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Round the Red Lamp: Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life

by Arthur Conan Doyle · English · Gutenberg #423 · 395,059 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Round the Red Lamp: Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life

Author: Arthur Conan Doyle


        
Release date: February 1, 1996 [eBook #423]
                Most recently updated: April 23, 2022

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/423


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROUND THE RED LAMP: BEING FACTS AND FANCIES OF MEDICAL LIFE ***





ROUND THE RED LAMP

BEING FACTS AND FANCIES OF MEDICAL LIFE

By SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE




THE PREFACE.

[Being an extract from a long and animated correspondence with a friend
in America.]

I quite recognise the force of your objection that an invalid or a
woman in weak health would get no good from stories which attempt to
treat some features of medical life with a certain amount of realism.
If you deal with this life at all, however, and if you are anxious to
make your doctors something more than marionettes, it is quite
essential that you should paint the darker side, since it is that which
is principally presented to the surgeon or physician.  He sees many
beautiful things, it is true, fortitude and heroism, love and
self-sacrifice; but they are all called forth (as our nobler qualities
are always called forth) by bitter sorrow and trial.  One cannot write
of medical life and be merry over it.

Then why write of it, you may ask?  If a subject is painful why treat
it at all?  I answer that it is the province of fiction to treat
painful things as well as cheerful ones.  The story which wiles away a
weary hour fulfils an obviously good purpose, but not more so, I hold,
than that which helps to emphasise the graver side of life.  A tale
which may startle the reader out of his usual grooves of thought, and
shocks him into seriousness, plays the part of the alterative and tonic
in medicine, bitter to the taste but bracing in the result.  There are
a few stories in this little collection which might have such an
effect, and I have so far shared in your feeling that I have reserved
them from serial publication.  In book-form the reader can see that
they are medical stories, and can, if he or she be so minded, avoid
them.

Yours very truly,

A. CONAN DOYLE.


P. S.--You ask about the Red Lamp.  It is the usual sign of the general
practitioner in England.




CONTENTS.

  BEHIND THE TIMES
  HIS FIRST OPERATION
  A STRAGGLER OF '15
  THE THIRD GENERATION
  A FALSE START
  THE CURSE OF EVE
  SWEETHEARTS
  A PHYSIOLOGIST'S WIFE
  THE CASE OF LADY SANNOX
  A QUESTION OF DIPLOMACY
  A MEDICAL DOCUMENT
  LOT NO. 249
  THE LOS AMIGOS FIASCO
  THE DOCTORS OF HOYLAND
  THE SURGEON TALKS




ROUND THE RED LAMP.




BEHIND THE TIMES.

My first interview with Dr. James Winter was under dramatic
circumstances.  It occurred at two in the morning in the bedroom of an
old country house.  I kicked him twice on the white waistcoat and
knocked off his gold spectacles, while he with the aid of a female
accomplice stifled my angry cries in a flannel petticoat and thrust me
into a warm bath.  I am told that one of my parents, who happened to be
present, remarked in a whisper that there was nothing the matter with
my lungs.  I cannot recall how Dr. Winter looked at the time, for I had
other things to think of, but his description of my own appearance is
far from flattering.  A fluffy head, a body like a trussed goose, very
bandy legs, and feet with the soles turned inwards--those are the main
items which he can remember.

From this time onwards the epochs of my life were the periodical
assaults which Dr. Winter made upon me.  He vaccinated me; he cut me
for an abscess; he blistered me for mumps.  It was a world of peace and
he the one dark cloud that threatened.  But at last there came a time
of real illness--a time when I lay for months together inside my
wickerwork-basket bed, and then it was that I learned that that hard
face could relax, that those country-made creaking boots could steal
very gently to a bedside, and that that rough voice could thin into a
whisper when it spoke to a sick child.

And now the child is himself a medical man, and yet Dr. Winter is the
same as ever.  I can see no change since first I can remember him, save
that perhaps the brindled hair is a trifle whiter, and the huge
shoulders a little more bowed.  He is a very tall man, though he loses
a couple of inches from his stoop.  That big back of his has curved
itself over sick beds until it has set in that shape.  His face is of a
walnut brown, and tells of long winter drives over bleak country roads,
with the wind and the rain in his teeth.  It looks smooth at a little
distance, but as you approach him you see that it is shot with
innumerable fine wrinkles like a last year's apple.  They are hardly to
be seen when he is in repose; but when he laughs his face breaks like a
starred glass, and you realise then that though he looks old, he must
be older than he looks.


How old that is I could never discover.  I have often tried to find
out, and have struck his stream as high up as George IV and even the
Regency, but without ever getting quite to the source.  His mind must
have been open to impressions very early, but it must also have closed
early, for the politics of the day have little interest for him, while
he is fiercely excited about questions which are entirely prehistoric.
He shakes his head when he speaks of the first Reform Bill and
expresses grave doubts as to its wisdom, and I have heard him, when he
was warmed by a glass of wine, say bitter things about Robert Peel and
his abandoning of the Corn Laws.  The death of that statesman brought
the history of England to a definite close, and Dr. Winter refers to
everything which had happened since then as to an insignificant
anticlimax.

But it was only when I had myself become a medical man that I was able
to appreciate how entirely he is a survival of a past generation.  He
had learned his medicine under that obsolete and forgotten system by
which a youth was apprenticed to a surgeon, in the days when the study
of anatomy was often approached through a violated grave.  His views
upon his own profession are even more reactionary than in politics.
Fifty years have brought him little and deprived him of less.
Vaccination was well within the teaching of his youth, though I think
he has a secret preference for inoculation.  Bleeding he would practise
freely but for public opinion.  Chloroform he regards as a dangerous
innovation, and he always clicks with his tongue when it is mentioned.
He has even been known to say vain things about Laennec, and to refer
to the stethoscope as "a new-fangled French toy."  He carries one in
his hat out of deference to the expectations of his patients, but he is
very hard of hearing, so that it makes little difference whether he
uses it or not.

He reads, as a duty, his weekly medical paper, so that he has a general
idea as to the advance of modern science.  He always persists in
looking upon it as a huge and rather ludicrous experiment.  The germ
theory of disease set him chuckling for a long time, and his favourite
joke in the sick room was to say, "Shut the door or the germs will be
getting in." As to the Darwinian theory, it struck him as being the
crowning joke of the century.  "The children in the nursery and the
ancestors in the stable," he would cry, and laugh the tears out of his
eyes.

He is so very much behind the day that occasionally, as things move
round in their usual circle, he finds himself, to his bewilderment, in
the front of the fashion.  Dietetic treatment, for example, had been
much in vogue in his youth, and he has more practical knowledge of it
than any one whom I have met.  Massage, too, was familiar to him when
it was new to our generation.  He had been trained also at a time when
instruments were in a rudimentary state, and when men learned to trust
more to their own fingers.  He has a model surgical hand, muscular in
the palm, tapering in the fingers, "with an eye at the end of each."  I
shall not easily forget how Dr. Patterson and I cut Sir John Sirwell,
the County Member, and were unable to find the stone.  It was a
horrible moment.  Both our careers were at stake.  And then it was that
Dr. Winter, whom we had asked out of courtesy to be present, introduced
into the wound a finger which seemed to our excited senses to be about
nine inches long, and hooked out the stone at the end of it.  "It's
always well to bring one in your waistcoat-pocket," said he with a
chuckle, "but I suppose you youngsters are above all that."

We made him president of our branch of the British Medical Association,
but he resigned after the first meeting.  "The young men are too much
for me," he said.  "I don't understand what they are talking about."
Yet his patients do very well.  He has the healing touch--that magnetic
thing which defies explanation or analysis, but which is a very evident
fact none the less.  His mere presence leaves the patient with more
hopefulness and vitality.  The sight of disease affects him as dust
does a careful housewife.  It makes him angry and impatient.  "Tut,
tut, this will never do!" he cries, as he takes over a new case.  He
would shoo Death out of the room as though he were an intrusive hen.
But when the intruder refuses to be dislodged, when the blood moves
more slowly and the eyes grow dimmer, then it is that Dr. Winter is of
more avail than all the drugs in his surgery.  Dying folk cling to his
hand as if the presence of his bulk and vigour gives them more courage
to face the change; and that kindly, windbeaten face has been the last
earthly impression which many a sufferer has carried into the unknown.

When Dr. Patterson and I--both of us young, energetic, and
up-to-date--settled in the district, we were most cordially received by
the old doctor, who would have been only too happy to be relieved of
some of his patients.  The patients themselves, however, followed their
own inclinations--which is a reprehensible way that patients have--so
that we remained neglected, with our modern instruments and our latest
alkaloids, while he was serving out senna and calomel to all the
countryside.  We both of us loved the old fellow, but at the same time,
in the privacy of our own intimate conversations, we could not help
commenting upon this deplorable lack of judgment.  "It's all very well
for the poorer people," said Patterson.  "But after all the educated
classes have a right to expect that their medical man will know the
difference between a mitral murmur and a bronchitic rale.  It's the
judicial frame of mind, not the sympathetic, which is the essential
one."

I thoroughly agreed with Patterson in what he said.  It happened,
however, that very shortly afterwards the epidemic of influenza broke
out, and we were all worked to death.  One morning I met Patterson on
my round, and found him looking rather pale and fagged out.  He made
the same remark about me.  I was, in fact, feeling far from well, and I
lay upon the sofa all the afternoon with a splitting headache and pains
in every joint.  As evening closed in, I could no longer disguise the
fact that the scourge was upon me, and I felt that I should have
medical advice without delay.  It was of Patterson, naturally, that I
thought, but somehow the idea of him had suddenly become repugnant to
me.  I thought of his cold, critical attitude, of his endless
questions, of his tests and his tappings.  I wanted something more
soothing--something more genial.

"Mrs. Hudson," said I to my housekeeper, "would you kindly run along to
old Dr. Winter and tell him that I should be obliged to him if he would
step round?"

She was back with an answer presently.  "Dr. Winter will come round in
an hour or so, sir; but he has just been called in to attend Dr.
Patterson."




HIS FIRST OPERATION.

It was the first day of the winter session, and the third year's man
was walking with the first year's man.  Twelve o'clock was just booming
out from the Tron Church.

"Let me see," said the third year's man.  "You have never seen an
operation?"

"Never."

"Then this way, please.  This is Rutherford's historic bar.  A glass of
sherry, please, for this gentleman.  You are rather sensitive, are you
not?"

"My nerves are not very strong, I am afraid."

"Hum!  Another glass of sherry for this gentleman.  We are going to an
operation now, you know."

The novice squared his shoulders and made a gallant attempt to look
unconcerned.

"Nothing very bad--eh?"

"Well, yes--pretty bad."

"An--an amputation?"

"No; it's a bigger affair than that."

"I think--I think they must be expecting me at home."

"There's no sense in funking.  If you don't go to-day, you must
to-morrow.  Better get it over at once.  Feel pretty fit?"

"Oh, yes; all right!"  The smile was not a success.

"One more glass of sherry, then.  Now come on or we shall be late.  I
want you to be well in front."

"Surely that is not necessary."

"Oh, it is far better!  What a drove of students!  There are plenty of
new men among them.  You can tell them easily enough, can't you? If
they were going down to be operated upon themselves, they could not
look whiter."

"I don't think I should look as white."

"Well, I was just the same myself.  But the feeling soon wears off.
You see a fellow with a face like plaster, and before the week is out
he is eating his lunch in the dissecting rooms.  I'll tell you all
about the case when we get to the theatre."

