Dr. Irechester was a man of considerable attainments and an active, though not very persevering, intellect. He was widely read both in professional and general literature, but had shrunk from the arduous path of specialization. And he shrank even more from the drudgery of his calling. He had private means, inherited in middle life; his wife had a respectable portion; there was, then, nothing in his circumstances to thwart his tastes and tendencies. He had soon come to see in the late Dr. Evans a means of relief rather than a threat of rivalry; even more easily he slipped into the same way of regarding Mary Arkroyd, helped thereto by a lingering feeling that, after all and in spite of all, when it came to really serious cases, a woman could not, at best, play more than second fiddle. So, as has been seen, he patronized and encouraged Mary; he told himself that, when she had thoroughly proved her capacity—within the limits which he ascribed to it—to take her into partnership would not be a bad arrangement. True, he could pretty well choose his patients now; but as senior partner he would be able to do it completely. It was well-nigh inconceivable that, for example, the Naylors—great friends—should ever leave him; but he would like to be quite secure of the pick of new patients, some of whom might, through ignorance or whim, call in Mary. There was old Saffron, for instance. He was, in Irechester’s private opinion, or, perhaps it should be said in his private suspicions, an interesting case; yet, just for that reason, unreliable, and evidently ready to take offense. It was because of cases of that kind that he contemplated offering partnership to Mary; he would both be sure of keeping them and able to devote himself to them.
But his wife laughed at Mary, or at that development of the feminist movement which had produced her and so many other more startling phenomena. The Doctor was fond of his wife, a sprightly, would-be fashionable, still very pretty woman. But her laughter, and the opinion it represented, were to him the merest crackling of thorns under a pot.
The fine afternoon had come, a few days before Christmas, and he sat, side by side with Mr. Naylor, both warmly wrapped in coats and rugs, watching the lawn tennis at Old Place. Doctor Mary and Beaumaroy were playing together, the latter accustoming himself to a finger short in gripping his racquet, against Cynthia and Captain Alec. The Captain could not yet cover the court in his old fashion, but his height and reach made him formidable at the net, and Cynthia was very active. Ten days of Inkston air had made a vast difference to Cynthia. And something else was helping. It required no common loyalty to lost causes and ruined ideals—it is surely not harsh to indicate Captain Cranster by these terms?—to resist Alec Naylor. In fact he had almost taken Cynthia’s breath away at their first meeting; she thought that she had never seen anything quite so magnificent, or—all round and from all points of view, so romantic; his stature, handsomeness, limp, renown. Who can be surprised at it? Moreover, he was modest and simple, and no fool within the bounds of his experience.
“She seems a nice little girl, that, and uncommon pretty,” Naylor remarked.
“Yes, but he’s a queer fish, I fancy,” the Doctor answered, also rather absently. Their minds were not running on parallel lines.
“My boy a queer fish?” Naylor expostulated humorously.
Irechester smiled; his lips shut close and tight, his smile was quick but narrow. “You’re matchmaking. I was diagnosing,” he said.
Naylor apologized. “I’ve a desperate instinct to fit all these young fellows up with mates as soon as possible. Isn’t it only fair?”
“And also extremely expedient. But it’s the sort of thing you can leave to them, can’t you?”
“As to Beaumaroy—I suppose you meant him, not Alec—I think you must have been talking to old Tom Punnit—or, rather, hearing him talk.”
“Punnit’s general view is sound enough, I think, as to the man’s characteristics; but he doesn’t appreciate his cunning.”
“Cunning?” Naylor was openly astonished. “He doesn’t strike me as a cunning man, not in the least.”
“Possibly, possibly, I say—not in his ends, but in his means and expedients. That’s my view. I just put it on record, Naylor. I never like talking too much about my cases.”
“Beaumaroy’s not your patient, is he?”
“His employer, I suppose he’s his employer, Saffron is. Well, I thought it advisable to see Saffron alone. I tried to. Saffron was reluctant, this man here openly against it. Next time I shall insist. Because I think, mind you, at present I no more than think, that there’s more in Saffron’s case than meets the eye.”
Naylor glanced at him, smiling. “You fellows are always starting hares,” he said.
“Game and set!” cried Captain Alec, and—to his partner—“Thank you very much for carrying a cripple.”
But Irechester’s attention remained fixed on Beaumaroy, and consequently on Doctor Mary, for the partners did not separate at the end of their game, but, after putting on their coats, began to walk up and down together on the other side of the court, in animated conversation, though Beaumaroy did most of the talking, Mary listening in her usual grave and composed manner. Now and then a word or two reached Irechester’s ears, old Naylor seemed to have fallen into a reverie over his cigar, and it must be confessed that he took no pains not to overhear. Once at least he plainly heard “Saffron” from Beaumaroy; he thought that the same lips spoke his own name, and he was sure that Doctor Mary’s did. Beaumaroy was speaking rather urgently, and making gestures with his hands; it seemed as though he were appealing to his companion in some difficulty or perplexity. Irechester’s mouth was severely compressed and his glance suspicious as he watched.
The scene was ended by Gertie Naylor calling these laggards in to tea, to which meal the rest of the company had already betaken itself.
