The House of Dr. Edwardes

by Francis Beeding

  “How’s that Padre, for a tiger?” he repeated, blowing out his walrus mustache, and turning his prominent eyes on the lean man in the Roman collar sitting opposite.

  He met with no response. The padre appeared not even to have heard him, but sat silent, staring at the untasted food on his plate, one hand playing with a little gold cross he wore on his watch chain.

  “Most interesting,” said Constance, trying to be kind.

  “Interesting,” thundered the Colonel. “It was the most extraordinary thing that has occurred to me in all my thirty years’ Shikar experience. Did I ever tell you the yarn about old Tommy Erskine? Tommy, we always called him, because his name was Thomas. When Tommy and I were stationed at Bangalore, or was it Jullundur? Upon my word I can’t remember. Yes, yes, I do, I remember perfectly well. It was Jodpore, in eighty-nine, or was it eighty-seven? No, no, it was ninety-three, the year of the smallpox epidemic, or was it cholera? No, I remember now; it was blackwater fever, blackwater fever, and I remember that Mrs. Brown, wife of John Brown, of the I.C.S.—no, it was someone else—can’t remember who—anyhow she had twins and died of it.”

  “Excuse me Colonel,” put in a thin voice from the end of the table, “blackwater fever is a disease indigenous to Africa.”

  The speaker, even thinner than her voice, removed her pince-nez from a high nose and wiped them with severity. She was dressed in a severe garment of black taffeta, with innumerable jet buttons running from the chin to the waist. Incongruously her fingers were blazing with false gems. She crinkled uncomfortably as she sat back.

  The Colonel turned his eyes in her direction.

  “Stuff and nonsense, Miss Truro.”

  “My name is Truelow,” she corrected him coldly.

  “Truelow, Truro, Truelow,” said the Colonel, “what’s in a name? It’s facts that count. Facts. You think I don’t know what blackwater fever is? Had it four times, madam, four dashed confounded times, and the last time I was all but drowned in it. Black water, devilish bad it was and full of whacking great trout. Caught one of them myself—on a little greenheart, only four feet long, or was it four feet six? Weighed a hundred and ten pounds when gaffed.”

  Constance looked appealingly at Doctor Murchison. This was one of the Colonel’s bad days, during which he was rude to everyone, and especially to the Reverend Mark Hickett and to Miss Laughter Truelow, the thin lady, who seldom failed to contradict him.

  Taking advantage of a momentary pause for breath in the interminable flow of the adventures of Tommy Erskine, who had by now become George Baghot, of the old forty-second, or was it the fifty-first, she inquired hastily of Mr. Curtis, the robust looking man seated opposite, whether he would care to come for a walk that afternoon.

  Mr. Curtis, who had been eating in steady silence throughout luncheon, shot a furtive glance at her across the table.

  “Would you mind repeating that last observation?” he said.

  Constance, with an effort, did so.

  “Go for a walk?” he repeated. “Go for a walk. That is a most unusual proposition. I must refer it to my directors.”

  “Stimson,” he said over his shoulder to an imaginary person. “Stimson, make a note of that; it is very important, very important indeed.”

  “Oh, God,” thought Constance, “how long shall I be able to stand it?”

  She had never realized what this vocation which she had chosen might mean. She had at first been bewildered, then full of pity, but now, as she must own to herself, most crushingly bored. Scientific enthusiasm was all very well, but devotion to duty, when it meant meeting day after day the same poor minds, closed within a circle of their own into which it appeared quite impossible to penetrate, hardly sufficed to sustain her.

  Her patients had exhibited degrees of madness varying from something almost sane to something approaching dementia, but she had not been able to add anything to their personal files of any real significance. Miss Laughter Truelow was the nearest to sanity. Severe garments and a terrible zeal for propriety were characteristics of her lucid intervals, and Constance had been puzzled to know why she was there at all, until one day she had come upon her posing before a mirror in her room, her everyday clothes discarded, wearing some kind of oriental transparency and repeating with curious gestures snatches from the Song of Solomon.

  She was roused from her reverie by the voice of Doctor Murchison. He was addressing Mr. Curtis.