The students were pouring down the sloping street which led to the
infirmary--each with his little sheaf of note-books in his hand.  There
were pale, frightened lads, fresh from the high schools, and callous
old chronics, whose generation had passed on and left them.  They swept
in an unbroken, tumultuous stream from the university gate to the
hospital.  The figures and gait of the men were young, but there was
little youth in most of their faces.  Some looked as if they ate too
little--a few as if they drank too much.  Tall and short, tweed-coated
and black, round-shouldered, bespectacled, and slim, they crowded with
clatter of feet and rattle of sticks through the hospital gate.  Now
and again they thickened into two lines, as the carriage of a surgeon
of the staff rolled over the cobblestones between.

"There's going to be a crowd at Archer's," whispered the senior man
with suppressed excitement.  "It is grand to see him at work.  I've
seen him jab all round the aorta until it made me jumpy to watch him.
This way, and mind the whitewash."

They passed under an archway and down a long, stone-flagged corridor,
with drab-coloured doors on either side, each marked with a number.
Some of them were ajar, and the novice glanced into them with tingling
nerves.  He was reassured to catch a glimpse of cheery fires, lines of
white-counterpaned beds, and a profusion of coloured texts upon the
wall.  The corridor opened upon a small hall, with a fringe of poorly
clad people seated all round upon benches.  A young man, with a pair of
scissors stuck like a flower in his buttonhole and a note-book in his
hand, was passing from one to the other, whispering and writing.

"Anything good?" asked the third year's man.

"You should have been here yesterday," said the out-patient clerk,
glancing up.  "We had a regular field day.  A popliteal aneurism, a
Colles' fracture, a spina bifida, a tropical abscess, and an
elephantiasis.  How's that for a single haul?"

"I'm sorry I missed it.  But they'll come again, I suppose.  What's up
with the old gentleman?"

A broken workman was sitting in the shadow, rocking himself slowly to
and fro, and groaning.  A woman beside him was trying to console him,
patting his shoulder with a hand which was spotted over with curious
little white blisters.

"It's a fine carbuncle," said the clerk, with the air of a connoisseur
who describes his orchids to one who can appreciate them.  "It's on his
back and the passage is draughty, so we must not look at it, must we,
daddy?  Pemphigus," he added carelessly, pointing to the woman's
disfigured hands.  "Would you care to stop and take out a metacarpal?"

"No, thank you.  We are due at Archer's.  Come on!" and they rejoined
the throng which was hurrying to the theatre of the famous surgeon.

The tiers of horseshoe benches rising from the floor to the ceiling
were already packed, and the novice as he entered saw vague curving
lines of faces in front of him, and heard the deep buzz of a hundred
voices, and sounds of laughter from somewhere up above him.  His
companion spied an opening on the second bench, and they both squeezed
into it.

"This is grand!" the senior man whispered.  "You'll have a rare view of
it all."

Only a single row of heads intervened between them and the operating
table.  It was of unpainted deal, plain, strong, and scrupulously
clean.  A sheet of brown water-proofing covered half of it, and beneath
stood a large tin tray full of sawdust.  On the further side, in front
of the window, there was a board which was strewed with glittering
instruments--forceps, tenacula, saws, canulas, and trocars.  A line of
knives, with long, thin, delicate blades, lay at one side.  Two young
men lounged in front of this, one threading needles, the other doing
something to a brass coffee-pot-like thing which hissed out puffs of
steam.

"That's Peterson," whispered the senior, "the big, bald man in the
front row.  He's the skin-grafting man, you know.  And that's Anthony
Browne, who took a larynx out successfully last winter.  And there's
Murphy, the pathologist, and Stoddart, the eye-man.  You'll come to
know them all soon."

"Who are the two men at the table?"

"Nobody--dressers.  One has charge of the instruments and the other of
the puffing Billy.  It's Lister's antiseptic spray, you know, and
Archer's one of the carbolic-acid men.  Hayes is the leader of the
cleanliness-and-cold-water school, and they all hate each other like
poison."

A flutter of interest passed through the closely packed benches as a
woman in petticoat and bodice was led in by two nurses.  A red woolen
shawl was draped over her head and round her neck.  The face which
looked out from it was that of a woman in the prime of her years, but
drawn with suffering, and of a peculiar beeswax tint.  Her head drooped
as she walked, and one of the nurses, with her arm round her waist, was
whispering consolation in her ear.  She gave a quick side-glance at the
instrument table as she passed, but the nurses turned her away from it.

"What ails her?" asked the novice.

"Cancer of the parotid.  It's the devil of a case; extends right away
back behind the carotids.  There's hardly a man but Archer would dare
to follow it.  Ah, here he is himself!"

As he spoke, a small, brisk, iron-grey man came striding into the room,
rubbing his hands together as he walked.  He had a clean-shaven face,
of the naval officer type, with large, bright eyes, and a firm,
straight mouth.  Behind him came his big house-surgeon, with his
gleaming pince-nez, and a trail of dressers, who grouped themselves
into the corners of the room.

"Gentlemen," cried the surgeon in a voice as hard and brisk as his
manner, "we have here an interesting case of tumour of the parotid,
originally cartilaginous but now assuming malignant characteristics,
and therefore requiring excision.  On to the table, nurse!  Thank you!
Chloroform, clerk!  Thank you!  You can take the shawl off, nurse."

The woman lay back upon the water-proofed pillow, and her murderous
tumour lay revealed.  In itself it was a pretty thing--ivory white,
with a mesh of blue veins, and curving gently from jaw to chest.  But
the lean, yellow face and the stringy throat were in horrible contrast
with the plumpness and sleekness of this monstrous growth.  The surgeon
placed a hand on each side of it and pressed it slowly backwards and
forwards.

"Adherent at one place, gentlemen," he cried.  "The growth involves the
carotids and jugulars, and passes behind the ramus of the jaw, whither
we must be prepared to follow it.  It is impossible to say how deep our
dissection may carry us.  Carbolic tray.  Thank you!  Dressings of
carbolic gauze, if you please!  Push the chloroform, Mr. Johnson.  Have
the small saw ready in case it is necessary to remove the jaw."

The patient was moaning gently under the towel which had been placed
over her face.  She tried to raise her arms and to draw up her knees,
but two dressers restrained her.  The heavy air was full of the
penetrating smells of carbolic acid and of chloroform.  A muffled cry
came from under the towel, and then a snatch of a song, sung in a high,
quavering, monotonous voice:

  "He says, says he,
  If you fly with me
  You'll be mistress of the ice-cream van.
  You'll be mistress of the----"

It mumbled off into a drone and stopped.  The surgeon came across,
still rubbing his hands, and spoke to an elderly man in front of the
novice.

"Narrow squeak for the Government," he said.

"Oh, ten is enough."

"They won't have ten long.  They'd do better to resign before they are
driven to it."

"Oh, I should fight it out."

"What's the use.  They can't get past the committee even if they got a
vote in the House.  I was talking to----"

"Patient's ready, sir," said the dresser.

"Talking to McDonald--but I'll tell you about it presently."  He walked
back to the patient, who was breathing in long, heavy gasps.  "I
propose," said he, passing his hand over the tumour in an almost
caressing fashion, "to make a free incision over the posterior border,
and to take another forward at right angles to the lower end of it.
Might I trouble you for a medium knife, Mr. Johnson?"

The novice, with eyes which were dilating with horror, saw the surgeon
pick up the long, gleaming knife, dip it into a tin basin, and balance
it in his fingers as an artist might his brush.  Then he saw him pinch
up the skin above the tumour with his left hand.  At the sight his
nerves, which had already been tried once or twice that day, gave way
utterly.  His head swain round, and he felt that in another instant he
might faint.  He dared not look at the patient.  He dug his thumbs into
his ears lest some scream should come to haunt him, and he fixed his
eyes rigidly upon the wooden ledge in front of him.  One glance, one
cry, would, he knew, break down the shred of self-possession which he
still retained.  He tried to think of cricket, of green fields and
rippling water, of his sisters at home--of anything rather than of what
was going on so near him.

And yet somehow, even with his ears stopped up, sounds seemed to
penetrate to him and to carry their own tale.  He heard, or thought
that he heard, the long hissing of the carbolic engine.  Then he was
conscious of some movement among the dressers.  Were there groans, too,
breaking in upon him, and some other sound, some fluid sound, which was
more dreadfully suggestive still?  His mind would keep building up
every step of the operation, and fancy made it more ghastly than fact
could have been.  His nerves tingled and quivered.  Minute by minute
the giddiness grew more marked, the numb, sickly feeling at his heart
more distressing.  And then suddenly, with a groan, his head pitching
forward, and his brow cracking sharply upon the narrow wooden shelf in
front of him, he lay in a dead faint.


When he came to himself, he was lying in the empty theatre, with his
collar and shirt undone.  The third year's man was dabbing a wet sponge
over his face, and a couple of grinning dressers were looking on.

"All right," cried the novice, sitting up and rubbing his eyes.  "I'm
sorry to have made an ass of myself."

"Well, so I should think," said his companion.

"What on earth did you faint about?"

"I couldn't help it.  It was that operation."

"What operation?"

"Why, that cancer."

There was a pause, and then the three students burst out laughing.
"Why, you juggins!" cried the senior man, "there never was an operation
at all!  They found the patient didn't stand the chloroform well, and
so the whole thing was off.  Archer has been giving us one of his racy
lectures, and you fainted just in the middle of his favourite story."




A STRAGGLER OF '15.

It was a dull October morning, and heavy, rolling fog-wreaths lay low
over the wet grey roofs of the Woolwich houses.  Down in the long,
brick-lined streets all was sodden and greasy and cheerless.  From the
high dark buildings of the arsenal came the whirr of many wheels, the
thudding of weights, and the buzz and babel of human toil.  Beyond, the
dwellings of the workingmen, smoke-stained and unlovely, radiated away
in a lessening perspective of narrowing road and dwindling wall.

There were few folk in the streets, for the toilers had all been
absorbed since break of day by the huge smoke-spouting monster, which
sucked in the manhood of the town, to belch it forth weary and
work-stained every night.  Little groups of children straggled to
school, or loitered to peep through the single, front windows at the
big, gilt-edged Bibles, balanced upon small, three-legged tables, which
were their usual adornment.  Stout women, with thick, red arms and
dirty aprons, stood upon the whitened doorsteps, leaning upon their
brooms, and shrieking their morning greetings across the road.  One
stouter, redder, and dirtier than the rest, had gathered a small knot
of cronies around her and was talking energetically, with little shrill
titters from her audience to punctuate her remarks.

"Old enough to know better!" she cried, in answer to an exclamation
from one of the listeners.  "If he hain't no sense now, I 'specs he
won't learn much on this side o' Jordan.  Why, 'ow old is he at all?
Blessed if I could ever make out."

"Well, it ain't so hard to reckon," said a sharp-featured pale-faced
woman with watery blue eyes.  "He's been at the battle o' Waterloo, and
has the pension and medal to prove it."

"That were a ter'ble long time agone," remarked a third.  "It were
afore I were born."

"It were fifteen year after the beginnin' of the century," cried a
younger woman, who had stood leaning against the wall, with a smile of
superior knowledge upon her face.  "My Bill was a-saying so last
Sabbath, when I spoke to him o' old Daddy Brewster, here."

"And suppose he spoke truth, Missus Simpson, 'ow long agone do that
make it?"

"It's eighty-one now," said the original speaker, checking off the
years upon her coarse red fingers, "and that were fifteen.  Ten and
ten, and ten, and ten, and ten--why, it's only sixty-and-six year, so
he ain't so old after all."

"But he weren't a newborn babe at the battle, silly!" cried the young
woman with a chuckle.  "S'pose he were only twenty, then he couldn't be
less than six-and-eighty now, at the lowest."

"Aye, he's that--every day of it," cried several.