At the tea table they found General Punnit discoursing on war, and giving “idealists” what idealists usually get. The General believed in war; he pressed the biological argument, did not flinch when Mr. Naylor dubbed him the “British Bernhardi,” and invoked the support of “these medical gentleman” (this with a smile at Doctor Mary’s expense) for his point of view. War tested, proved, braced, hardened; it was nature’s crucible; it was the antidote to softness and sentimentality; it was the vindication of the strong, the elimination of the weak.
“I suppose there’s a lot in all that, sir,” said Alec Naylor, “but I don’t think the effect on one’s character is always what you say. I think I’ve come out of this awful business a good deal softer than I went in.” He laughed in an apologetic way. “More, more sentimental, if you like, with more feeling, don’t you know, for human life, and suffering, and so on. I’ve seen a great many men killed, but the sight hasn’t made me any more ready to kill men. In fact, quite the reverse.” He smiled again. “Really sometimes, for a row of pins, I’d have turned conscientious objector.”
Mrs. Naylor looked apprehensively at the General: would he explode? No, he took it quite quietly. “You’re a man who can afford to say it, Alec,” he remarked, with a nod that was almost approving.
Naylor looked affectionately at his son and turned to Beaumaroy. “And what’s the war done to you?” he asked. And this question did draw from the General, if not an explosion, at least a rather contemptuous smile: Beaumaroy had earned no right to express opinions!
But express one he did, and with his habitual air of candor. “I believe it’s destroyed every, scruple I ever had!”
“Mr. Beaumaroy!” exclaimed his hostess, scandalized; while the two girls, Cynthia and Gertie, laughed.
“I mean it. Can you see human life treated as dirt, absolutely as cheap as dirt, for three years, and come out thinking it worth anything? Can you fight for your own hand, right or wrong? Oh, yes, right or wrong, in the end, and it’s no good blinking it. Can you do that for three years in war, and then hesitate to fight for your own hand, right or wrong, in peace? Who really cares for right or wrong, anyhow?”
A pause ensued—rather an uncomfortable pause. There was a raw sincerity in Beaumaroy’s utterance that made it a challenge.
“I honestly think we did care about the rights and wrongs—we in England,” said Naylor.
“That was certainly so at the beginning,” Irechester agreed.
Beaumaroy took him up smartly. “Aye, at the beginning. But what about when our blood got up? What then? Would we, in our hearts, rather have been right and got a licking, or wrong and given one?”
“A searching question!” mused old Naylor. “What say you, Tom Punnit?”
“It never occurred to me to put the question,” the General answered brusquely.
“May I ask why not, sir?” said Beaumaroy respectfully.
“Because I believed in God. I knew that we were right, and I knew that we should win.”
“Are we in theology now, or still in biology?” asked Irechester, rather acidly.
“You’re getting out of my ‘depth anyhow,” smiled Mrs. Naylor. “And I’m sure the girls must be bewildered.”
“Mamma, I’ve done biology!”
“And many people think they’ve done theology!” chuckled Naylor. “Done it completely!”
“I’ve raised a pretty argument!” said Beaumaroy, smiling. “I’m sorry! I only meant to answer your question about the effect the whole thing has had on myself.”
“Even your answer to that was pretty startling, Mr. Beaumaroy,” said Doctor Mary, smiling too. “You gave us to understand that it had obliterated for you all distinctions of right and wrong, didn’t you?”
“Did I go as far as that?” he laughed. “Then I’m open to the remark that they can’t have been very strong at first.”
“Now don’t destroy the general interest of your thesis,” Naylor implored. “It’s quite likely that yours is a case as common as Alec’s, or even commoner. ‘A brutal and licentious soldiery,’ isn’t that a classic phrase in our histories? All the same, I fancy Mr. Beaumaroy does himself less than justice.” He laughed. “We shall be able to judge of that when we know him better.”
“At all events, Miss Gertie, look out that I don’t fake the score at tennis!” said Beaumaroy.
“A man might be capable of murder, but not capable of that,” said Alec.
“A truly British sentiment!” cried his father. “Tom, we have got back to the national ideals.”
The discussion ended in laughter, and the talk turned to lighter matters; but, as Mary Arkroyd drove Cynthia home across the heath, her thoughts returned to it. The two men, the two soldiers, seemed to have given an authentic account of what their experience had done to them. Both, as she saw the case, had been moved to pity, horror, and indignation that such things should be done, or should have to be done, in the world. After that point came the divergence. The higher nature had been raised, the lower debased; Alec Naylor’s sympathies had been sharpened and sensitized; Beaumaroy’s blunted. Where the one had found ideals and incentives, the other found despair—a despair that issued in excuses and denied high standards. And the finer mind belonged to the finer soldier; that she knew, for Gertie had told her General Punnit’s story, and, however much she might discount it as the tale of an elderly martinet, yet it stood for something, for something that could never be attributed to Alec Naylor.
And yet, for her mind traveled back to her earlier talk by the tennis court, Beaumaroy had a conscience, had feelings. He was fond of old Mr. Saffron; he felt a responsibility for him, felt it, indeed, keenly. Or was he, under all that seeming openness, a consummate hypocrite? Did he value Mr. Saffron only as a milk cow, the doting giver of a large salary? Was his only desire to humor him, keep him in good health and temper, and use him to his own profit? A puzzling man, but, at all events, cutting a poor figure beside Alec Naylor, about whom there could circle no clouds of doubt. Doctor Mary’s learning and gravity did not prevent her from drawing a very heroic and rather romantic figure of Captain Alec—notwithstanding that she sometimes found him rather hard to talk to.
