselle. Do not go in, I implore you. They told me that only last night the stone was red again.”

  “I do not understand,” repeated Constance, as completely baffled by the few words she could catch as by the stream of syllables which conveyed nothing to her whatever.

  “The stone, the white stone, the old white stone,” repeated the woman. “It was red—rouge du sang I tell you, all streaked and spattered.”

  Constance gave a little gesture of despair. She assumed that someone must be ill or in need of something, and she struggled to convey to the woman that, if she really needed anything, she had better come up with her to the castle.

  On this the woman stared at her, suddenly silent, and now, as it seemed, suspicious. Then abruptly, without another word, she turned on her heel and shuffled off down the road.

  Constance watched her a moment or two, then she herself turned and, passing through the white gate, made her way up towards the castle.

  The light had been rapidly fading during her interview with the woman at the gate. The rocks above the castle had gone gray; the grass was no longer green; and the castle itself was a black shadow that squatted in the path.

  Chapter Three

  I

  It was nine o’clock next morning when Constance awoke.

  Doctor Murchison had told her to be in no hurry to join him, but to take all the rest she needed after her journey.

  She spent her time, as she dressed, by the open window, in the cool mountain air, collecting her thoughts for the professional interview which she was shortly to have with her chief. She must try to be ready and clear and efficient, making a good impression from the start.

  She prided herself, above all, on being clear. It was her habit to put her thoughts, as she termed it, into boxes—one box for each thought or subject. This metaphor had been to her from childhood the greatest comfort and assistance. She imagined her mind as a large room containing rows and rows of boxes all neatly ordered, and each of them marked with an appropriate label; and, as she moved forward in time, the boxes which contained her past grew smaller. There was a box for her brother, but that box was seldom opened now, for he had been killed on the Somme. Already it was smaller than the others. There were many boxes for her work and boxes for her various friends. The contents of some of the latter, if opened, might perhaps have startled those to whom they were allotted. For her thoughts during the day she kept a large general box into which they were hastily thrown to be sorted out and stored at the first available moment.

  This morning, somehow, the system seemed to have broken down. She was curiously unable to collect or to govern her ideas. She felt like a nervous orator, who has prepared his speech, but who, at the last moment, sees his points and phrases escaping all control and weaving willful patterns of their own.

  “
But this,” she assured herself, “is ridiculous. Doctor Murchison has given you no reason to be afraid of him.”

  “On the contrary,” she said, securing the last button of her dress, and falling into the old habit of addressing her reflection, “I think that already you please Doctor Murchison—not in the French sense, of course. That would be too tiresome. But he seemed perfectly satisfied with his colleague.”

  She took another look at her thought boxes, but only to think how odd it would be if somebody, unknown to her, had happened to change all the labels.

  She contrived, however, to laugh at that, and went downstairs, walking with a light step into the dining room of the private set of rooms reserved for Doctor Edwardes, his assistant and his secretary.

  These rooms were set apart in the south wing of the castle. They comprised three living rooms. One was large and spacious, lined with books and looking straight out over the meadow fifty feet below. The other two were considerably smaller, one being used as a dining room, the other as a laboratory and dispensary. Above them were three bedrooms, one of which had been given to Constance. It was a pleasant room, commanding from its windows the whole green meadow in which the castle stood, bounded by its rampart of rock and roofed with the blue sky.

  As she entered the dining room a man standing by the window came to meet her.

  “I am Mr. Ambrose Deeling,” he said. “You, I take it, are our new colleague, Miss Sedgwick?” and he bowed formally over her hand, so that Constance had a glimpse of his bald head, over which a few strands of hair were drawn in neat parallel lines.