"I've had 'bout enough of it," remarked the large woman gloomily.
"Unless his young niece, or grandniece, or whatever she is, come
to-day, I'm off, and he can find some one else to do his work.  Your
own 'ome first, says I."

"Ain't he quiet, then, Missus Simpson?" asked the youngest of the group.

"Listen to him now," she answered, with her hand half raised and her
head turned slantwise towards the open door.  From the upper floor
there came a shuffling, sliding sound with a sharp tapping of a stick.
"There he go back and forrards, doing what he call his sentry go.  'Arf
the night through he's at that game, the silly old juggins.  At six
o'clock this very mornin there he was beatin' with a stick at my door.
'Turn out, guard!' he cried, and a lot more jargon that I could make
nothing of.  Then what with his coughin' and 'awkin' and spittin',
there ain't no gettin' a wink o' sleep.  Hark to him now!"

"Missus Simpson, Missus Simpson!" cried a cracked and querulous voice
from above.

"That's him!" she cried, nodding her head with an air of triumph.  "He
do go on somethin' scandalous.  Yes, Mr. Brewster, sir."

"I want my morning ration, Missus Simpson."

"It's just ready, Mr. Brewster, sir."

"Blessed if he ain't like a baby cryin' for its pap," said the young
woman.

"I feel as if I could shake his old bones up sometimes!" cried Mrs.
Simpson viciously.  "But who's for a 'arf of fourpenny?"

The whole company were about to shuffle off to the public house, when a
young girl stepped across the road and touched the housekeeper timidly
upon the arm.  "I think that is No. 56 Arsenal View," she said.  "Can
you tell me if Mr. Brewster lives here?"

The housekeeper looked critically at the newcomer.  She was a girl of
about twenty, broad-faced and comely, with a turned-up nose and large,
honest grey eyes.  Her print dress, her straw hat, with its bunch of
glaring poppies, and the bundle she carried, had all a smack of the
country.

"You're Norah Brewster, I s'pose," said Mrs. Simpson, eyeing her up and
down with no friendly gaze.

"Yes, I've come to look after my Granduncle Gregory."

"And a good job too," cried the housekeeper, with a toss of her head.
"It's about time that some of his own folk took a turn at it, for I've
had enough of it.  There you are, young woman!  In you go and make
yourself at home.  There's tea in the caddy and bacon on the dresser,
and the old man will be about you if you don't fetch him his breakfast.
I'll send for my things in the evenin'."  With a nod she strolled off
with her attendant gossips in the direction of the public house.

Thus left to her own devices, the country girl walked into the front
room and took off her hat and jacket.  It was a low-roofed apartment
with a sputtering fire upon which a small brass kettle was singing
cheerily.  A stained cloth lay over half the table, with an empty brown
teapot, a loaf of bread, and some coarse crockery.  Norah Brewster
looked rapidly about her, and in an instant took over her new duties.
Ere five minutes had passed the tea was made, two slices of bacon were
frizzling on the pan, the table was rearranged, the antimacassars
straightened over the sombre brown furniture, and the whole room had
taken a new air of comfort and neatness.  This done she looked round
curiously at the prints upon the walls.  Over the fireplace, in a
small, square case, a brown medal caught her eye, hanging from a strip
of purple ribbon.  Beneath was a slip of newspaper cutting.  She stood
on her tiptoes, with her fingers on the edge of the mantelpiece, and
craned her neck up to see it, glancing down from time to time at the
bacon which simmered and hissed beneath her.  The cutting was yellow
with age, and ran in this way:

"On Tuesday an interesting ceremony was performed at the barracks of
the Third Regiment of Guards, when, in the presence of the Prince
Regent, Lord Hill, Lord Saltoun, and an assemblage which comprised
beauty as well as valour, a special medal was presented to Corporal
Gregory Brewster, of Captain Haldane's flank company, in recognition of
his gallantry in the recent great battle in the Lowlands.  It appears
that on the ever-memorable 18th of June four companies of the Third
Guards and of the Coldstreams, under the command of Colonels Maitland
and Byng, held the important farmhouse of Hougoumont at the right of
the British position.  At a critical point of the action these troops
found themselves short of powder.  Seeing that Generals Foy and Jerome
Buonaparte were again massing their infantry for an attack on the
position, Colonel Byng dispatched Corporal Brewster to the rear to
hasten up the reserve ammunition.  Brewster came upon two powder
tumbrils of the Nassau division, and succeeded, after menacing the
drivers with his musket, in inducing them to convey their powder to
Hougoumont.  In his absence, however, the hedges surrounding the
position had been set on fire by a howitzer battery of the French, and
the passage of the carts full of powder became a most hazardous matter.
The first tumbril exploded, blowing the driver to fragments.  Daunted
by the fate of his comrade, the second driver turned his horses, but
Corporal Brewster, springing upon his seat, hurled the man down, and
urging the powder cart through the flames, succeeded in forcing his way
to his companions.  To this gallant deed may be directly attributed the
success of the British arms, for without powder it would have been
impossible to have held Hougoumont, and the Duke of Wellington had
repeatedly declared that had Hougoumont fallen, as well as La Haye
Sainte, he would have found it impossible to have held his ground.
Long may the heroic Brewster live to treasure the medal which he has so
bravely won, and to look back with pride to the day when, in the
presence of his comrades, he received this tribute to his valour from
the august hands of the first gentleman of the realm."

The reading of this old cutting increased in the girl's mind the
veneration which she had always had for her warrior kinsman.  From her
infancy he had been her hero, and she remembered how her father used to
speak of his courage and his strength, how he could strike down a
bullock with a blow of his fist and carry a fat sheep under either arm.
True, she had never seen him, but a rude painting at home which
depicted a square-faced, clean shaven, stalwart man with a great
bearskin cap, rose ever before her memory when she thought of him.

She was still gazing at the brown medal and wondering what the "Dulce
et decorum est" might mean, which was inscribed upon the edge, when
there came a sudden tapping and shuffling upon the stair, and there at
the door was standing the very man who had been so often in her
thoughts.

But could this indeed be he?  Where was the martial air, the flashing
eye, the warrior face which she had pictured?  There, framed in the
doorway, was a huge twisted old man, gaunt and puckered, with twitching
hands and shuffling, purposeless feet.  A cloud of fluffy white hair, a
red-veined nose, two thick tufts of eyebrow and a pair of dimly
questioning, watery blue eyes--these were what met her gaze.  He leaned
forward upon a stick, while his shoulders rose and fell with his
crackling, rasping breathing.

"I want my morning rations," he crooned, as he stumped forward to his
chair.  "The cold nips me without 'em.  See to my fingers!"  He held
out his distorted hands, all blue at the tips, wrinkled and gnarled,
with huge, projecting knuckles.

"It's nigh ready," answered the girl, gazing at him with wonder in her
eyes.  "Don't you know who I am, granduncle?  I am Norah Brewster from
Witham."

"Rum is warm," mumbled the old man, rocking to and fro in his chair,
"and schnapps is warm, and there's 'eat in soup, but it's a dish o' tea
for me.  What did you say your name was?"

"Norah Brewster."

"You can speak out, lass.  Seems to me folk's voices isn't as loud as
they used."

"I'm Norah Brewster, uncle.  I'm your grandniece come down from Essex
way to live with you."

"You'll be brother Jarge's girl!  Lor, to think o' little Jarge having
a girl!"  He chuckled hoarsely to himself, and the long, stringy sinews
of his throat jerked and quivered.

"I am the daughter of your brother George's son," said she, as she
turned the bacon.

"Lor, but little Jarge was a rare un!" he continued.  "Eh, by Jimini,
there was no chousing Jarge.  He's got a bull pup o' mine that I gave
him when I took the bounty.  You've heard him speak of it, likely?"

"Why, grandpa George has been dead this twenty year," said she, pouring
out the tea.

"Well, it was a bootiful pup--aye, a well-bred un, by Jimini!  I'm cold
for lack o' my rations.  Rum is good, and so is schnapps, but I'd as
lief have tea as either."

He breathed heavily while he devoured his food.  "It's a middlin'
goodish way you've come," said he at last.  "Likely the stage left
yesternight."

"The what, uncle?"

"The coach that brought you."

"Nay, I came by the mornin' train."

"Lor, now, think o' that!  You ain't afeard o' those newfangled things!
By Jimini, to think of you comin' by railroad like that!  What's the
world a-comin' to!"

There was silence for some minutes while Norah sat stirring her tea and
glancing sideways at the bluish lips and champing jaws of her companion.

"You must have seen a deal o' life, uncle," said she.  "It must seem a
long, long time to you!"

"Not so very long neither.  I'm ninety, come Candlemas; but it don't
seem long since I took the bounty.  And that battle, it might have been
yesterday.  Eh, but I get a power o' good from my rations!"  He did
indeed look less worn and colourless than when she first saw him.  His
face was flushed and his back more erect.

"Have you read that?" he asked, jerking his head towards the cutting.

"Yes, uncle, and I'm sure you must be proud of it."

"Ah, it was a great day for me!  A great day!  The Regent was there,
and a fine body of a man too!  'The ridgment is proud of you,' says he.
'And I'm proud of the ridgment,' say I.  'A damned good answer too!'
says he to Lord Hill, and they both bu'st out a-laughin'.  But what be
you a-peepin' out o' the window for?"

"Oh, uncle, here's a regiment of soldiers coming down the street with
the band playing in front of them."

"A ridgment, eh?  Where be my glasses?  Lor, but I can hear the band,
as plain as plain!  Here's the pioneers an' the drum-major!  What be
their number, lass?"  His eyes were shining and his bony yellow
fingers, like the claws of some fierce old bird, dug into her shoulder.

"They don't seem to have no number, uncle.  They've something wrote on
their shoulders.  Oxfordshire, I think it be."

"Ah, yes!" he growled.  "I heard as they'd dropped the numbers and
given them newfangled names.  There they go, by Jimini!  They're young
mostly, but they hain't forgot how to march.  They have the swing-aye,
I'll say that for them.  They've got the swing."  He gazed after them
until the last files had turned the corner and the measured tramp of
their marching had died away in the distance.

He had just regained his chair when the door opened and a gentleman
stepped in.

"Ah, Mr. Brewster!  Better to-day?" he asked.

"Come in, doctor!  Yes, I'm better.  But there's a deal o' bubbling in
my chest.  It's all them toobes.  If I could but cut the phlegm, I'd be
right.  Can't you give me something to cut the phlegm?"

The doctor, a grave-faced young man, put his fingers to the furrowed,
blue-corded wrist.

"You must be careful," he said.  "You must take no liberties."  The
thin tide of life seemed to thrill rather than to throb under his
finger.

The old man chuckled.

"I've got brother Jarge's girl to look after me now.  She'll see I
don't break barracks or do what I hadn't ought to.  Why, darn my skin,
I knew something was amiss!

"With what?"

"Why, with them soldiers.  You saw them pass, doctor--eh?  They'd
forgot their stocks.  Not one on 'em had his stock on."  He croaked and
chuckled for a long time over his discovery.  "It wouldn't ha' done for
the Dook!" he muttered.  "No, by Jimini! the Dook would ha' had a word
there."

The doctor smiled.  "Well, you are doing very well," said he.  "I'll
look in once a week or so, and see how you are."  As Norah followed him
to the door, he beckoned her outside.

"He is very weak," he whispered.  "If you find him failing you must
send for me."

"What ails him, doctor?"

"Ninety years ails him.  His arteries are pipes of lime.  His heart is
shrunken and flabby.  The man is worn out."

Norah stood watching the brisk figure of the young doctor, and
pondering over these new responsibilities which had come upon her.
When she turned a tall, brown-faced artilleryman, with the three gold
chevrons of sergeant upon his arm, was standing, carbine in hand, at
her elbow.