She felt Cynthia’s arm steal around her waist, and Cynthia said softly, “I did enjoy my afternoon. Can we go again soon, Mary?”
Mary glanced at her. Cynthia laughed and blushed. “Isn’t he splendid?” Cynthia murmured. “But I don’t like Mr. Beaumaroy, do you?”
“I say yes to the first question, but I’m not quite ready to answer the second,” said Mary with a laugh.
Three days later, on Christmas Eve, one whom Jeanne, who caught sight of him in the hall, described as being all there was possible of ugliness, delivered (with a request for an immediate answer) the following note for Mary Arkroyd:
Mr. Saffron is unwell, and I have insisted that he must see a doctor. So much he has yielded, after a fight! But nothing will induce him to see Dr. Irechester again. On this point I tried to reason with him, but in vain. He is obstinate and resolved. I am afraid that I am putting you in a difficult and disagreeable position, but it seems to me that I have no alternative but to ask you to call on him professionally. I hope that Dr. Irechester will not be hurt by a whim which is, no doubt, itself merely a symptom of disordered nerves, for Dr. Irechester has been most attentive and very successful hitherto in dealing with the dear old gentleman. But my first duty is to Mr. Saffron. If it will ease matters at all, pray hold yourself at liberty to show this note to Dr. Irechester. May I beg you to be kind enough to call at your earliest convenience, though it is, alas, a rough evening to ask you to come out?
Yours very faithfully,
“How very awkward!” exclaimed Mary. She had prided herself on a rigorous abstention from “poaching”; she fancied that men were very ready to accuse women of not “playing the game” and had been resolved to give no color to such an accusation. “Mr. Saffron has sent for me—professionally. He’s ill, it seems,” she said to Cynthia.
“Why shouldn’t he?”
“Because he is a patient of Dr. Irechester, not a patient of mine.”
“But people often change their doctors, don’t they? He thinks you’re cleverer, I suppose, and I expect you are really.”
There was no use in expounding professional etiquette to Cynthia. Mary had to decide the point for herself, and quickly; the old man might be seriously ill. Beaumaroy had said at the Naylors’ that his attacks were sometimes alarming.
Suddenly she recollected that he had also seemed to hint that they were more alarming than Irechester appeared to appreciate; she had not taken much notice of that hint at the time, but now it recurred to her very distinctly. There was no suggestion of the sort in Beaumaroy’s letter. Beaumaroy had written a letter that could be shown to Irechester! Was that dishonesty, or only a pardonable diplomacy?
“I suppose I must go, and explain to Dr. Irechester afterwards.” She rang the bell, to recall the maid, and gave her answer. “Say I will be round as soon as possible. Is the messenger walking?”
“He’s got a bicycle, Miss.”
“All right. I shall be there almost as soon as he is.”
She seemed to have no alternative, just as Beaumaroy had none. Yet while she put on her mackintosh, it was very wet and misty, got out her car, and lit her lamps, her face was still fretful and her mind disturbed. For now, as she looked back on it, Beaumaroy’s conversation with her at Old Place seemed just a prelude to this summons, and meant to prepare her for it. Perhaps that too was pardonable diplomacy, and no reference to it could be expected in a letter which she was at liberty to show to Dr. Irechester. She wondered, uncomfortably, how Irechester would take it.
As Mary brought her car to a stand at the gate of the little front garden of Tower Cottage, she saw, through the mist, Beaumaroy’s corrugated face; he was standing in the doorway, and the light in the passage revealed it. It seemed to her to wear a triumphant impish look, but this vanished as he advanced to meet her, relieved her of the neat black handbag which she always carried with her on her visits, and suggested gravely that she should at once go upstairs and see her patient.
“He’s quieter now,” he said. “The mere news that you were coming had a soothing effect. Let me show you the way.” He led her upstairs and into a small room on the first floor, nakedly furnished with necessities, but with a cheery fire blazing in the grate.
Old Mr. Saffron lay in bed, propped up by pillows. His silver hair strayed from under a nightcap; he wore a light blue bedroom jacket; its color matched that of his restless eyes; his arms were under the clothes from the elbows down. He was rather flushed, but did not look seriously ill, and greeted Doctor Mary with dignified composure.
“I’ll see Dr. Arkroyd alone, Hector.” Beaumaroy gave the slightest little jerk of his head, and the old man added quickly, “I am sure of myself, quite sure.”
The phrase sounded rather an odd one to Mary, but Beaumaroy accepted the assurance with a nod: “All right, I’ll wait downstairs, sir. I hope you’ll bring me a good account of him, Doctor.” So he left Mary to make her examination; going downstairs, he shook his head once, pursed up his lips, and then smiled doubtfully, as a man may do when he has made up his mind to take a chance.
When Mary rejoined him, she asked for pen and paper, wrote a prescription, and requested that Beaumaroy’s man should take it to the chemist’s. He went out, to give it to the Sergeant, and, when he came back, found her seated in the big chair by the fire.
“The present little attack is nothing, Mr. Beaumaroy,” she said. “Stomachic—with a little fever; if he takes what I’ve prescribed, he ought to be all right in the morning. But I suppose you know that there is valvular disease—quite definite? Didn’t Dr. Irechester tell you?”
