Part 22 (1/2)

Why, in India--but we'll let it go at that, if you don't mind. I have provided for the widow.”

Dollar bowed over his bit of steel tubing, but this time put it down so hastily that it rolled off the table. General Dysone was towering over him with shaking hand outstretched.

”I can't say any more,” he croaked. ”You must come down and see her for yourself; then you could do the talking--and I shouldn't feel such a d.a.m.ned cur! By G.o.d, sir, it's awful, talking about one's own wife like this, even for her own good! It's worse than I thought it would be. I know it's different to a doctor--but--but you're an old soldierman as well, aren't you? Didn't I hear you were in the war?”

”I was.”

”Well, then,” cried the General, and his blue eyes lit up with simple cunning, ”that's where we met! We've run up against each other again, and I've asked you down for this next week-end! Can you manage it? Are you free? I'll write you a check for your own fee this minute, if you like--there must be nothing of that kind down there. You don't mind being Captain Dollar again, if that was it, to my wife?”

His pathetic eagerness, his sensitive loyalty--even his sudden and solicitous zest in the pious fraud proposed--made between them an irresistible appeal. Dollar had to think; the rooms up-stairs were not empty; but none enshrined a more interesting case than this sounded. On the other hand, he had to be on his guard against a weakness for mere human interest as apart from the esoteric principles of his practise.

People might call him an empiric--empiric he was proud to be, but it was and must remain empiricism in one definite direction only. Psychical research was not for him--and the Dysone story had a psychic flavor.

In the end he said quite bluntly:

”I hope you don't suggest a ghost behind all this, General?”

”I? Lord, no! I don't believe in 'em,” cried the warrior, with a nervous laugh.

”Does any member of your household?”

”Not--now.”

”_Not_ now?”

”No. I think I am right in saying that.” But something was worrying him.

”Perhaps it is also right,” he continued, with the engaging candor of an overthrown reserve, ”and only fair--since I take it you are coming--to tell you that there was a fellow with us who thought he saw things. But it was all the most utter moons.h.i.+ne. He saw brown devils in flowing robes, but what he'd taken before he saw them I can't tell you! He didn't stay with me long enough for us to get to know each other. But he wasn't just a servant, and it was before the poor gardener's affair.

Like so many old soldiers on the shelf, Doctor Dollar, I am writing a book, and I run a secretary of sorts; now it's Jim Paley, a nephew of ours; and thank G.o.d he has more sense.”

”Yet even he gets depressed?”

”He has had cause. If our own kith and kin behaved like one possessed----” He stopped himself yet again; this time his hand found Dollar's with a vibrant grip. ”You will come, won't you? I can meet any train on Sat.u.r.day, or any other day that suits you better. I--for her own sake, doctor--I sometimes feel it might be better if she went away for a time. But you will come and see her for yourself?”

Before he left it was a promise; a harder heart than John Dollar's would have ended by making it, and putting the new case before all others when the Sat.u.r.day came. But it was not only his prospective patient whom the crime doctor was now really anxious to see; he felt fascinated in advance by the scene and every person of an indubitable drama, of which at least one tragic act was already over.

There was no question of meeting him at any station; the wealthy mother of a still recent patient had insisted on presenting Doctor Dollar with a fifteen-horse-power Talboys, which he had eventually accepted, and even chosen for himself (with certain expert a.s.sistance), as an incalculable contribution to the Cause. Already the car had vastly enlarged his theater of work; and on every errand his heart was lightened and his faith fortified by the wonderful case of the young chauffeur who sat so upright at the wheel beside him. In the beginning he had slouched there like the worst of his kind; it was neither precept nor reprimand which had straightened his back and his look and all about him. He was what John Dollar had always wanted--the unconscious patient whose history none knew--who himself little dreamed that it was all known to the man who treated him almost like a brother.

The boy had been in prison for dishonesty; he was being sedulously trusted, and so taught to trust himself. He had come in March, a sulky and suspicious clod; and now in June he could talk cricket and sixpenny editions from the Hounslow tram-lines to the wide white gate opening into a drive through a Berks.h.i.+re wood, with a house lurking behind it in a mask of ivy, out of the sun.

But in the drive General Dysone stepped back into the doctor's life, and, on being directed to the stables, he who had filled it for the last hour drove out of it for the next twenty-four.

”I wanted you to hear something at once from me,” his host whispered under the whispering trees, ”lest it should be mentioned and take you aback before the others. We've had another little tragedy--not a horror like the last--yet in one way almost worse. My wife shot her own dog dead last night!”

Dollar put a curb upon his parting lips.

”_In_ the night?” he stood still to ask.

”Well, between eleven and twelve.”

”In her own room, or where?”

”Out-of-doors. Don't ask me how it happened; n.o.body seems to know, and don't _you_ know anything if she speaks of it herself.”