"Good-morning, miss," said he, raising one thick finger to his jaunty,
yellow-banded cap.  "I b'lieve there's an old gentleman lives here of
the name of Brewster, who was engaged in the battle o' Waterloo?"

"It's my granduncle, sir," said Norah, casting down her eyes before the
keen, critical gaze of the young soldier.  "He is in the front parlour."

"Could I have a word with him, miss?  I'll call again if it don't
chance to be convenient."

"I am sure that he would be very glad to see you, sir.  He's in here,
if you'll step in.  Uncle, here's a gentleman who wants to speak with
you."

"Proud to see you, sir--proud and glad, sir," cried the sergeant,
taking three steps forward into the room, and grounding his carbine
while he raised his hand, palm forwards, in a salute.  Norah stood by
the door, with her mouth and eyes open, wondering if her granduncle had
ever, in his prime, looked like this magnificent creature, and whether
he, in his turn, would ever come to resemble her granduncle.

The old man blinked up at his visitor, and shook his head slowly.  "Sit
ye down, sergeant," said he, pointing with his stick to a chair.
"You're full young for the stripes.  Lordy, it's easier to get three
now than one in my day.  Gunners were old soldiers then and the grey
hairs came quicker than the three stripes."

"I am eight years' service, sir," cried the sergeant.  "Macdonald is my
name--Sergeant Macdonald, of H Battery, Southern Artillery Division.  I
have called as the spokesman of my mates at the gunner's barracks to
say that we are proud to have you in the town, sir."

Old Brewster chuckled and rubbed his bony hands.  "That were what the
Regent said," he cried.  "'The ridgment is proud of ye,' says he.  'And
I am proud of the ridgment,' says I.  'And a damned good answer too,'
says he, and he and Lord Hill bu'st out a-laughin'."

"The non-commissioned mess would be proud and honoured to see you,
sir," said Sergeant Macdonald; "and if you could step as far you'll
always find a pipe o' baccy and a glass o' grog a-waitin' you."

The old man laughed until he coughed.  "Like to see me, would they?
The dogs!" said he.  "Well, well, when the warm weather comes again
I'll maybe drop in.  Too grand for a canteen, eh?  Got your mess just
the same as the orficers.  What's the world a-comin' to at all!"

"You was in the line, sir, was you not?" asked the sergeant
respectfully.

"The line?" cried the old man, with shrill scorn.  "Never wore a shako
in my life.  I am a guardsman, I am.  Served in the Third Guards--the
same they call now the Scots Guards.  Lordy, but they have all marched
away--every man of them--from old Colonel Byng down to the drummer
boys, and here am I a straggler--that's what I am, sergeant, a
straggler!  I'm here when I ought to be there.  But it ain't my fault
neither, for I'm ready to fall in when the word comes."

"We've all got to muster there," answered the sergeant.  "Won't you try
my baccy, sir?" handing over a sealskin pouch.

Old Brewster drew a blackened clay pipe from his pocket, and began to
stuff the tobacco into the bowl.  In an instant it slipped through his
fingers, and was broken to pieces on the floor.  His lip quivered, his
nose puckered up, and he began crying with the long, helpless sobs of a
child.  "I've broke my pipe," he cried.

"Don't, uncle; oh, don't!" cried Norah, bending over him, and patting
his white head as one soothes a baby.  "It don't matter.  We can easy
get another."

"Don't you fret yourself, sir," said the sergeant.  "'Ere's a wooden
pipe with an amber mouth, if you'll do me the honour to accept it from
me.  I'd be real glad if you will take it."

"Jimini!" cried he, his smiles breaking in an instant through his
tears.  "It's a fine pipe.  See to my new pipe, Norah.  I lay that
Jarge never had a pipe like that.  You've got your firelock there,
sergeant?"

"Yes, sir.  I was on my way back from the butts when I looked in."

"Let me have the feel of it.  Lordy, but it seems like old times to
have one's hand on a musket.  What's the manual, sergeant, eh?  Cock
your firelock--look to your priming--present your firelock--eh,
sergeant?  Oh, Jimini, I've broke your musket in halves!"

"That's all right, sir," cried the gunner laughing.  "You pressed on
the lever and opened the breech-piece.  That's where we load 'em, you
know."

"Load 'em at the wrong end!  Well, well, to think o' that!  And no
ramrod neither!  I've heard tell of it, but I never believed it afore.
Ah!  it won't come up to brown Bess.  When there's work to be done, you
mark my word and see if they don't come back to brown Bess."

"By the Lord, sir!" cried the sergeant hotly, "they need some change
out in South Africa now.  I see by this mornin's paper that the
Government has knuckled under to these Boers.  They're hot about it at
the non-com. mess, I can tell you, sir."

"Eh--eh," croaked old Brewster.  "By Jimini! it wouldn't ha' done for
the Dook; the Dook would ha' had a word to say over that."

"Ah, that he would, sir!" cried the sergeant; "and God send us another
like him.  But I've wearied you enough for one sitting.  I'll look in
again, and I'll bring a comrade or two with me, if I may, for there
isn't one but would be proud to have speech with you."

So, with another salute to the veteran and a gleam of white teeth at
Norah, the big gunner withdrew, leaving a memory of blue cloth and of
gold braid behind him.  Many days had not passed, however, before he
was back again, and during all the long winter he was a frequent
visitor at Arsenal View.  There came a time, at last, when it might be
doubted to which of the two occupants his visits were directed, nor was
it hard to say by which he was most anxiously awaited.  He brought
others with him; and soon, through all the lines, a pilgrimage to Daddy
Brewster's came to be looked upon as the proper thing to do.  Gunners
and sappers, linesmen and dragoons, came bowing and bobbing into the
little parlour, with clatter of side arms and clink of spurs,
stretching their long legs across the patchwork rug, and hunting in the
front of their tunics for the screw of tobacco or paper of snuff which
they had brought as a sign of their esteem.

It was a deadly cold winter, with six weeks on end of snow on the
ground, and Norah had a hard task to keep the life in that time-worn
body.  There were times when his mind would leave him, and when, save
an animal outcry when the hour of his meals came round, no word would
fall from him.  He was a white-haired child, with all a child's
troubles and emotions.  As the warm weather came once more, however,
and the green buds peeped forth again upon the trees, the blood thawed
in his veins, and he would even drag himself as far as the door to bask
in the life-giving sunshine.

"It do hearten me up so," he said one morning, as he glowed in the hot
May sun.  "It's a job to keep back the flies, though.  They get
owdacious in this weather, and they do plague me cruel."

"I'll keep them off you, uncle," said Norah.

"Eh, but it's fine!  This sunshine makes me think o' the glory to come.
You might read me a bit o' the Bible, lass.  I find it wonderful
soothing."

"What part would you like, uncle?"

"Oh, them wars."

"The wars?"

"Aye, keep to the wars!  Give me the Old Testament for choice.  There's
more taste to it, to my mind.  When parson comes he wants to get off to
something else; but it's Joshua or nothing with me.  Them Israelites
was good soldiers--good growed soldiers, all of 'em."

"But, uncle," pleaded Norah, "it's all peace in the next world."

"No, it ain't, gal."

"Oh, yes, uncle, surely!"

The old corporal knocked his stick irritably upon the ground.  "I tell
ye it ain't, gal.  I asked parson."

"Well, what did he say?"

"He said there was to be a last fight.  He even gave it a name, he did.
The battle of Arm--Arm----"

"Armageddon."

"Aye, that's the name parson said.  I 'specs the Third Guards'll be
there.  And the Dook--the Dook'll have a word to say."

An elderly, grey-whiskered gentleman had been walking down the street,
glancing up at the numbers of the houses.  Now as his eyes fell upon
the old man, he came straight for him.

"Hullo!" said he; "perhaps you are Gregory Brewster?"

"My name, sir," answered the veteran.

"You are the same Brewster, as I understand, who is on the roll of the
Scots Guards as having been present at the battle of Waterloo?"

"I am that man, sir, though we called it the Third Guards in those
days.  It was a fine ridgment, and they only need me to make up a full
muster."

"Tut, tut! they'll have to wait years for that," said the gentleman
heartily.  "But I am the colonel of the Scots Guards, and I thought I
would like to have a word with you."

Old Gregory Brewster was up in an instant, with his hand to his
rabbit-skin cap.  "God bless me!" he cried, "to think of it! to think
of it!"

"Hadn't the gentleman better come in?" suggested the practical Norah
from behind the door.

"Surely, sir, surely; walk in, sir, if I may be so bold."  In his
excitement he had forgotten his stick, and as he led the way into the
parlour his knees tottered, and he threw out his hands.  In an instant
the colonel had caught him on one side and Norah on the other.

"Easy and steady," said the colonel, as he led him to his armchair.

"Thank ye, sir; I was near gone that time.  But, Lordy I why, I can
scarce believe it.  To think of me the corporal of the flank company
and you the colonel of the battalion!  How things come round, to be
sure!"

"Why, we are very proud of you in London," said the colonel.  "And so
you are actually one of the men who held Hougoumont."  He looked at the
bony, trembling hands, with their huge, knotted knuckles, the stringy
throat, and the heaving, rounded shoulders.  Could this, indeed, be the
last of that band of heroes?  Then he glanced at the half-filled
phials, the blue liniment bottles, the long-spouted kettle, and the
sordid details of the sick room.  "Better, surely, had he died under
the blazing rafters of the Belgian farmhouse," thought the colonel.

"I hope that you are pretty comfortable and happy," he remarked after a
pause.

"Thank ye, sir.  I have a good deal o' trouble with my toobes--a deal
o' trouble.  You wouldn't think the job it is to cut the phlegm.  And I
need my rations.  I gets cold without 'em.  And the flies!  I ain't
strong enough to fight against them."

"How's the memory?" asked the colonel.

"Oh, there ain't nothing amiss there.  Why, sir, I could give you the
name of every man in Captain Haldane's flank company."

"And the battle--you remember it?"

"Why, I sees it all afore me every time I shuts my eyes.  Lordy, sir,
you wouldn't hardly believe how clear it is to me.  There's our line
from the paregoric bottle right along to the snuff box.  D'ye see?
Well, then, the pill box is for Hougoumont on the right--where we
was--and Norah's thimble for La Haye Sainte.  There it is, all right,
sir; and here were our guns, and here behind the reserves and the
Belgians.  Ach, them Belgians!"  He spat furiously into the fire.
"Then here's the French, where my pipe lies; and over here, where I put
my baccy pouch, was the Proosians a-comin' up on our left flank.
Jimini, but it was a glad sight to see the smoke of their guns!"

"And what was it that struck you most now in connection with the whole
affair?" asked the colonel.

"I lost three half-crowns over it, I did," crooned old Brewster.  "I
shouldn't wonder if I was never to get that money now.  I lent 'em to
Jabez Smith, my rear rank man, in Brussels.  'Only till pay-day, Grig,'
says he.  By Gosh! he was stuck by a lancer at Quatre Bras, and me with
not so much as a slip o' paper to prove the debt!  Them three
half-crowns is as good as lost to me."

The colonel rose from his chair laughing.  "The officers of the Guards
want you to buy yourself some little trifle which may add to your
comfort," he said.  "It is not from me, so you need not thank me." He
took up the old man's tobacco pouch and slipped a crisp banknote inside
it.

"Thank ye kindly, sir.  But there's one favour that I would like to ask
you, colonel."

"Yes, my man."

"If I'm called, colonel, you won't grudge me a flag and a firing party?
I'm not a civilian; I'm a guardsman--I'm the last of the old Third
Guards."

"All right, my man, I'll see to it," said the colonel.  "Good-bye; I
hope to have nothing but good news from you."