“Yes; but he said there was no particular—no immediate danger.”
“If he’s kept quiet and free from worry. Didn’t he advise that?”
“Yes,” Beaumaroy admitted, “he did. That’s the only thing you find wrong with him, Doctor?”
Beaumaroy was standing on the far side of the table, his finger-tips resting lightly on it. He looked across at Mary with eyes candidly inquiring.
“I’ve found nothing else so far. I suppose he’s got nothing to worry him?”
“Not really, I think. He fusses a bit about his affairs.” He smiled. “We go to London every week to fuss about his affairs; he’s always changing his investments, taking his money out of one thing and putting it in another, you know. Old people get like that sometimes, don’t they? I’m a novice at that kind of thing, never having had any money to play with; but I’m bound to say that he seems to know very well what he’s about.”
“Do you know anything of his history or his people? Has he any relations?”
“I know very little. I don’t think he has any, any real relations, so to speak. There are, I believe, some cousins, distant cousins, whom he hates. In fact, a lonely old bachelor, Dr. Arkroyd.”
Mary gave a little laugh and became less professional. “He’s rather an old dear! He uses funny stately phrases. He said I might speak quite openly to you, as you were closely attached to his person!”
“Sounds rather like a newspaper, doesn’t it? He does talk like that sometimes.” Beaumaroy moved round the table, came close to the fire, and stood there, smiling down at Mary.
“He’s very fond of you, I think,” she went on.
“He reposes entire confidence in me,” said Beaumaroy, with a touch of assumed pompousness.
“Those were his very words!” cried Mary, laughing again. “And he said it just in that way! How clever of you to guess!”
“Not so very. He says it to me six times a week.”
Mary had risen, about to take her leave, but to her surprise Beaumaroy went on quickly, with one of his confidential smiles, “And now I’m going to show you that I have the utmost confidence in you. Please sit down again, Dr. Arkroyd. The matter concerns your patient just as much as myself, or I wouldn’t trouble you with it, at any rate I shouldn’t venture to so early in our acquaintance. I want you to consider yourself as Mr. Saffron’s medical adviser, and, also, to try to imagine yourself my friend.”
“I’ve every inclination to be your friend, but I hardly know you, Mr. Beaumaroy.”
“And feel a few doubts about me? From what you’ve heard from myself, and perhaps from others?”
The wind swished outside; save for that, the little room seemed very still. The professional character of the interview did not save it, for Mary Arkroyd, from a sudden and rather unwelcome sense of intimacy, of an intimacy thrust upon her, though not so much by her companion as by circumstances. She answered rather stiffly, “Perhaps I have some doubts.”
“You detect, very acutely, that I have a great influence over Mr. Saffron. You ask, very properly, whether he has relations. I think you threw out a feeler about his money affairs, whether he had anything to worry about was your phrase, wasn’t it? Am I misinterpreting what was in your mind?”
As he spoke, he offered her a cigarette from a box on the mantelpiece. She took one and lit it at the top of the lamp-chimney; then she sat down again in the big chair; she had not accepted his earlier invitation to resume her seat.
“It was proper for me to put those questions, Mr. Beaumaroy. Mr. Saffron is not a sound man, and he’s old. In normal conditions his relations should at least be warned of the position.”
“Exactly,” Beaumaroy assented with an appearance of eagerness. “But he hates them. Any suggestion that they have any sort of claim on him raises strong resentment in him. I’ve known old men, old moneyed men, like that before, and no doubt you have. Well now, you’ll begin to see the difficulty of my position. I’ll put the case to you quite bluntly. Suppose Mr. Saffron, having this liking for me, this confidence in me, living here with me alone, except for servants; being, as one might say, exposed to my influence; suppose he took it into his head to make a will in my favor, to leave me all his money. It’s quite a considerable sum, so far as our Wednesday doings enable me to judge. Suppose that happened, how should I stand in your opinion, Dr. Arkroyd? But wait a moment still. Suppose that my career has not been very, well, resplendent; that my army record is only so-so; that I’ve devoted myself to him with remarkable assiduity, as in fact I have; that I might be called, quite plausibly, an adventurer. Well, propounding that will, how should I stand before the world and, if necessary (he shrugged his shoulders), the Court?”
Mary sat silent for a moment or two. Beaumaroy knelt down by the fire, rearranged the logs of wood which were smouldering there, and put on a couple more. From that position, looking into the grate, he added, “And the change of doctors? It was he, of course, who insisted on it, but I can see a clever lawyer using that against me too. Can’t you, Dr. Arkroyd?”
“I’m sure I wish you hadn’t had to make the change!” exclaimed Mary.
“So do I; though, mind you, I’m not pretending that Irechester is a favorite of mine, any more than he is of my old friend’s. Still, there it is. I’ve no right, perhaps, to press my question, but your opinion would be of real value to me.”
“I see no reason to think that he’s not quite competent to make a will,” said Doctor Mary. “And no real reason why he shouldn’t prefer you to distant relations whom he dislikes.”
“Ah, no real reason; that’s what you say! You mean that people would impute—”
Mary Arkroyd had her limitations—of experience, of knowledge, of intuition. But she did not lack courage.