  “By all means go for a walk with Miss Sedgwick,” he was saying. “It’s a lovely afternoon, and the exercise will do you good.”

  A sudden silence had fallen on the table. It was like the shutting of a door upon an uproar, for they all talked at once and talked unceasingly, maddeningly, all except the Reverend Hickett, who would seldom talk at all. The face of Mr. Curtis assumed a look of strained attention.

  “If you really have no objection,” he stammered. “But we must be careful Doctor. Business is business, you know. And my absence may be misconstrued. The Board is apt to be suspicious. I have suffered—suffered—”

  He broke off, and a look of misery came into his eyes.

  “That will be quite all right,” said Doctor Murchison soothingly. “I will see the directors myself.”

  Mr. Curtis nodded his head vigorously, brightened into a smile, and spoke again over his shoulder.

  “Stimson,” he said, “make a note of that and remember to put it in the minutes.”

  All the others at the table, except Constance, were leaning forward and gazing with awe at the doctor. Their attitude was one of extreme deference, a strange expectancy in which it was difficult to say whether confidence or suspicion predominated. Even the Reverend Hickett, abandoning the pose of detached sorrow which he had maintained ever since Constance had arrived, stared with the rest, his fingers plucking nervously at the high Roman collar about his thin neck. Miss Laughter Truelow passed a dry tongue across her withered lips. Colonel Rickaby assumed the expression of a junior officer awaiting important instructions from his General.

  Mr. Curtis sighed heavily and sat back.

  “Thank you, Miss Sedgwick, for the suggestion. I shall be delighted to walk with you, delighted—delighted.”

  The attention of the others relaxed. They ceased gazing at the doctor, and the uproar broke out again. Constance felt a thrill of envy. What extraordinary power Doctor Murchison was beginning to exercise. How all these poor souls looked up to him, with what pathetic eagerness they waited on everything he said. Of herself they took little or no notice.

  A servant, handed her a dish, little rounds of steak cut thick on toast. Constance shook her head. She rarely ate meat at middle day, and she did not like it underdone.

  “I am sorry,” said Doctor Murchison, noticing her refusal.

  “Let me order something else for you. What about an omelette? But I can assure you that the steak is excellent, very tender and saignant,” and he helped himself as he spoke to a large portion.

  Constance flushed, obscurely resenting this comment on her refusal of a dish. And saignant, bleeding. How disgustingly the French described meat that was underdone.

  “No, thank you,” she said. “I’m not really hungry, you know.”

  “Stuff and nonsense,” broke in the Colonel, “stuff and nonsense, my dear young lady; good roast beef of old England never hurt anybody. I agree with the doctor, emphatically if I may say so, quite emphatically,” and he thrust his fork into his own portion with a gusto that was somehow revolting.

  She turned hastily to Miss Truelow, and inquired after her little dog. Birdy boy, it appeared, had refused his breakfast again, and Miss Truelow was much distressed.

  “When I was campaigning against the Mahsuds, or was it the Wazi Wazi,” said the Colonel….

  II

  At half-past two Constance stood on the terrace awaiting Mr. Curtis. She had recovered from her mood at the luncheon table, and was now trying bravely to achieve the true medical spirit which, devoid alike of pity or of anger, views its case
s as so many milestones along the road to discovery. In a word, she had pulled herself together. She would not, she said, in future, allow the patients, however tiresome they might be, to get on her nerves. As a doctor she had no right to nerves. She was waiting now for Mr. Curtis with an equable mind, determined to draw him out as much as possible during the walk, and give as accurate an account as she could of the result.

  This was her third experience with Mr. Curtis, and the mere fact that Doctor Murchison had allowed her to take him for a walk proved, as she assured herself, that he was satisfied with the way she was working.

  Mr. Curtis came bustling out of the groined Gothic doorway five minutes late. He was dressed in rather startling tweeds, and in his cloth cap were stuck several dry flies.

  “Sorry to be late. Sorry to be late,” he said, bustling across the gravel of the terrace. “There were some last instructions for Stimson. Stimson, you know. He needed some last instructions.”

