Part 14 (1/2)
”The Baron de Mortemer,” broke in the stranger, pointing to the card as if it answered all questions. ”It is the Baroness who is very suffering--I pray you to come without delay.”
”But what is it?” asked the doctor. ”What shall I bring with me? My instrument-case?”
The Baron smiled with his lips and frowned with his eyes. ”Not at all,” he said, ”Madame expects not an arrival--it is not so bad as that--but she has had a sudden access of anguish--she has demanded you. I pray you to come at the instant. Bring what pleases you, what you think best, but come!”
The man's manner was not agitated, but it was strangely urgent, overpowering, constraining; his voice was like a pus.h.i.+ng hand.
Carmichael threw on his coat and hat, hastily picked up his medicine-satchel and a portable electric battery, and followed the Baron to the motor.
The great car started easily and rolled softly purring down the deserted street. The houses were all asleep, and the college buildings dark as empty fortresses. The moon-threaded mist clung closely to the town like a shroud of gauze, not concealing the form beneath, but making its immobility more mysterious. The trees drooped and dripped with moisture, and the leaves seemed ready, almost longing, to fall at a touch. It was one of those nights when the solid things of the world, the houses and the hills and the woods and the very earth itself, grow unreal to the point of vanis.h.i.+ng; while the impalpable things, the presences of life and death which travel on the unseen air, the influences of the far-off starry lights, the silent messages and presentiments of darkness, the ebb and flow of vast currents of secret existence all around us, seem so close and vivid that they absorb and overwhelm us with their intense reality.
Through this realm of indistinguishable verity and illusion, strangely imposed upon the familiar, homely street of Calvinton, the machine ran smoothly, faintly humming, as the Frenchman drove it with master-skill--itself a dream of embodied power and speed. Gliding by the last cottages of Town's End where the street became the highroad, the car ran swiftly through the open country for a mile until it came to a broad entrance. The gate was broken from the leaning posts and thrown to one side. Here the machine turned in and laboured up a rough, gra.s.s-grown carriage-drive.
Carmichael knew that they were at Castle Gordon, one of the ”old places” of Calvinton, which he often pa.s.sed on his country drives. The house stood well back from the road, on a slight elevation, looking down over the oval field that was once a lawn, and the scattered elms and pines and Norway firs that did their best to preserve the memory of a n.o.ble plantation. The building was colonial; heavy stone walls covered with yellow stucco; tall white wooden pillars ranged along a narrow portico; a style which seemed to a.s.sert that a Greek temple was good enough for the residence of an American gentleman. But the clean buff and white of the house had long since faded. The stucco had cracked, and, here and there, had fallen from the stones. The paint on the pillars was dingy, peeling in round blisters and narrow strips from the grey wood underneath. The trees were ragged and untended, the gra.s.s uncut, the driveway overgrown with weeds and gullied by rains--the whole place looked forsaken. Carmichael had always supposed that it was vacant. But he had not pa.s.sed that way for nearly a month, and, meantime, it might have been reopened and tenanted.
The Baron drove the car around to the back of the house and stopped there.
”Pardon,” said he, ”that I bring you not to the door of entrance; but this is the more convenient.”
He knocked hurriedly and spoke a few words in French. The key grated in the lock and the door creaked open. A withered, wiry little man, dressed in dark grey, stood holding a lighted candle, which flickered in the draught. His head was nearly bald; his sallow, hairless face might have been of any age from twenty to a hundred years; his eyes between their narrow red lids were glittering and inscrutable as those of a snake. As he bowed and grinned, showing his yellow, broken teeth, Carmichael thought that he had never seen a more evil face or one more clearly marked with the sign of the drug-fiend.
”My chauffeur, Gaspard,” said the Baron, ”also my valet, my cook, my chambermaid, my man to do all, what you call factotum, is it not? But he speaks not English, so pardon me once more.”
He spoke a few words to the man, who shrugged his shoulders and smiled with the same deferential grimace while his unchanging eyes gleamed through their slits. Carmichael caught only the word ”Madame” while he was slipping off his overcoat, and understood that they were talking of his patient.
”Come,” said the Baron, ”he says that it goes better, at least not worse--that is always something. Let us mount at the instant.”
The hall was bare, except for a table on which a kitchen lamp was burning, and two chairs with heavy automobile coats and rugs and veils thrown upon them. The stairway was uncarpeted, and the dust lay thick under the banisters. At the door of the back room on the second floor the Baron paused and knocked softly. A low voice answered, and he went in, beckoning the doctor to follow.
III
If Carmichael lived to be a hundred he could never forget that first impression. The room was but partly furnished, yet it gave at once the idea that it was inhabited; it was even, in some strange way, rich and splendid. Candles on the mantelpiece and a silver travelling-lamp on the dressing-table threw a soft light on little articles of luxury, and photographs in jewelled frames, and a couple of well-bound books, and a gilt clock marking the half-hour after midnight. A wood fire burned in the wide chimney-place, and before it a rug was spread. At one side there was a huge mahogany four-post bedstead, and there, propped up by the pillows, lay the n.o.blest-looking woman that Carmichael had ever seen.
She was dressed in some clinging stuff of soft black, with a diamond at her breast, and a deep-red cloak thrown over her feet. She must have been past middle age, for her thick, brown hair was already touched with silver, and one lock of snow-white lay above her forehead. But her face was one of those which time enriches; fearless and tender and high-spirited, a speaking face in which the dark-lashed grey eyes were like words of wonder and the sensitive mouth like a clear song. She looked at the young doctor and held out her hand to him.
”I am glad to see you,” she said, in her low, pure voice, ”very glad!
You are Roger Carmichael's son. Oh, I am glad to see you indeed.”
”You are very kind,” he answered, ”and I am glad also to be of any service to you, though I do not yet know who you are.”
The Baron was bending over the fire rearranging the logs on the andirons. He looked up sharply and spoke in his strong nasal tone.
”_Pardon! Madame la Baronne de Mortemer, j'ai l'honneur de vous presenter Monsieur le Docteur Carmichael._”
The accent on the ”doctor” was marked. A slight shadow came upon the lady's face. She answered, quietly:
”Yes, I know. The doctor has come to see me because I was ill. We will talk of that in a moment. But first I want to tell him who I am--and by another name. Dr. Carmichael, did your father ever speak to you of Jean Gordon?”
”Why, yes,” he said, after an instant of thought, ”it comes back to me now quite clearly. She was the young girl to whom he taught Latin when he first came here as a college instructor. He was very fond of her.
There was one of her books in his library--I have it now--a little volume of Horace, with a few translations in verse written on the fly-leaves, and her name on the t.i.tle-page--Jean Gordon. My father wrote under that, 'My best pupil, who left her lessons unfinished.'