"A kind gentleman, Norah," croaked old Brewster, as they saw him walk
past the window; "but, Lordy, he ain't fit to hold the stirrup o' my
Colonel Byng!"

It was on the very next day that the old corporal took a sudden change
for the worse.  Even the golden sunlight streaming through the window
seemed unable to warm that withered frame.  The doctor came and shook
his head in silence.  All day the man lay with only his puffing blue
lips and the twitching of his scraggy neck to show that he still held
the breath of life.  Norah and Sergeant Macdonald had sat by him in the
afternoon, but he had shown no consciousness of their presence.  He lay
peacefully, his eyes half closed, his hands under his cheek, as one who
is very weary.

They had left him for an instant and were sitting in the front room,
where Norah was preparing tea, when of a sudden they heard a shout that
rang through the house.  Loud and clear and swelling, it pealed in
their ears--a voice full of strength and energy and fiery passion.
"The Guards need powder!" it cried; and yet again, "The Guards need
powder!"

The sergeant sprang from his chair and rushed in, followed by the
trembling Norah.  There was the old man standing up, his blue eyes
sparkling, his white hair bristling, his whole figure towering and
expanding, with eagle head and glance of fire.  "The Guards need
powder!" he thundered once again, "and, by God, they shall have it!" He
threw up his long arms, and sank back with a groan into his chair.  The
sergeant stooped over him,  and his face darkened.

"Oh, Archie, Archie," sobbed the frightened girl, "what do you think of
him?"

The sergeant turned away.  "I think," said he, "that the Third Guards
have a full muster now."




THE THIRD GENERATION.

Scudamore Lane, sloping down riverwards from just behind the Monument,
lies at night in the shadow of two black and monstrous walls which loom
high above the glimmer of the scattered gas lamps.  The footpaths are
narrow, and the causeway is paved with rounded cobblestones, so that
the endless drays roar along it like breaking waves.  A few
old-fashioned houses lie scattered among the business premises, and in
one of these, half-way down on the left-hand side, Dr. Horace Selby
conducts his large practice.  It is a singular street for so big a man;
but a specialist who has an European reputation can afford to live
where he likes.  In his particular branch, too, patients do not always
regard seclusion as a disadvantage.

It was only ten o'clock.  The dull roar of the traffic which converged
all day upon London Bridge had died away now to a mere confused murmur.
It was raining heavily, and the gas shone dimly through the streaked
and dripping glass, throwing little circles upon the glistening
cobblestones.  The air was full of the sounds of the rain, the thin
swish of its fall, the heavier drip from the eaves, and the swirl and
gurgle down the two steep gutters and through the sewer grating.  There
was only one figure in the whole length of Scudamore Lane.  It was that
of a man, and it stood outside the door of Dr. Horace Selby.

He had just rung and was waiting for an answer.  The fanlight beat full
upon the gleaming shoulders of his waterproof and upon his upturned
features.  It was a wan, sensitive, clear-cut face, with some subtle,
nameless peculiarity in its expression, something of the startled horse
in the white-rimmed eye, something too of the helpless child in the
drawn cheek and the weakening of the lower lip.  The man-servant knew
the stranger as a patient at a bare glance at those frightened eyes.
Such a look had been seen at that door many times before.

"Is the doctor in?"

The man hesitated.

"He has had a few friends to dinner, sir.  He does not like to be
disturbed outside his usual hours, sir."

"Tell him that I MUST see him.  Tell him that it is of the very first
importance.  Here is my card."  He fumbled with his trembling fingers
in trying to draw one from his case.  "Sir Francis Norton is the name.
Tell him that Sir Francis Norton, of Deane Park, must see him without
delay."

"Yes, sir."  The butler closed his fingers upon the card and the
half-sovereign which accompanied it.  "Better hang your coat up here in
the hall.  It is very wet.  Now if you will wait here in the
consulting-room, I have no doubt that I shall be able to send the
doctor in to you."

It was a large and lofty room in which the young baronet found himself.
The carpet was so soft and thick that his feet made no sound as he
walked across it.  The two gas jets were turned only half-way up, and
the dim light with the faint aromatic smell which filled the air had a
vaguely religious suggestion.  He sat down in a shining leather
armchair by the smouldering fire and looked gloomily about him.  Two
sides of the room were taken up with books, fat and sombre, with broad
gold lettering upon their backs.  Beside him was the high,
old-fashioned mantelpiece of white marble--the top of it strewed with
cotton wadding and bandages, graduated measures, and little bottles.
There was one with a broad neck just above him containing bluestone,
and another narrower one with what looked like the ruins of a broken
pipestem and "Caustic" outside upon a red label.  Thermometers,
hypodermic syringes bistouries and spatulas were scattered about both
on the mantelpiece and on the central table on either side of the
sloping desk.  On the same table, to the right, stood copies of the
five books which Dr. Horace Selby had written upon the subject with
which his name is peculiarly associated, while on the left, on the top
of a red medical directory, lay a huge glass model of a human eye the
size of a turnip, which opened down the centre to expose the lens and
double chamber within.

Sir Francis Norton had never been remarkable for his powers of
observation, and yet he found himself watching these trifles with the
keenest attention.  Even the corrosion of the cork of an acid bottle
caught his eye, and he wondered that the doctor did not use glass
stoppers.  Tiny scratches where the light glinted off from the table,
little stains upon the leather of the desk, chemical formulae scribbled
upon the labels of the phials--nothing was too slight to arrest his
attention.  And his sense of hearing was equally alert.  The heavy
ticking of the solemn black clock above the mantelpiece struck quite
painfully upon his ears.  Yet in spite of it, and in spite also of the
thick, old-fashioned wooden partition, he could hear voices of men
talking in the next room, and could even catch scraps of their
conversation.  "Second hand was bound to take it." "Why, you drew the
last of them yourself!"

"How could I play the queen when I knew that the ace was against me?"
The phrases came in little spurts falling back into the dull murmur of
conversation.  And then suddenly he heard the creaking of a door and a
step in the hall, and knew with a tingling mixture of impatience and
horror that the crisis of his life was at hand.

Dr. Horace Selby was a large, portly man with an imposing presence.
His nose and chin were bold and pronounced, yet his features were
puffy, a combination which would blend more freely with the wig and
cravat of the early Georges than with the close-cropped hair and black
frock-coat of the end of the nineteenth century.  He was clean shaven,
for his mouth was too good to cover--large, flexible, and sensitive,
with a kindly human softening at either corner which with his brown
sympathetic eyes had drawn out many a shame-struck sinner's secret.
Two masterful little bushy side-whiskers bristled out from under his
ears spindling away upwards to merge in the thick curves of his
brindled hair.  To his patients there was something reassuring in the
mere bulk and dignity of the man.  A high and easy bearing in medicine
as in war bears with it a hint of victories in the past, and a promise
of others to come.  Dr. Horace Selby's face was a consolation, and so
too were the large, white, soothing hands, one of which he held out to
his visitor.

"I am sorry to have kept you waiting.  It is a conflict of duties, you
perceive--a host's to his guests and an adviser's to his patient.  But
now I am entirely at your disposal, Sir Francis.  But dear me, you are
very cold."

"Yes, I am cold."

"And you are trembling all over.  Tut, tut, this will never do!  This
miserable night has chilled you.  Perhaps some little stimulant----"

"No, thank you.  I would really rather not.  And it is not the night
which has chilled me.  I am frightened, doctor."

The doctor half-turned in his chair, and he patted the arch of the
young man's knee, as he might the neck of a restless horse.

"What then?" he asked, looking over his shoulder at the pale face with
the startled eyes.

Twice the young man parted his lips.  Then he stooped with a sudden
gesture, and turning up the right leg of his trousers he pulled down
his sock and thrust forward his shin.  The doctor made a clicking noise
with his tongue as he glanced at it.

"Both legs?"

"No, only one."

"Suddenly?"

"This morning."

"Hum."

The doctor pouted his lips, and drew his finger and thumb down the line
of his chin.  "Can you account for it?" he asked briskly.

"No."

A trace of sternness came into the large brown eyes.

"I need not point out to you that unless the most absolute
frankness----"

The patient sprang from his chair.  "So help me God!" he cried, "I have
nothing in my life with which to reproach myself.  Do you think that I
would be such a fool as to come here and tell you lies.  Once for all,
I have nothing to regret."  He was a pitiful, half-tragic and
half-grotesque figure, as he stood with one trouser leg rolled to the
knee, and that ever present horror still lurking in his eyes.  A burst
of merriment came from the card-players in the next room, and the two
looked at each other in silence.

"Sit down," said the doctor abruptly, "your assurance is quite
sufficient."  He stooped and ran his finger down the line of the young
man's shin, raising it at one point.  "Hum, serpiginous," he murmured,
shaking his head.  "Any other symptoms?"

"My eyes have been a little weak."

"Let me see your teeth."  He glanced at them, and again made the
gentle, clicking sound of sympathy and disapprobation.

"Now your eye."  He lit a lamp at the patient's elbow, and holding a
small crystal lens to concentrate the light, he threw it obliquely upon
the patient's eye.  As he did so a glow of pleasure came over his large
expressive face, a flush of such enthusiasm as the botanist feels when
he packs the rare plant into his tin knapsack, or the astronomer when
the long-sought comet first swims into the field of his telescope.

"This is very typical--very typical indeed," he murmured, turning to
his desk and jotting down a few memoranda upon a sheet of paper.
"Curiously enough, I am writing a monograph upon the subject.  It is
singular that you should have been able to furnish so well-marked a
case."  He had so forgotten the patient in his symptom, that he had
assumed an almost congratulatory air towards its possessor.  He
reverted to human sympathy again, as his patient asked for particulars.

"My dear sir, there is no occasion for us to go into strictly
professional details together," said he soothingly.  "If, for example,
I were to say that you have interstitial keratitis, how would you be
the wiser?  There are indications of a strumous diathesis.  In broad
terms, I may say that you have a constitutional and hereditary taint."

The young baronet sank back in his chair, and his chin fell forwards
upon his chest.  The doctor sprang to a side-table and poured out half
a glass of liqueur brandy which he held to his patient's lips.  A
little fleck of colour came into his cheeks as he drank it down.

"Perhaps I spoke a little abruptly," said the doctor, "but you must
have known the nature of your complaint.  Why, otherwise, should you
have come to me?"

"God help me, I suspected it; but only today when my leg grew bad.  My
father had a leg like this."

"It was from him, then----?"

"No, from my grandfather.  You have heard of Sir Rupert Norton, the
great Corinthian?"

The doctor was a man of wide reading with a retentive, memory.  The
name brought back instantly to him the remembrance of the sinister
reputation of its owner--a notorious buck of the thirties--who had
gambled and duelled and steeped himself in drink and debauchery, until
even the vile set with whom he consorted had shrunk away from him in
horror, and left him to a sinister old age with the barmaid wife whom
he had married in some drunken frolic.  As he looked at the young man
still leaning back in the leather chair, there seemed for the instant
to flicker up behind him some vague presentiment of that foul old dandy
with his dangling seals, many-wreathed scarf, and dark satyric face.
What was he now?  An armful of bones in a mouldy box.  But his deeds--
they were living and rotting the blood in the veins of an innocent man.

"I see that you have heard of him," said the young baronet.  "He died
horribly, I have been told; but not more horribly than he had lived.
My father was his only son.  He was a studious man, fond of books and
canaries and the country; but his innocent life did not save him."

"His symptoms were cutaneous, I understand."

"He wore gloves in the house.  That was the first thing I can remember.
And then it was his throat.  And then his legs.  He used to ask me so
often about my own health, and I thought him so fussy, for how could I
tell what the meaning of it was.  He was always watching me--always
with a sidelong eye fixed upon me.  Now, at last, I know what he was
watching for."

"Had you brothers or sisters?"