“I have given you my professional opinion. It is that, so far as I see, Mr. Saffron is of perfectly sound understanding, and capable of making a valid will. You did me the honor—”
“No, no!” he interrupted in a low but rather strangely vehement protest. “I begged the favor—”
“As you like! The favor then, of asking me to give you my opinion as your friend, as well as my view as Mr. Saffron’s doctor.”
Beaumaroy did not rise from his knees, but turned his face towards her; the logs had blazed up, and his eyes looked curiously bright in the glare, themselves, as it were, afire.
“In my opinion a man of sensitive honor would prefer that that will should not be made, Mr. Beaumaroy,” said Mary steadily.
Beaumaroy appeared to consider. “I’m a bit posed by that point of view, Dr. Arkroyd,” he said at last, “Either the old man’s sane—compos mentis,don’t you call it?—or he isn’t. If he is—”
“I know. But I feel that way about it.”
“You’d have to give evidence for me!” He raised his brows and smiled at her.
“There can be undue influence without actual want of mental competence, I think.”
“I don’t know whether my influence is undue. I believe I’m the only creature alive who cares twopence for the poor old gentleman.”
“I know! I know! Mr. Beaumaroy, your position is very difficult. I see that. It really is. But, would you take the money for yourself? Aren’t you—well, rather in the position of a trustee?”
“Who for? The hated cousins? What’s the reason in that?”
“They may be very good people really. Old men take fancies, as you said yourself. And they may have built on—”
“Stepping into a dead man’s shoes? I dare say. Why mayn’t I build on it too? Why not my hand against the other fellow’s?”
“That’s what you learnt from the war! You said so—at Old Place. Captain Naylor said something different.”
“Suppose Alec Naylor and I, a hero and a damaged article,” he smiled at Mary, and she smiled back with a sudden enjoyment of the humorous yet bitter tang in his voice, “loved the same woman, and I had a chance of her. Am I to give it up?”
“Really we’re getting a long way from medicine, Mr. Beaumaroy!”
“Oh, you’re a general practitioner! Wise on all subjects under heaven! Conceive yourself hesitating between him and me—”
Mary laughed frankly. “How absurd you are! If you must go on talking, talk seriously.”
“But why am I absurd?”
“Because, if I were a marrying woman, which I’m not, I shouldn’t hesitate between you and Captain Naylor, not for a minute.”
“You’d jump at me?”
Laughing again, his eyes had now a schoolboy merriment in them, Mary rose from the big chair. “At him, if I’m not being impolite, Mr. Beaumaroy.”
They stood face to face. For the first time for several years—Mary’s girlhood had not been altogether empty of sentimental episodes—she blushed under a man’s glance, because it was a man’s. At this event, of which she was acutely conscious and at which she was intensely irritated, she drew herself up, with an attempt to return to her strictly professional manner.
“I don’t find you the least impolite, Dr. Arkroyd,” said Beaumaroy.
It was impudent, yet gay, dexterous, and elusive enough to avoid reproof. With no more than a little shake of her head and a light yet embarrassed laugh, Mary moved toward the door, her way lying between the table and an old oak sideboard, which stood against the wall. Some plates, knives, and other articles of the table lay strewn, none too tidily, about it. Beaumaroy followed her, smiling complacently, his hands in his pockets.
Suddenly Mary came to a stop and pointed with her finger at the sideboard, turning her face towards her companion. At the same instant Beaumaroy’s right hand shot out from his pocket towards the sideboard, as though to snatch up something from it. Then he drew the hand as swiftly back again; but his eyes watched Mary’s with an alert and suspicious gaze. That was for a second only; then his face resumed its amused and nonchalant expression. But the movement of the hand and the look of the eyes had not escaped Mary’s attention; her voice betrayed some surprise as she said:
“It’s only that I just happened to notice that combination knife-and-fork lying there, and I wondered who—”
The article in question lay among some half-dozen ordinary knives and forks. It was of a kind quite familiar to Doctor Mary from her hospital experience, a fork on one side, a knife-blade on the other; an implement made for people who could command the use of only one hand.
“Surely you’ve noticed my hand?” He drew his right hand again from the pocket to which he had so quickly returned it. “I used to use that in hospital, when I was bandaged up. But that’s a long while ago now, and I can’t think why Hooper’s left it lying there.”
The account was plausible, and entirely the same might now be said of his face and manner. But Mary had seen the dart of his hand and the sudden alertness in his eyes. Her own rested on him for a moment with inquiry, for the first time with a hint of distrust. “I see!” she murmured vaguely, and, turning away from him, pursued her way to the door. Beaumaroy followed her with a queer smile on his lips; he shrugged his shoulders once, very slightly.
A constraint had fallen on Mary. She allowed herself to be escorted to the car and helped into it in silence. Beaumaroy made no effort to force the talk, possibly by reason of the presence of Sergeant Hooper, who had arrived back from the chemist’s with the medicine for Mr. Saffron just as Mary and Beaumaroy came out of the hall door. He stood by his bicycle, drawing just a little aside to let them pass, but not far enough to prevent the light from the passage showing up his ill-favored countenance.
“Well, good-bye, Dr. Arkroyd. I’ll see how he is to-morrow, and ask you to be kind enough to call again, if it seems advisable. And a thousand thanks.”
“Good-night, Mr. Beaumaroy.”
