Part 15 (2/2)
”I--please, sir--I never stopped to see, sir!”
Dollar flew to his telephone; forsook it for a taxicab; drew Edenborough's rooms in vain; inquired as vainly (as an anonymous wedding guest, uncertain of the church) at Admiral Trevellyn's; was at the House of Commons by half past six, and at Scotland Yard (armed with written injunctions from the Secretary of State) before seven.
At that hour and place the matter pa.s.sed out of the hands of Doctor John Dollar, who could only hasten home to Welbeck Street, there to enter upon the most shattering vigil of his life--the terrible telephone at his elbow--and still more terrible inquirers on the telephone as the night wore on!
But never one word of news.
Toward midnight Topham Vinson arrived with the elaborate sandwiches and even the champagne that he had found awaiting him at home. It was the measure of a born leader; the doctor had not broken his fast since lunch; and in the small hours he once dozed for some minutes in his chair.
But the politician had not the temperament to wait for the telephone to talk to him; he talked repeatedly into the telephone, set a round dozen of myrmidons by the ears, and at last was rightly served by being sent off to Hammersmith to identify the dead body of a defaulting clerk, just recovered from the Thames.
”I'm not coming with you,” Dollar had said, even when the description seemed to tally. ”Edenborough wouldn't drown himself--and this is my place.”
It was a being ten years older who opened his own front door again at daybreak. His face was as gray as the wintry dawn, the whole man bowed and broken. Topham Vinson stood aghast on the step.
”It isn't all over, is it?”
The doctor nodded with compressed lips.
”When and where?”
”I don't know. Come in. They're getting up down-stairs; there'll be some tea in a minute.”
”For G.o.d's sake tell me what you've heard!”
”Haven't I told you? They rang up just after you went. He bought prussic acid yesterday!”
Dollar had dropped into his elaborate old chair; the bent head between his hands drooped over its own reflection in the monastic writing-table.
”Who rang up?” asked the man on his legs.
”Some of your people.”
”Was that all they had to tell you?”
”That was all; we shan't have long to wait for the rest.”
”Where did he buy it?”
”At his own chemist's--'to put a poor old dog out of its misery!' His very words, Vinson, so they tell me! I shall hear them all my life.”
”And it has taken all night to learn this, has it, from the chemist's where the poor devil dealt!”
Dollar understood this outburst of truculent emotion.
”That was my fault,” said he. ”I told them to confine their attention to entries made in the poison books after five o'clock yesterday afternoon. Edenborough had signed his name and got the stuff earlier in the day.”
”Before you told him anything?”
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