"None, thank God."

"Well, well, it is a sad case, and very typical of many which come in
my way.  You are no lonely sufferer, Sir Francis.  There are many
thousands who bear the same cross as you do."

"But where is the justice of it, doctor?" cried the young man,
springing from his chair and pacing up and down the consulting-room.
"If I were heir to my grandfather's sins as well as to their results, I
could understand it, but I am of my father's type.  I love all that is
gentle and beautiful--music and poetry and art.  The coarse and animal
is abhorrent to me.  Ask any of my friends and they would tell you
that.  And now that this vile, loathsome thing--ach, I am polluted to
the marrow, soaked in abomination!  And why?  Haven't I a right to ask
why?  Did I do it?  Was it my fault?  Could I help being born?  And
look at me now, blighted and blasted, just as life was at its sweetest.
Talk about the sins of the father--how about the sins of the Creator?"
He shook his two clinched hands in the air--the poor impotent atom with
his pin-point of brain caught in the whirl of the infinite.

The doctor rose and placing his hands upon his shoulders he pressed him
back into his chair once more.  "There, there, my dear lad," said he;
"you must not excite yourself.  You are trembling all over.  Your
nerves cannot stand it.  We must take these great questions upon trust.
What are we, after all?  Half-evolved creatures in a transition stage,
nearer perhaps to the Medusa on the one side than to perfected humanity
on the other.  With half a complete brain we can't expect to understand
the whole of a complete fact, can we, now?  It is all very dim and
dark, no doubt; but I think that Pope's famous couplet sums up the
whole matter, and from my heart, after fifty years of varied
experience, I can say----"

But the young baronet gave a cry of impatience and disgust.  "Words,
words, words!  You can sit comfortably there in your chair and say
them--and think them too, no doubt.  You've had your life, but I've
never had mine.  You've healthy blood in your veins; mine is putrid.
And yet I am as innocent as you.  What would words do for you if you
were in this chair and I in that?  Ah, it's such a mockery and a
make-believe!  Don't think me rude, though, doctor.  I don't mean to be
that.  I only say that it is impossible for you or any other man to
realise it.  But I've a question to ask you, doctor.  It's one on which
my whole life must depend."  He writhed his fingers together in an
agony of apprehension.

"Speak out, my dear sir.  I have every sympathy with you."

"Do you think--do you think the poison has spent itself on me?  Do you
think that if I had children they would suffer?"

"I can only give one answer to that.  'The third and fourth
generation,' says the trite old text.  You may in time eliminate it
from your system, but many years must pass before you can think of
marriage."

"I am to be married on Tuesday," whispered the patient.

It was the doctor's turn to be thrilled with horror.  There were not
many situations which would yield such a sensation to his seasoned
nerves.  He sat in silence while the babble of the card-table broke in
upon them again.  "We had a double ruff if you had returned a heart."
"I was bound to clear the trumps."  They were hot and angry about it.

"How could you?" cried the doctor severely.  "It was criminal."

"You forget that I have only learned how I stand to-day."  He put his
two hands to his temples and pressed them convulsively.  "You are a man
of the world, Dr. Selby.  You have seen or heard of such things before.
Give me some advice.  I'm in your hands.  It is all very sudden and
horrible, and I don't think I am strong enough to bear it."

The doctor's heavy brows thickened into two straight lines, and he bit
his nails in perplexity.

"The marriage must not take place."

"Then what am I to do?"

"At all costs it must not take place."

"And I must give her up?"

"There can be no question about that."

The young man took out a pocketbook and drew from it a small
photograph, holding it out towards the doctor.  The firm face softened
as he looked at it.

"It is very hard on you, no doubt.  I can appreciate it more now that I
have seen that.  But there is no alternative at all.  You must give up
all thought of it."

"But this is madness, doctor--madness, I tell you.  No, I won't raise
my voice.  I forgot myself.  But realise it, man.  I am to be married
on Tuesday.  This coming Tuesday, you understand.  And all the world
knows it.  How can I put such a public affront upon her.  It would be
monstrous."

"None the less it must be done.  My dear lad, there is no way out of
it."

"You would have me simply write brutally and break the engagement at
the last moment without a reason.  I tell you I couldn't do it."

"I had a patient once who found himself in a somewhat similar situation
some years ago," said the doctor thoughtfully.  "His device was a
singular one.  He deliberately committed a penal offence, and so
compelled the young lady's people to withdraw their consent to the
marriage."

The young baronet shook his head.  "My personal honour is as yet
unstained," said he.  "I have little else left, but that, at least, I
will preserve."

"Well, well, it is a nice dilemma, and the choice lies with you."

"Have you no other suggestion?"

"You don't happen to have property in Australia?"

"None."

"But you have capital?"

"Yes."

"Then you could buy some.  To-morrow morning would do.  A thousand
mining shares would be enough.  Then you might write to say that urgent
business affairs have compelled you to start at an hour's notice to
inspect your property.  That would give you six months, at any rate."

"Well, that would be possible.  Yes, certainly, it would be possible.
But think of her position.  The house full of wedding presents--guests
coming from a distance.  It is awful.  And you say that there is no
alternative."

The doctor shrugged his shoulders.

"Well, then, I might write it now, and start to-morrow--eh?  Perhaps
you would let me use your desk.  Thank you.  I am so sorry to keep you
from your guests so long.  But I won't be a moment now."

He wrote an abrupt note of a few lines.  Then with a sudden impulse he
tore it to shreds and flung it into the fireplace.

"No, I can't sit down and tell her a lie, doctor," he said rising.  "We
must find some other way out of this.  I will think it over and let you
know my decision.  You must allow me to double your fee as I have taken
such an unconscionable time.  Now good-bye, and thank you a thousand
times for your sympathy and advice."

"Why, dear me, you haven't even got your prescription yet.  This is the
mixture, and I should recommend one of these powders every morning, and
the chemist will put all directions upon the ointment box.  You are
placed in a cruel situation, but I trust that these may be but passing
clouds.  When may I hope to hear from you again?"

"To-morrow morning."

"Very good.  How the rain is splashing in the street!  You have your
waterproof there.  You will need it.  Good-bye, then, until to-morrow."

He opened the door.  A gust of cold, damp air swept into the hall.  And
yet the doctor stood for a minute or more watching the lonely figure
which passed slowly through the yellow splotches of the gas lamps, and
into the broad bars of darkness between.  It was but his own shadow
which trailed up the wall as he passed the lights, and yet it looked to
the doctor's eye as though some huge and sombre figure walked by a
manikin's side and led him silently up the lonely street.

Dr. Horace Selby heard again of his patient next morning, and rather
earlier than he had expected.  A paragraph in the Daily News caused him
to push away his breakfast untasted, and turned him sick and faint
while he read it.  "A Deplorable Accident," it was headed, and it ran
in this way:

"A fatal accident of a peculiarly painful character is reported from
King William Street.  About eleven o'clock last night a young man was
observed while endeavouring to get out of the way of a hansom to slip
and fall under the wheels of a heavy, two-horse dray.  On being picked
up his injuries were found to be of the most shocking character, and he
expired while being conveyed to the hospital.  An examination of his
pocketbook and cardcase shows beyond any question that the deceased is
none other than Sir Francis Norton, of Deane Park, who has only within
the last year come into the baronetcy.  The accident is made the more
deplorable as the deceased, who was only just of age, was on the eve of
being married to a young lady belonging to one of the oldest families
in the South.  With his wealth and his talents the ball of fortune was
at his feet, and his many friends will be deeply grieved to know that
his promising career has been cut short in so sudden and tragic a
fashion."




A FALSE START.

"Is Dr. Horace Wilkinson at home?"

"I am he.  Pray step in."

The visitor looked somewhat astonished at having the door opened to him
by the master of the house.

"I wanted to have a few words."

The doctor, a pale, nervous young man, dressed in an
ultra-professional, long black frock-coat, with a high, white collar
cutting off his dapper side-whiskers in the centre, rubbed his hands
together and smiled.  In the thick, burly man in front of him he
scented a patient, and it would be his first.  His scanty resources had
begun to run somewhat low, and, although he had his first quarter's
rent safely locked away in the right-hand drawer of his desk, it was
becoming a question with him how he should meet the current expenses of
his very simple housekeeping.  He bowed, therefore, waved his visitor
in, closed the hall door in a careless fashion, as though his own
presence thereat had been a purely accidental circumstance, and finally
led the burly stranger into his scantily furnished front room, where he
motioned him to a seat.  Dr. Wilkinson planted himself behind his desk,
and, placing his finger-tips together, he gazed with some apprehension
at his companion.  What was the matter with the man?  He seemed very
red in the face.  Some of his old professors would have diagnosed his
case by now, and would have electrified the patient by describing his
own symptoms before he had said a word about them.  Dr. Horace
Wilkinson racked his brains for some clue, but Nature had fashioned him
as a plodder--a very reliable plodder and nothing more.  He could think
of nothing save that the visitor's watch-chain had a very brassy
appearance, with a corollary to the effect that he would be lucky if he
got half-a-crown out of him.  Still, even half-a-crown was something in
those early days of struggle.

Whilst the doctor had been running his eyes over the stranger, the
latter had been plunging his hands into pocket after pocket of his
heavy coat.  The heat of the weather, his dress, and this exercise of
pocket-rummaging had all combined to still further redden his face,
which had changed from brick to beet, with a gloss of moisture on his
brow.  This extreme ruddiness brought a clue at last to the observant
doctor.  Surely it was not to be attained without alcohol.  In alcohol
lay the secret of this man's trouble.  Some little delicacy was needed,
however, in showing him that he had read his case aright--that at a
glance he had penetrated to the inmost sources of his ailments.

"It's very hot," observed the stranger, mopping his forehead.

"Yes, it is weather which tempts one to drink rather more beer than is
good for one," answered Dr. Horace Wilkinson, looking very knowingly at
his companion from over his finger-tips.

"Dear, dear, you shouldn't do that."

"I!  I never touch beer."

"Neither do I.  I've been an abstainer for twenty years."

This was depressing.  Dr. Wilkinson blushed until he was nearly as red
as the other.  "May I ask what I can do for you?" he asked, picking up
his stethoscope and tapping it gently against his thumb-nail.

"Yes, I was just going to tell you.  I heard of your coming, but I
couldn't get round before----"  He broke into a nervous little cough.

"Yes?" said the doctor encouragingly.

"I should have been here three weeks ago, but you know how these things
get put off."  He coughed again behind his large red hand.

"I do not think that you need say anything more," said the doctor,
taking over the case with an easy air of command.  "Your cough is quite
sufficient.  It is entirely bronchial by the sound.  No doubt the
mischief is circumscribed at present, but there is always the danger
that it may spread, so you have done wisely to come to me.  A little
judicious treatment will soon set you right.  Your waistcoat, please,
but not your shirt.  Puff out your chest and say ninety-nine in a deep
voice."

The red-faced man began to laugh.  "It's all right, doctor," said he.
"That cough comes from chewing tobacco, and I know it's a very bad
habit.  Nine-and-ninepence is what I have to say to you, for I'm the
officer of the gas company, and they have a claim against you for that
on the metre."

Dr. Horace Wilkinson collapsed into his chair.  "Then you're not a
patient?" he gasped.

"Never needed a doctor in my life, sir."

"Oh, that's all right."  The doctor concealed his disappointment under
an affectation of facetiousness.  "You don't look as if you troubled
them much.  I don't know what we should do if every one were as robust.
I shall call at the company's offices and pay this small amount."

"If you could make it convenient, sir, now that I am here, it would
save trouble----"

"Oh, certainly!"  These eternal little sordid money troubles were more
trying to the doctor than plain living or scanty food.  He took out his
purse and slid the contents on to the table.  There were two
half-crowns and some pennies.  In his drawer he had ten golden
sovereigns.  But those were his rent.  If he once broke in upon them he
was lost.  He would starve first.