She started the car. Beaumaroy walked back to the hall door. Mary glanced behind her once, and saw him standing by it, again framed by the light behind him, as she had seen him on her arrival. But, this time, within the four corners of the same frame was included the forbidding visage of Sergeant Hooper.
Beaumaroy returned to the fire in the parlor; Hooper, leaving his bicycle in the passage, followed him into the room and put the medicine bottle on the table. Smiling at him, Beaumaroy pointed at the combination knife-and-fork.
“Is it your fault or mine that that damned thing’s lying there?” he asked.
“Yours,” answered the Sergeant without hesitation and with his habitual surliness. “I cleaned it and put it out for you to lock away, as usual. Suppose you went and forgot it, sir!”
Beaumaroy shook his head in self-condemnation and a humorous dismay. “That’s it! I went and forgot it, Sergeant. And I think, I rather think, that Doctor Mary smells a rat, though she is, at present, far from guessing the color of the animal!”
The words sounded scornful; they were spoken for the Sergeant as well as for himself. He was looking amused and kindly, even rather tenderly amused; as though liking and pity were the emotions which most actively survived his first private conversation with Doctor Mary, in spite of that mishap of the combination knife-and-fork.
Christmas Day of 1918 was a merry feast, and nowhere merrier than at Old Place. There was a house-party and, for dinner on the day itself, a local contingent as well: Miss Wall, the Irechesters, Mr. Penrose, and Doctor Mary. Mr. Beaumaroy also had been invited by Mrs. Naylor; she considered him an interesting man and felt pity for the obviousennuiof his situation; but he had not felt able to leave his old friend. Doctor Mary’s Paying Guest was of the house-party, not merely a dinner guest. She was asked over to spend three days and went, accompanied by Jeanne, who by this time was crying much less; crying was no longer the cue; her mistress, and not merely stern Doctor Mary, had plainly shown her that. Gertie Naylor had invited Cynthia to help her in entertaining the subalterns, though Gertie was really quite equal to that task herself; there were only three of them, and if a pretty girl is not equal to three subalterns, well, what are we coming to in England? And, as it turned out, Miss Gertie had to deal with them all, sometimes collectively, sometimes one by one, practically unassisted. Cynthia was otherwise engaged. Gertie complained neither of the cause nor of its consequence.
The drink, or drugs, hypothesis was exploded, and Miss Wall’s speculations set at rest, with a quite comforting solatium of romantic and unhappy interest, “a nice tit-bit for the old cat,” as Mr. Naylor unkindly put it. Cynthia had told her story; she wanted a richer sympathy than Doctor Mary’s common-sense afforded; out of this need the revelation came to Gertie in innocent confidence, and, with the narrator’s tacit approval, ran through the family and its intimate friends. If Cynthia had been as calculating as she was guileless, she could not have done better for herself. Mrs. Naylor’s motherliness, old Naylor’s courtliness, Gertie’s breathless concern and avid appetite for the fullest detail, everybody’s desire to console and cheer, all these were at her service, all enlisted in the effort to make her forget, and live and laugh again. Her heart responded; she found herself becoming happy at a rate which made her positively ashamed. No wonder tactful Jeanne discovered that the cue was changed!
Fastidious old Naylor regarded his wife with the affection of habit and with a little disdain for the ordinariness of her virtues—not to say of the mind which they adorned. His daughter was to him a precious toy, on which he tried jokes, played tricks, and lavished gifts, for the joy of seeing the prettiness of her reactions to his treatment. It never occurred to him to think that his toy might be broken; fond as he was, his feeling for her lacked the apprehensiveness of the deepest love. But he idolized his son, and in this case neither without fear nor without understanding. For four years now he had feared for him bitterly: for his body, for his life. At every waking hour his inner cry had been even as David’s, “Would God I had died for thee, my son, my son!” For at every moment of those four years it might be that his son was even then dead. That terror, endured under a cool and almost off-hand demeanor, was past; but he feared for his son still. Of all who went to the war as Crusaders, none had the temperament more ardently than Alec. As he went, so, obviously, he had come back, not disillusioned, nay, with all his illusions, or delusions, about this wicked world and its possibilities, about the people who dwell in it and their lamentable limitations, stronger in his mind than ever. How could he get through life without being too sorely hurt and wounded, without being cut to the very quick by his inevitable discoveries? Old Naylor did not see how it was to be done, or even hoped for; but the right kind of wife was unquestionably the best chance.
He had cast a speculative eye on Cynthia Walford, Irechester had caught him at it, but, as he observed her more, she did not altogether satisfy him. Alec needed someone more stable, stronger, someone in a sense protective; somebody more like Mary Arkroyd; that idea passed through his thoughts; if only Mary would take the trouble to dress herself, remember that she was, or might be made, an attractive young woman; and, yes, throw her mortar and pestle out of the window without, however, discarding with them the sturdy, sane, balanced qualities of mind which enabled her to handle them with such admirable competence. But he soon had to put this idea from him. His son’s own impulse was to give, not to seek, protection and support.
Of Cynthia’s woeful experience Alec had spoken to his father once only: “It makes me mad to think the fellow who did that wore a British uniform!”
