Part 16 (2/2)

George Edenborough had taken Winterwald on his wedding trip, and nothing would suit him and his nut-brown bride but for the doctor to join them at their table. It was a slightly embarra.s.sing invitation, but there was good reason for not persisting in a first refusal. And the bride carried the situation with a breezy vitality, while her groom chose a wine worthy of the occasion, and the newcomer explained that he had arrived by the afternoon train, but had not come straight to the hotel.

”Then you won't have heard of our great excitement,” said Mrs.

Edenborough, ”and I'm afraid you won't like it when you do!”

”If you mean the strychnine affair,” returned Dollar, with a certain deliberation, ”I heard one version before I had been in the place an hour. I can't say that I did like it. But I should be interested to know what you both think about it all.”

Edenborough returned the wine-list to the waiter with sepulchral injunctions.

”Are you telling him about our medical scandal?” he inquired briskly of the bride. ”My dear doctor, it'll make your professional hair stand on end! Here's the local pract.i.tioner been prescribing strychnine pills warranted to kill in twenty minutes!”

”So I hear,” said the crime doctor, dryly.

”The poor brute has been frightfully overworked,” continued Edenborough, in deference to a more phlegmatic front than he had expected of the British faculty. ”They say he was up two whole nights last week; he seems to be the only doctor in the place, and the hotels are full of fellows doing their level best to lay themselves out. We've had two concussions of the brain and one complicated fracture this very week.

Still, to go and give your patient a hundred times more strychnine than you intended----”

And he stopped himself, as though the subject, which he had taken up with a purely nervous zest, was rather near home after all.

”But what about his patient?” adroitly inquired the doctor. ”If half that one hears is true, he wouldn't have been much loss.”

”Not much, I'm afraid,” said Lucy Edenborough, with the air of a Roman matron turning down her thumbs.

”He's a fellow who was at my private school, just barely twenty-one, and making an absolute fool of himself,” exclaimed Edenborough, touching his gla.s.s. ”It's an awful pity. He used to be such a nice little chap, Jack Laverick.”

”He was nice enough when he was out here a year ago,” the bride admitted, ”and he's still a sportsman. He won half the toboggan races last season, and took it all delightfully; he's quite another person now, and gives himself absurd airs on top of everything else. Still, I shall expect Mr. Laverick either to sweep the board or break his neck.

He evidently wasn't born to be poisoned.”

”Did he come to grief last year, Mrs. Edenborough?”

”He only nearly had one of his ears cut off, in a spill on the ice-run.

So they said; but he was tobogganing again next day.”

”Doctor Alt looked after him all right then, I hear,” added Edenborough, as the champagne arrived. ”But I only wish _you_ could take the fellow in hand! He really used to be a decent chap, but it would take even you all your time to make him one again, Doctor Dollar.”

The crime doctor smiled as he raised his gla.s.s and returned compliments across the bubbles. It was the smile of a man with bigger fish to fry.

Yet it was he who came back to the subject of young Laverick, asking if he had not a tutor or somebody to look after him, and what the man meant by not doing his job.

In an instant both the Edenboroughs had turned upon their friend. Poor Mr. Scarth was not to blame! Poor Mr. Scarth, it appeared, had been a master at the preparatory school at which Jack Laverick and George Edenborough had been boys. He was a splendid fellow, and very popular in the hotel, but there was nothing but sympathy with him in the matter under discussion. His charge was of age, and in a position to send him off at any moment, as indeed he was always threatening in his cups. But there again there was a special difficulty: one cup was more than enough for Jack Laverick, whose weak head for wine was the only excuse for him.

”Yet there was nothing of the kind last year,” said Mrs. Edenborough, in a reversionary voice; ”at least, one never heard of it And that makes it all the harder on poor Mr. Scarth.”

Dollar declared that he was burning to meet the unfortunate gentleman; the couple exchanged glances, and he was told to wait till after the concert, at which he had better sit with them. Was there a concert? His face lengthened at the prospect, and the bride's eyes sparkled at his expense. She would not hear of his s.h.i.+rking it, but went so far as to cut dinner short in order to obtain good seats. She was one of those young women who have both a will and a way with them, and Dollar soon found himself securely penned in the gallery of an ambitious ballroom with a stage at the other end.

The concert came up to his most sardonic expectations, and he resigned himself to a boredom only intensified by the behavior of some crude humorists in the rows behind. Indifferent song followed indifferent song, and each earned a more vociferous encore from those gay young G.o.ds. A not unknown novelist told dialect stories of purely territorial interest; a lady recited with astounding spirit; another fiddled, no less courageously; but the back rows of the gallery were quite out of hand when a black-avised gentleman took the stage, and had not opened his mouth before those back rows were rows of Satan's reproving sin and clapping with unsophisticated gusto.

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