  Constance felt a momentary return of her exasperation at the manner in which he ceaselessly repeated every remark, and in his constant references to the imaginary Stimson. But she fought it down and met him with a smile.

  “You are not very late, Mr. Curtis,” she said, “and there is plenty of time.”

  “But I never like to keep a lady waiting. Never keep a lady waiting,” he said hastily. “But Stimson is so stupid. I shall have to give him a wigging. That’s what he wants, a good wigging.”

  They fell into step side by side and began to descend the terrace by a stone stairway leading to the meadow beneath.

  “In which direction shall we go?” said Constance, as they paused at the bottom.

  “Anywhere you like,” said Mr. Curtis, with a vague gesture of the stick in his right hand. “Over there perhaps,” and he pointed to the farther end of the valley, where the rocks rose sheer through the forest of fir, not far short of half a mile away.

  “I like the smell of the firs,” he went on. “It is a pleasant smell. Or perhaps you don’t agree.”

  He looked at her anxiously, and Constance hastened to say that she also found it a pleasant smell.

  Instinctively, as they went along, she ran over in her mind the salient points of his history as far as she knew them.

  He had been the senior partner in a not very prosperous firm which had gone bankrupt not long after the war through bad speculation. The catastrophe had unhinged his mind, more especially as his junior partner had been prosecuted for fraud and had only escaped conviction for lack of evidence. Mr. Curtis during the trial had apparently been quite unable to understand the transactions in which his partner had involved him, and his mental collapse was the consequence of prolonged worrying over small details and horror at being suspected of dishonesty. He had been sent to Château Landry by some rich relatives, anxious to put him out of the way and to forget the scandal of his bankruptcy. He now believed himself to be a Napoleon of finance, brilliant, ruthless, controlling the markets of the world.

  Doctor Murchison had informed Constance, however, that this delusion was the least important of his symptoms. There was, it seemed, a psychosis, the origin of which must be sought farther back than the period of his bankruptcy.

  “I wish there was a trout stream here,” he said suddenly.

  They were walking now across the level grass, where, not far away Colonel Rickaby was engaged on a solitary round on the nine-hole golf links which was laid out in the castle grounds.

  “I didn’t know you were a fisherman, Mr. Curtis,” said Constance, and her remark led him to talk easily and sanely of his pastime. He was a keen angler, and had once been a member of Driffield and accustomed to take three or four miles of a Norwegian river every summer. For a few moments Stimson was mercifully forgotten. Mr. Curtis strode briskly along, sniffing the fragrant air and pausing every now and again to illustrate with his stick a difficult cast, as he described his pursuit of a whacking great fellow, not an ounce under four pounds, which he had hooked late on a May evening, and which had apparently cost him some trouble to bring to the net.

  “I believe there is some fishing here,” said Constance. “The man who drove me up from Thonon said that there were trout in the Dranse. We might perhaps be able to get you permission to fish there. Perhaps you would like me to inquire?”

  They were now walking upon a little path scarcely broad enough for two, which wound up among the fir trees.

  “The Dranse,” said Mr. Curtis, “where is that?”

  “It’s the river down there,” said Constance, and she pointed across the level stretch of meadow towards the main valley which was shut off by the shoulder of mountain round which ran the only road to the castle.

  Mr. Curtis stopped abruptly, and the anxious look which she was beginning to recognize as a symptom of some profound mental disturbance came into his eyes.

  “Not over there Miss Sedgwick,” he said, “I could never go over there. You see, I know what happened down in that dreadful place. I know all about it Miss Sedgwick, even the details—even the details,” and he stood shivering as if with sudden cold.

  Constance looked at him, at a loss how to reply. Was he alluding to the accident which had resulted in the death of poor Jules? She decided to ignore his change of manner.

  “Come along, Mr. Curtis,” she said, for he still stood as though rooted to the spot, “I find it a little chilly under these firs.”

  They were now cut off from the sunshine, and the dark forest was cold and obscure after the open meadow.

  “I would not fish over there,” repeated Mr. Curtis. “not even if he gave me permission.”

  “Do you mean Doctor Murchison?”

  “Who else should I mean?” said Mr. Curtis.