How unreasonable! Since by all the laws of average, when millions of men are wearing a uniform, there must be some rogues in it. But it was Alec’s way to hold himself responsible for the whole of His Majesty’s Forces. Their honor was his; for their misdeeds he must in his own person make reparation. “That fellow Beaumaroy may have lost his conscience, but my boy seems to have acquired five million,” the old man grumbled to himself—a grumble full of pride.
The father might analyze; with Alec it was all impulse, the impulse to soothe, to obliterate, to atone. The girl had been sorely hurt; with the acuteness of sympathy he divined that she felt herself in a way soiled and stained by contact with unworthiness and by a too easy acceptance of it. All that must be swept out of her heart, out of her memory, if it could be.
Doctor Mary saw what was happening, and with a little pang to which she would not have liked to own. She had set love affairs, and all the notions connected therewith, behind her; but she had idealized Alec Naylor a little; and she thought Cynthia, in homely phrase, “hardly good enough.” Was it not rather perverse that the very fact of having been a little goose should help her to win so rare a swan?
“You’re taking my patient out of my hands, Captain Alec!” she said to him jokingly. “And you’re devoting great attention to the case.”
He flushed. “She seems to like to talk to me,” he answered simply. “She seems to me to have rather a remarkable mind, Doctor Mary.” (She was “Doctor Mary” to all the Old Place party now, in affection, with a touch of chaff.)
O sancta simplicitas! Mary longed to say; that Cynthia was a very ordinary child. Like to talk to him, indeed! Of course she did; and to use her girl’s weapons on him; and to wonder, in an almost awestruck delight, at their effect on this dazzling hero. Well, the guilelessness of heroes!
So mused Mary, on the unprofessional side of her mind, as she watched, that Christmastide, Captain Alec’s delicate, sensitively indirect, and delayed approach toward the ripe fruit that hung so ready to his hand. “Part of his chivalry to assume she can’t think of him yet!” Mary was half-impatient, half-reluctantly admiring; not an uncommon mixture of feeling for the extreme forms of virtue to produce. In the net result, however, her marked image of Alec lost something of its heroic proportions.
But professionally (the distinction must not be pushed too far, she was not built in watertight compartments) Tower Cottage remained obstinately in the center of her thoughts; and, connected with it, there arose a puzzle over Dr. Irechester’s demeanor. She had taken advantage of Beaumaroy’s permission, though rather doubtful whether she was doing right, for she was still inexperienced in niceties of etiquette, and sent on the letter, with a frank note explaining her own feelings and the reason which had caused her to pay her visit to Mr. Saffron. But though Irechester was quite friendly when they met at Old Place before dinner, and talked freely to her during a rather prolonged period of waiting (Captain Alec and Cynthia, Gertie and two subalterns were very late, having apparently forgotten dinner in more refined delights), he made no reference to the letters, nor to Tower Cottage or its inmates. Mary herself was too shy to break the ice, but wondered at his silence, and the more because the matter evidently had not gone out of his mind. For after dinner, when the port had gone round once and the proper healths been honored, he said across the table to Mr. Penrose:
“We were talking the other day of the Tower, on the heath, you know, by old Saffron’s cottage, and none of us knew its history. You know all about Inkston from time out o’ mind. Have you got any story about it?”
Mr. Penrose practiced as a solicitor in London, but lived in a little old house near the Irechesters’ in the village street, and devoted his leisure to the antiquities and topography of the neighborhood; his lore was plentiful and curious, if not important. He was a small, neat old fellow, with white whiskers of the antique cut, a thin voice, and a dry cackling laugh.
“There was a story about it, and one quite fit for Christmas evening, if you’re in the mood to hear it.”
The thin voice was penetrating. At the promise of a story silence fell on the company, and Mr. Penrose told his tale, vouching as his authority an erstwhile “oldest inhabitant,” now gathered to his fathers; for the tale dated back some eighty years, to the date of the ancient’s early manhood.
A seafaring man had suddenly appeared, out of space, as it were, at Inkston, and taken the cottage. He carried with him a strong smell of rum and tobacco, and gave it to be understood that his name was Captain Duggle. He was no beauty, and his behavior was worse than his looks. To that quiet village, in those quiet strait-laced times, he was a horror and a portent. He not only drank prodigiously—that, being in character and also a source of local profit, might have passed with mild censure—but he swore and blasphemed horribly, spurning the parson, mocking at Revelation, even at the Deity Himself. The Devil was his friend, he said. A most terrible fellow, this Captain Duggle. Inkston’s hair stood on end, and no wonder!
“No doubt they shivered with delight over it all,” commented Mr. Naylor.
Captain Duggle lived all by himself—well, what God-fearing Christian, male or female, would be found to live with him—came and went mysteriously and capriciously, always full of money, and at least equally full of drink! What he did with himself nobody knew, but evil legends gathered about him. Terrified wayfarers, passing the cottage by night, took oath that they had heard more than one voice!
“This is proper Christmas!” a subaltern interjected into Gertie’s ear.
Mr. Penrose, with an air of gratification, continued his narrative.
“The story goes on to tell,” he said, “of a final interview with the village clergyman, in which that reverend man, as in duty bound, solemnly told Captain Duggle that however much he might curse, and blaspheme, and drink, and, er, do all the other things that the Captain did (obviously here Mr. Penrose felt hampered by the presence of ladies), yet Death, Judgment, and Churchyard wait for him at last. Whereupon the Captain, emitting an inconceivably terrific imprecation, which no one ever dared to repeat and which consequently is lost to tradition, declared that the first he’d never feared, the second was parson’s gabble, and as to the third, never should his dead toes be nearer any church than for the last forty years his living feet had been! If so be as he wasn’t drowned at sea, he’d make a grave for himself!”