"Dear me!" said he, with a smile, as at some strange, unheard-of
incident.  "I have run short of small change.  I am afraid I shall have
to call upon the company, after all."

"Very well, sir." The inspector rose, and with a practised glance
around, which valued every article in the room, from the two-guinea
carpet to the eight-shilling muslin curtains, he took his departure.

When he had gone Dr. Wilkinson rearranged his room, as was his habit a
dozen times in the day.  He laid out his large Quain's Dictionary of
Medicine in the forefront of the table so as to impress the casual
patient that he had ever the best authorities at his elbow.  Then he
cleared all the little instruments out of his pocket-case--the
scissors, the forceps, the bistouries, the lancets--and he laid them
all out beside the stethoscope, to make as good a show as possible.
His ledger, day-book, and visiting-book were spread in front of him.
There was no entry in any of them yet, but it would not look well to
have the covers too glossy and new, so he rubbed them together and
daubed ink over them.  Neither would it be well that any patient should
observe that his name was the first in the book, so he filled up the
first page of each with notes of imaginary visits paid to nameless
patients during the last three weeks.  Having done all this, he rested
his head upon his hands and relapsed into the terrible occupation of
waiting.

Terrible enough at any time to the young professional man, but most of
all to one who knows that the weeks, and even the days during which he
can hold out are numbered.  Economise as he would, the money would
still slip away in the countless little claims which a man never
understands until he lives under a rooftree of his own.  Dr. Wilkinson
could not deny, as he sat at his desk and looked at the little heap of
silver and coppers, that his chances of being a successful practitioner
in Sutton were rapidly vanishing away.

And yet it was a bustling, prosperous town, with so much money in it
that it seemed strange that a man with a trained brain and dexterous
fingers should be starved out of it for want of employment.  At his
desk, Dr. Horace Wilkinson could see the never-ending double current of
people which ebbed and flowed in front of his window.  It was a busy
street, and the air was forever filled with the dull roar of life, the
grinding of the wheels, and the patter of countless feet.  Men, women,
and children, thousands and thousands of them passed in the day, and
yet each was hurrying on upon his own business, scarce glancing at the
small brass plate, or wasting a thought upon the man who waited in the
front room.  And yet how many of them would obviously, glaringly have
been the better for his professional assistance.  Dyspeptic men, anemic
women, blotched faces, bilious complexions--they flowed past him, they
needing him, he needing them, and yet the remorseless bar of
professional etiquette kept them forever apart.  What could he do?
Could he stand at his own front door, pluck the casual stranger by the
sleeve, and whisper in his ear, "Sir, you will forgive me for remarking
that you are suffering from a severe attack of acne rosacea, which
makes you a peculiarly unpleasant object.  Allow me to suggest that a
small prescription containing arsenic, which will not cost you more
than you often spend upon a single meal, will be very much to your
advantage."  Such an address would be a degradation to the high and
lofty profession of Medicine, and there are no such sticklers for the
ethics of that profession as some to whom she has been but a bitter and
a grudging mother.

Dr. Horace Wilkinson was still looking moodily out of the window, when
there came a sharp clang at the bell.  Often it had rung, and with
every ring his hopes had sprung up, only to dwindle away again, and
change to leaden disappointment, as he faced some beggar or touting
tradesman.  But the doctor's spirit was young and elastic, and again,
in spite of all experience, it responded to that exhilarating summons.
He sprang to his feet, cast his eyes over the table, thrust out his
medical books a little more prominently, and hurried to the door.  A
groan escaped him as he entered the hall.  He could see through the
half-glazed upper panels that a gypsy van, hung round with wicker
tables and chairs, had halted before his door, and that a couple of the
vagrants, with a baby, were waiting outside.  He had learned by
experience that it was better not even to parley with such people.

"I have nothing for you," said he, loosing the latch by an inch.  "Go
away!"

He closed the door, but the bell clanged once more.  "Get away!  Get
away!" he cried impatiently, and walked back into his consulting-room.
He had hardly seated himself when the bell went for the third time.  In
a towering passion he rushed back, flung open the door.

"What the----?"

"If you please, sir, we need a doctor."

In an instant he was rubbing his hands again with his blandest
professional smile.  These were patients, then, whom he had tried to
hunt from his doorstep--the very first patients, whom he had waited for
so impatiently.  They did not look very promising.  The man, a tall,
lank-haired gypsy, had gone back to the horse's head.  There remained a
small, hard-faced woman with a great bruise all round her eye.  She
wore a yellow silk handkerchief round her head, and a baby, tucked in a
red shawl, was pressed to her bosom.

"Pray step in, madam," said Dr. Horace Wilkinson, with his very best
sympathetic manner.  In this case, at least, there could be no mistake
as to diagnosis.  "If you will sit on this sofa, I shall very soon make
you feel much more comfortable."

He poured a little water from his carafe into a saucer, made a compress
of lint, fastened it over the injured eye, and secured the whole with a
spica bandage, secundum artem.

"Thank ye kindly, sir," said the woman, when his work was finished;
"that's nice and warm, and may God bless your honour.  But it wasn't
about my eye at all that I came to see a doctor."

"Not your eye?" Dr. Horace Wilkinson was beginning to be a little
doubtful as to the advantages of quick diagnosis.  It is an excellent
thing to be able to surprise a patient, but hitherto it was always the
patient who had surprised him.

"The baby's got the measles."

The mother parted the red shawl, and exhibited a little dark,
black-eyed gypsy baby, whose swarthy face was all flushed and mottled
with a dark-red rash.  The child breathed with a rattling sound, and it
looked up at the doctor with eyes which were heavy with want of sleep
and crusted together at the lids.

"Hum!  Yes.  Measles, sure enough--and a smart attack."

"I just wanted you to see her, sir, so that you could signify."

"Could what?"

"Signify, if anything happened."

"Oh, I see--certify."

"And now that you've seen it, sir, I'll go on, for Reuben--that's my
man--is in a hurry."

"But don't you want any medicine?"

"Oh, now you've seen it, it's all right.  I'll let you know if anything
happens."

"But you must have some medicine.  The child is very ill."  He
descended into the little room which he had fitted as a surgery, and he
made up a two-ounce bottle of cooling medicine.  In such cities as
Sutton there are few patients who can afford to pay a fee to both
doctor and chemist, so that unless the physician is prepared to play
the part of both he will have little chance of making a living at
either.

"There is your medicine, madam.  You will find the directions upon the
bottle.  Keep the child warm and give it a light diet."

"Thank you kindly, sir." She shouldered her baby and marched for the
door.

"Excuse me, madam," said the doctor nervously.  "Don't you think it too
small a matter to make a bill of?  Perhaps it would be better if we had
a settlement at once."

The gypsy woman looked at him reproachfully out of her one uncovered
eye.

"Are you going to charge me for that?" she asked.  "How much, then?"

"Well, say half-a-crown."  He mentioned the sum in a half-jesting way,
as though it were too small to take serious notice of, but the gypsy
woman raised quite a scream at the mention of it.

"'Arf-a-crown! for that?"

"Well, my good woman, why not go to the poor doctor if you cannot
afford a fee?"

She fumbled in her pocket, craning awkwardly to keep her grip upon the
baby.

"Here's sevenpence," she said at last, holding out a little pile of
copper coins.  "I'll give you that and a wicker footstool."

"But my fee is half-a-crown."  The doctor's views of the glory of his
profession cried out against this wretched haggling, and yet what was
he to do?  "Where am I to get 'arf-a-crown?  It is well for gentlefolk
like you who sit in your grand houses, and can eat and drink what you
like, an' charge 'arf-a-crown for just saying as much as, ''Ow d'ye
do?'  We can't pick up' arf-crowns like that.  What we gets we earns
'ard.  This sevenpence is just all I've got.  You told me to feed the
child light.  She must feed light, for what she's to have is more than
I know."

Whilst the woman had been speaking, Dr. Horace Wilkinson's eyes had
wandered to the tiny heap of money upon the table, which represented
all that separated him from absolute starvation, and he chuckled to
himself at the grim joke that he should appear to this poor woman to be
a being living in the lap of luxury.  Then he picked up the odd
coppers, leaving only the two half-crowns upon the table.

"Here you are," he said brusquely.  "Never mind the fee, and take these
coppers.  They may be of some use to you.  Good-bye!"  He bowed her
out, and closed the door behind her.  After all she was the thin edge
of the wedge.  These wandering people have great powers of
recommendation.  All large practices have been built up from such
foundations.  The hangers-on to the kitchen recommend to the kitchen,
they to the drawing-room, and so it spreads.  At least he could say now
that he had had a patient.

He went into the back room and lit the spirit-kettle to boil the water
for his tea, laughing the while at the recollection of his recent
interview.  If all patients were like this one it could easily be
reckoned how many it would take to ruin him completely.  Putting aside
the dirt upon his carpet and the loss of time, there were twopence gone
upon the bandage, fourpence or more upon the medicine, to say nothing
of phial, cork, label, and paper.  Then he had given her fivepence, so
that his first patient had absorbed altogether not less than one sixth
of his available capital.  If five more were to come he would be a
broken man.  He sat down upon the portmanteau and shook with laughter
at the thought, while he measured out his one spoonful and a half of
tea at one shilling eightpence into the brown earthenware teapot.
Suddenly, however, the laugh faded from his face, and he cocked his ear
towards the door, standing listening with a slanting head and a
sidelong eye.  There had been a rasping of wheels against the curb, the
sound of steps outside, and then a loud peal at the bell.  With his
teaspoon in his hand he peeped round the corner and saw with amazement
that a carriage and pair were waiting outside, and that a powdered
footman was standing at the door.  The spoon tinkled down upon the
floor, and he stood gazing in bewilderment.  Then, pulling himself
together, he threw open the door.

"Young man," said the flunky, "tell your master, Dr. Wilkinson, that he
is wanted just as quick as ever he can come to Lady Millbank, at the
Towers.  He is to come this very instant.  We'd take him with us, but
we have to go back to see if Dr. Mason is home yet.  Just you stir your
stumps and give him the message."

The footman nodded and was off in an instant, while the coachman lashed
his horses and the carriage flew down the street.

Here was a new development.  Dr. Horace Wilkinson stood at his door and
tried to think it all out.  Lady Millbank, of the Towers!  People of
wealth and position, no doubt.  And a serious case, or why this haste
and summoning of two doctors?  But, then, why in the name of all that
is wonderful should he be sent for?

He was obscure, unknown, without influence.  There must be some
mistake.  Yes, that must be the true explanation; or was it possible
that some one was attempting a cruel hoax upon him?  At any rate, it
was too positive a message to be disregarded.  He must set off at once
and settle the matter one way or the other.

But he had one source of information.  At the corner of the street was
a small shop where one of the oldest inhabitants dispensed newspapers
and gossip.  He could get information there if anywhere.  He put on his
well-brushed top hat, secreted instruments and bandages in all his
pockets, and without waiting for his tea closed up his establishment
and started off upon his adventure.

The stationer at the corner was a human directory to every one and
everything in Sutton, so that he soon had all the information which he
wanted.  Sir John Millbank was very well known in the town, it seemed.
He was a merchant prince, an exporter of pens, three times mayor, and
reported to be fully worth two millions sterling.

The Towers was his palatial seat, just outside the city.  His wife had
been an invalid for some years, and was growing worse.  So far the
whole thing seemed to be genuine enough.  By some amazing chance these
people really had sent for him.

And then another doubt assailed him, and he turned back into the shop.

