Part 16 (1/2)
”He had his own suspicions, you must remember. I had confirmed them--and _her_ first words left no more to be said, that he could bear to hear!
If only he had waited another minute! If only I had dragged him back to face it out!” groaned Dollar, in a bottomless pit of self-reproach. ”I call myself a crime doctor, yet I let my patient creep into s.p.a.ce with a bottle of prussic acid, and commit the one crime I had to prevent!”
”Why prussic acid, I wonder?”
The idle question was not asked for information, but it happened to be one that Dollar could answer, and it brought him to his book-shelves with a certain alacrity.
”I know,” he said, ”though I never thought of it till this minute! I was trying to write him a prescription on Sunday night, when the poor chap suddenly remarked that Sh.e.l.ley was right, and I found him dipping into these Letters, and had the luck to spot the very bit he'd struck. It was this”--and he read out the pa.s.sage beginning: ”You, of course, enter into society at Leghorn: should you meet with any scientific person, capable of preparing the _Prussic Acid, or essential oil of bitter almonds_, I should regard it as a great kindness if you could procure me a small quant.i.ty”--down to ”it would be a comfort to me to hold in my hands that golden key to the chamber of perpetual peace.”
Topham Vinson's only comment was to pick up the book, which had fallen to the floor with the concluding words. Dollar was swaying where he stood, glancing in horror toward the door; at that moment it opened, and Mrs. Barton entered with the tea-tray.
”Mrs. Barton,” said the doctor, in a voice that failed him as it had not done all night, ”I don't want to hurt your feelings, but did that boy of yours speak the truth when he told me he had seen Mr. Edenborough out?”
”He did not, sir, and his father thrashed him for it!” cried the good woman. ”And that was very wrong of Barton, because I was as bad as the boy, in not telling you at the time. So we've all done wrong together, and we don't deserve to stay, as I told the both of them!”
The poor soul was forgiven and consoled, with an unconscious sympathy not lost on Topham Vinson, to whom it was extended a moment later.
”Take a drink of your tea,” said Dollar. ”It will do you good.”
”What about you?”
”I'm going up-stairs first.”
”You've thought of something!”
”I have,” replied Dollar in a tragic whisper. ”I've thought of my 'chamber of perpetual peace.'”
That sanctuary was on the second floor, and it had triple doors so s.p.a.ced that each could be shut in turn before the next was opened. The house might have been in an uproar, and yet one might have entered this room without admitting the slightest sound by the door. The window was of triple gla.s.s that would have deadened an explosion on its sill, and the walls were thickly wadded behind an inner paneling of aromatic pine.
The first sensation on entering was one of ineffable peace and quiet; next came a subtle, soothing scent, as of all the spices of Arabia; and lastly a surprising sense of scientific ventilation, as though the four sound-proof walls were yet not impervious to the outer air, but as though it were the pungent air of pine-clad mountains, in miraculous circulation here in the heart of London.
All this would have struck the visitor by degrees; but to John Dollar, who had devised and superintended every detail, it all came home together and afresh as he entered softly with the Home Secretary; and a certain composite effect, unforeseen in the beginning and still unexplained, fell upon him even now, and with it all the weight of his own fatigue; so that he could have flung himself on bed or couch as a doomed wretch sinks into the snow, but for the light in the room and what the light revealed.
It was light of a warm, strange, coppery shade, that he had found for himself by dyeing frosted electric lamps as children dye Easter eggs; it was the very softest and yet least sensuous shade that eyes ever penetrated with perfect ease, and it turned the room into a little hall of bronze. The simple curtains might have been golden lace, richly tarnished with age; the furniture solid copper; the bed an Eastern divan, and the form upon the bed a sleeping Arab.
It was George Edenborough lying there in all his clothes, a girl's photograph beside him on the coverlet, and beside the photograph a tiny phial that caught the light.
”Stay where you are!” whispered Dollar in a voice that thrilled his companion to the core. And he stole to the bed, stooped over it for a little lifetime, and so came stealing back.
”How long has he been dead?” said Topham Vinson, harshly; but in realty his blood was freezing at an unearthly smile in that unearthly light.
”Dead?” was the doctor's husky echo. ”Don't you know the smell of bitter almonds, and have you smelt it yet? Here's the golden bottle he hadn't opened when he lay down--perhaps for the first time since he was here on Sunday night--and this is his wedding morning, and he's only--only fast asleep!”
V
A SCHOOLMASTER ABROAD
It is a small world that flocks to Switzerland for the Christmas holidays. It is also a world largely composed of that particular cla.s.s which really did provide Doctor Dollar with the majority of his cases.
He was therefore not surprised, on the night of his arrival at the great Excelsior Hotel, in Winterwald, to feel a diffident touch on the shoulder, and to look round upon the sunburned blushes of a quite recent patient.