  For a moment longer he stood lost in some vision of his own. Then suddenly he shivered.

  “You are right,” he said abruptly, “it is cold—cold as death, cold as that poor, mangled fellow.”

  He lingered on the last two words with a strange unction. She knew that he was afraid, abjectly afraid, and yet he seemed to be prolonging some secret source of pleasure. She watched him curiously. Meeting her steady gaze he passed a hand rapidly over his forehead.

  “You quite understand,” he said, as though in apology, “my nerves are not for the moment very strong. I am here for a rest, you know. I have been overdoing it of late, vast operations in the city, enormous responsibility, immense sums involved.”

  Constance sighed. The interval of comparative lucidity seemed to have passed. Mr. Curtis was back once more in his old delusion. He moved on rapidly, speaking to her now over his shoulder as she followed him along the narrow path.

  “It is better to get away,” he continued. “It is better to get right away. The Dranse, I think you said; I must remember the name—that is important. I will ask Stimson to make a note of it. You see the idea—make a note of it. But first we must get away. It will be safer up there. But even up there—you see that great hawk, wheeling in the sunlight. He is looking for something to kill. Poor beasties! They do squeal, you know. Suddenly he pounces on them and then he tears them with his sharp beak and they bleed.”

  He paused a moment in his rapid ascent, and they stood on the path, breathing rather fast from the climb. He laid a hand on her arm and, avoiding her eyes, he said with the same strange unction which she had already noted:

  “The Dranse, was it not? The River Dranse. I am going to forget it. And for a while forget the weariness, the fever and the fret. The nightingale, you know. It is very steep down there by the river, precipitous, quite precipitous.

  And the poor fellow went crashing down, right beyond the rocks, till his head hit a large white stone and it cracked, just like that,” and Mr. Curtis put his foot on a pine cone which crackled under his heel as he spoke.

  “Horrible, horrible, most horrible,” he went on. “That stone would have to be scrubbed—hardly the work for a maid,” and suddenly he broke into a high cackling laugh.

  “How do you know about
the accident?” said Constance, for she felt sure that so terrible an event as the death of Jules would have been kept from all the patients.

  Mr. Curtis looked very cunning at that—cunning and a little frightened.

  “I mustn’t tell you,” he said. “It’s a secret between me and—and someone else. We really oughtn’t to talk about it at all. So you mustn’t give me away. We must be very careful, you know. Both in the same boat, now.”

  What did he mean? He had evidently had a vivid account from someone of the murder of Jules. Or perhaps he had overheard the servants talking. Constance decided to speak to Doctor Murchison about it. The incident had evidently impressed Mr. Curtis, and it had obviously had a most deplorable effect upon his state of mind.

  They were passing now through the firs and the path ran along the edge of the naked rock. It went, as it seemed, right round the whole circle of the mountain wall which rimmed the meadow, sometimes dipping low into the fir trees, sometimes rising above them to the bare stone. In the confined space of the valley this was the only walk of reasonable length that could be taken.

  Suddenly Mr. Curtis paused again.

  “One thing,” he said, “before we leave the subject. It was evidently his own fault. Nobody else to blame—blood on his own head. I tell you this as a friend, for it will be a lesson to us all.”

  “I afraid I don’t know what you mean,” faltered Constance.

  “He disobeyed,” said Mr. Curtis.

  III

  Germaine was a little late in starting. The servants had their evening meal at seven, an hour before the doctor dined himself, but she had been kept late with a press of work, mostly due, she decided, to the fantastic notions of cleanliness entertained by the young English “Miss,” who also called herself a doctor, and to whom she had taken a dislike. She had not, therefore, been able to start for the rendezvous till close on eight o’clock.

  She had started in a hurry, and in her anxiety to get away she had forgotten one of her duties. The new doctor had particularly asked her on no account to leave unlocked the little chapel where those poor mad folk, in Doctor Edwardes’ time, had assembled every day for morning and evening prayers. She had dusted the chapel only that afternoon, and she had neglected to lock it up again. No one, however, she reflected, was likely to notice it, and she would see to it as soon as she got back.