Mr. Penrose paused, sipped port wine, and resumed.
“And so, no doubt, he did, building the Tower for that purpose. By bribes and threats he got two men to work for him. One was the uncle of my informant. But though he built that Tower, and inside it dug his grave, he never lay there, being, as things turned out, carried off by the Devil. Oh, yes, there was no doubt! He went home one night, a Saturday, very drunk, as usual. On the Sunday night a belated wayfarer, possibly also drunk, heard wild shrieks and saw a strange red glow through the window of the Tower, now, by the way, boarded up. And no doubt he’d have smelt brimstone if the wind hadn’t set the wrong way! Anyhow Captain Duggle was never seen again by mortal eyes, at Inkston, at all events. After a time the landlord of the cottage screwed up his courage to resume possession; the Captain had only a lease of it, though he built the Tower at his own charges, and, I believe, without any permission, the landlord being much too frightened to interfere with him. He found everything in a sad mess in the house, while in the Tower itself every blessed stick had been burnt up. So the story looks pretty plausible.”
“And the grave?” This question came eagerly from at least three of the company.
“In front of the fireplace there was a big oblong hole—six feet by three, by four—planks at the bottom, the sides roughly lined with brick. Captain Duggle’s grave; but he wasn’t in it!”
“But what really became of him, Mr. Penrose?” cried Cynthia.
“The Rising Generation is very skeptical,” said old Naylor. “You, of course, Penrose, believe the story?”
“I do,” said Mr. Penrose composedly. “I believe that a devil carried him off, and that its name wasdelirium tremens. We can guess, can’t we, Irechester, why he smashed or burnt everything, and fled in mad terror into the darkness? Where to? Was he drowned at sea, or did he take his life, or did he rot to death in some filthy hole? Nobody knows. But the grave he dug is there in the Tower, unless it’s been filled up since old Saffron has lived there.”
“Why in the world wasn’t it filled up before?” asked Alec Naylor with a laugh. “People lived in the cottage, didn’t they?”
“I’ve visited the cottage often,” Irechester interposed, “when various people had it, but I never saw any signs of the Tower being used.”
“It never was, I’m sure; and as for the grave, well, Alec, in country parts, to this day, you’d be thought a bold man if you filled up a grave that your neighbor had dug for himself, and such a neighbor as Captain Duggle! He might take it into his head some night to visit it, and if he found it filled up there’d be trouble, nasty trouble!” His laugh cackled out rather uncomfortably. Gertie shivered, and one of the subalterns gulped down his port.
“Old Saffron’s a man of education, I believe. No doubt he pays no heed to such nonsense, and has had the thing covered up,” said Naylor.
“As to that I don’t know. Perhaps you do, Irechester? He’s your patient, isn’t he?”
Dr. Irechester sat four places from Mary. Before he replied to the question he cast a glance at her, smiling rather mockingly. “I’ve attended him on one or two occasions, but I’ve never seen the inside of the Tower. So I don’t know either.”
“Oh, but I’m curious! I shall ask Mr. Beaumaroy,” cried Cynthia.
The ironical character of Irechester’s smile grew more pronounced, and his voice was at its driest: “Certainly you can ask Beaumaroy, Miss Walford. As far as asking goes, there’s no difficulty.”
A pause followed this pointed remark, on which nobody seemed disposed to comment. Mrs. Naylor ended the session by rising from her chair.
But Mary Arkroyd was disquieted, worried as to how she stood with Irechester, vaguely but insistently worried over the whole Tower Cottage business. Well, the first point she could soon settle, or try to settle, anyhow.
With the directness which marked her action when once her mind was made up, she waylaid Irechester as he came into the drawing-room; her resolute approach sufficed to detach Naylor from him; he found himself for the moment isolated from everybody except Mary.
“You got my letter, Dr. Irechester? I—I rather expected an answer.”
“Your conduct was so obviously and punctiliously correct,” he replied suavely, “that I thought my answer could wait till I met you here to-day, as I knew that I was to have the pleasure of doing.” He looked her full in the eyes. “You were placed, my dear colleague, in a position in which you had no alternative.”
“I thought so, Dr. Irechester, but—”
“Oh yes, clearly! I’m far from making any complaint.” He gave her a courteous little bow, but it was one which plainly closed the subject. Indeed he passed by her and joined a group that had gathered on the hearthrug, leaving her alone.
So she stood for a minute, oppressed by a growing uneasiness. Irechester said nothing, but surely meant something of import? He mocked her, but not idly or out of wantonness. He seemed almost to warn her. What could there be to warn her about? He had laid an odd emphasis on the word “placed”; he had repeated it. Who had “placed” her there? Mr. Saffron? Or—
Alec Naylor broke in on her uneasy meditation. “It’s a clinking night, Doctor Mary,” he observed. “Do you mind if I walk Miss Walford home, instead of her going with you in your car, you know? It’s only a couple of miles and—”
“Do you think your leg can stand it?”
He laughed. “I’ll cut the thing off, if it dares to make any objection!”