"I am your neighbour, Dr. Horace Wilkinson," said he.  "Is there any
other medical man of that name in the town?"

No, the stationer was quite positive that there was not.

That was final, then.  A great good fortune had come in his way, and he
must take prompt advantage of it.  He called a cab and drove furiously
to the Towers, with his brain in a whirl, giddy with hope and delight
at one moment, and sickened with fears and doubts at the next lest the
case should in some way be beyond his powers, or lest he should find at
some critical moment that he was without the instrument or appliance
that was needed.  Every strange and outre case of which he had ever
heard or read came back into his mind, and long before he reached the
Towers he had worked himself into a positive conviction that he would
be instantly required to do a trephining at the least.

The Towers was a very large house, standing back amid trees, at the
head of a winding drive.  As he drove up the doctor sprang out, paid
away half his worldly assets as a fare, and followed a stately footman
who, having taken his name, led him through the oak-panelled,
stained-glass hall, gorgeous with deers' heads and ancient armour, and
ushered him into a large sitting-room beyond.  A very
irritable-looking, acid-faced man was seated in an armchair by the
fireplace, while two young ladies in white were standing together in
the bow window at the further end.

"Hullo! hullo! hullo!  What's this--heh?" cried the irritable man.
"Are you Dr. Wilkinson?  Eh?"

"Yes, sir, I am Dr. Wilkinson."

"Really, now.  You seem very young--much younger than I expected.
Well, well, well, Mason's old, and yet he don't seem to know much about
it.  I suppose we must try the other end now.  You're the Wilkinson who
wrote something about the lungs?  Heh?"

Here was a light!  The only two letters which the doctor had ever
written to The Lancet--modest little letters thrust away in a back
column among the wrangles about medical ethics and the inquiries as to
how much it took to keep a horse in the country--had been upon
pulmonary disease.  They had not been wasted, then.  Some eye had
picked them out and marked the name of the writer.  Who could say that
work was ever wasted, or that merit did not promptly meet with its
reward?

"Yes, I have written on the subject."

"Ha!  Well, then, where's Mason?"

"I have not the pleasure of his acquaintance."

"No?--that's queer too.  He knows you and thinks a lot of your opinion.
You're a stranger in the town, are you not?"

"Yes, I have only been here a very short time."

"That was what Mason said.  He didn't give me the address.  Said he
would call on you and bring you, but when the wife got worse of course
I inquired for you and sent for you direct.  I sent for Mason, too, but
he was out.  However, we can't wait for him, so just run away upstairs
and do what you can."

"Well, I am placed in a rather delicate position," said Dr. Horace
Wilkinson, with some hesitation.  "I am here, as I understand, to meet
my colleague, Dr. Mason, in consultation.  It would, perhaps, hardly be
correct for me to see the patient in his absence.  I think that I would
rather wait."

"Would you, by Jove!  Do you think I'll let my wife get worse while the
doctor is coolly kicking his heels in the room below?  No, sir, I am a
plain man, and I tell you that you will either go up or go out."

The style of speech jarred upon the doctor's sense of the fitness of
things, but still when a man's wife is ill much may be overlooked.  He
contented himself by bowing somewhat stiffly.  "I shall go up, if you
insist upon it," said he.

"I do insist upon it.  And another thing, I won't have her thumped
about all over the chest, or any hocus-pocus of the sort.  She has
bronchitis and asthma, and that's all.  If you can cure it well and
good.  But it only weakens her to have you tapping and listening, and
it does no good either."

Personal disrespect was a thing that the doctor could stand; but the
profession was to him a holy thing, and a flippant word about it cut
him to the quick.

"Thank you," said he, picking up his hat.  "I have the honour to wish
you a very good day.  I do not care to undertake the responsibility of
this case."

"Hullo! what's the matter now?"

"It is not my habit to give opinions without examining my patient.  I
wonder that you should suggest such a course to a medical man.  I wish
you good day."

But Sir John Millbank was a commercial man, and believed in the
commercial principle that the more difficult a thing is to attain the
more valuable it is.  A doctor's opinion had been to him a mere matter
of guineas.  But here was a young man who seemed to care nothing either
for his wealth or title.  His respect for his judgment increased
amazingly.

"Tut! tut!" said he; "Mason is not so thin-skinned.  There! there!
Have your way!  Do what you like and I won't say another word.  I'll
just run upstairs and tell Lady Millbank that you are coming."

The door had hardly closed behind him when the two demure young ladies
darted out of their corner, and fluttered with joy in front of the
astonished doctor.

"Oh, well done! well done!" cried the taller, clapping her hands.

"Don't let him bully you, doctor," said the other.  "Oh, it was so nice
to hear you stand up to him.  That's the way he does with poor Dr.
Mason.  Dr. Mason has never examined mamma yet.  He always takes papa's
word for everything.  Hush, Maude; here he comes again."  They subsided
in an instant into their corner as silent and demure as ever.

Dr. Horace Wilkinson followed Sir John up the broad, thick-carpeted
staircase, and into the darkened sick room.  In a quarter of an hour he
had sounded and sifted the case to the uttermost, and descended with
the husband once more to the drawing-room.  In front of the fireplace
were standing two gentlemen, the one a very typical, clean-shaven,
general practitioner, the other a striking-looking man of middle age,
with pale blue eyes and a long red beard.

"Hullo, Mason, you've come at last!"

"Yes, Sir John, and I have brought, as I promised, Dr. Wilkinson with
me."

"Dr.  Wilkinson!  Why, this is he."

Dr. Mason stared in astonishment.  "I have never seen the gentleman
before!" he cried.

"Nevertheless I am Dr. Wilkinson--Dr. Horace Wilkinson, of 114 Canal
View."

"Good gracious, Sir John!" cried Dr. Mason.

"Did you think that in a case of such importance I should call in a
junior local practitioner!  This is Dr. Adam Wilkinson, lecturer on
pulmonary diseases at Regent's College, London, physician upon the
staff of the St. Swithin's Hospital, and author of a dozen works upon
the subject.  He happened to be in Sutton upon a visit, and I thought I
would utilise his presence to have a first-rate opinion upon Lady
Millbank."

"Thank you," said Sir John, dryly.  "But I fear my wife is rather tired
now, for she has just been very thoroughly examined by this young
gentleman.  I think we will let it stop at that for the present;
though, of course, as you have had the trouble of coming here, I should
be glad to have a note of your fees."

When Dr. Mason had departed, looking very disgusted, and his friend,
the specialist, very amused, Sir John listened to all the young
physician had to say about the case.

"Now, I'll tell you what," said he, when he had finished.  "I'm a man
of my word, d'ye see?  When I like a man I freeze to him.  I'm a good
friend and a bad enemy.  I believe in you, and I don't believe in
Mason.  From now on you are my doctor, and that of my family.  Come and
see my wife every day.  How does that suit your book?"

"I am extremely grateful to you for your kind intentions toward me, but
I am afraid there is no possible way in which I can avail myself of
them."

"Heh! what d'ye mean?"

"I could not possibly take Dr. Mason's place in the middle of a case
like this.  It would be a most unprofessional act."

"Oh, well, go your own way!" cried Sir John, in despair.  "Never was
such a man for making difficulties.  You've had a fair offer and you've
refused it, and now you can just go your own way."

The millionaire stumped out of the room in a huff, and Dr. Horace
Wilkinson made his way homeward to his spirit-lamp and his
one-and-eightpenny tea, with his first guinea in his pocket, and with a
feeling that he had upheld the best traditions of his profession.

And yet this false start of his was a true start also, for it soon came
to Dr. Mason's ears that his junior had had it in his power to carry
off his best patient and had forborne to do so.  To the honour of the
profession be it said that such forbearance is the rule rather than the
exception, and yet in this case, with so very junior a practitioner and
so very wealthy a patient, the temptation was greater than is usual.
There was a grateful note, a visit, a friendship, and now the
well-known firm of Mason and Wilkinson is doing the largest family
practice in Sutton.




THE CURSE OF EVE.

Robert Johnson was an essentially commonplace man, with no feature to
distinguish him from a million others.  He was pale of face, ordinary
in looks, neutral in opinions, thirty years of age, and a married man.
By trade he was a gentleman's outfitter in the New North Road, and the
competition of business squeezed out of him the little character that
was left.  In his hope of conciliating customers he had become cringing
and pliable, until working ever in the same routine from day to day he
seemed to have sunk into a soulless machine rather than a man.  No
great question had ever stirred him.  At the end of this snug century,
self-contained in his own narrow circle, it seemed impossible that any
of the mighty, primitive passions of mankind could ever reach him.  Yet
birth, and lust, and illness, and death are changeless things, and when
one of these harsh facts springs out upon a man at some sudden turn of
the path of life, it dashes off for the moment his mask of civilisation
and gives a glimpse of the stranger and stronger face below.

Johnson's wife was a quiet little woman, with brown hair and gentle
ways.  His affection for her was the one positive trait in his
character.  Together they would lay out the shop window every Monday
morning, the spotless shirts in their green cardboard boxes below, the
neckties above hung in rows over the brass rails, the cheap studs
glistening from the white cards at either side, while in the background
were the rows of cloth caps and the bank of boxes in which the more
valuable hats were screened from the sunlight.  She kept the books and
sent out the bills.  No one but she knew the joys and sorrows which
crept into his small life.  She had shared his exultations when the
gentleman who was going to India had bought ten dozen shirts and an
incredible number of collars, and she had been as stricken as he when,
after the goods had gone, the bill was returned from the hotel address
with the intimation that no such person had lodged there.  For five
years they had worked, building up the business, thrown together all
the more closely because their marriage had been a childless one.  Now,
however, there were signs that a change was at hand, and that speedily.
She was unable to come downstairs, and her mother, Mrs. Peyton, came
over from Camberwell to nurse her and to welcome her grandchild.

Little qualms of anxiety came over Johnson as his wife's time
approached.  However, after all, it was a natural process.  Other men's
wives went through it unharmed, and why should not his?  He was himself
one of a family of fourteen, and yet his mother was alive and hearty.
It was quite the exception for anything to go wrong.  And yet in spite
of his reasonings the remembrance of his wife's condition was always
like a sombre background to all his other thoughts.

Dr. Miles of Bridport Place, the best man in the neighbourhood, was
retained five months in advance, and, as time stole on, many little
packets of absurdly small white garments with frill work and ribbons
began to arrive among the big consignments of male necessities.  And
then one evening, as Johnson was ticketing the scarfs in the shop, he
heard a bustle upstairs, and Mrs. Peyton came running down to say that
Lucy was bad and that she thought the doctor ought to be there without
delay.

It was not Robert Johnson's nature to hurry.  He was prim and staid and
liked to do things in an orderly fashion.  It was a quarter of a mile
from the corner of the New North Road where his shop stood to the
doctor's house in Bridport Place.  There were no cabs in sight so he
set off upon foot, leaving the lad to mind the shop.  At Bridport Place
he was told that the doctor had just gone to Harman Street to attend a
man in a fit.  Johnson started off for Harman Street, losing a little
of his primness as he became more anxious.  Two full cabs but no empty
ones passed him on the way.  At Harman Street he learned that the
doctor had gone on to a case of measles, fortunately he had left the
address--69 Dunstan Road, at the other side of the Regent's Canal.
Robert's primness had vanished now as he thought of the women waiting
at home, and he began to run as hard as he could down the Kingsland
Road.  Some way along he sprang into a cab which stood by the curb and
drove to Dunstan Road.  The doctor had just left, and Robert Johnson
felt inclined to sit down upon the steps in despair.

Fortunately he had not sent the cab away, and he was soon back at
Bridport Place.  Dr. Miles had not returned yet, but they were
expecting him every instant.  Johnson waited, drumming his fingers on
his knees, in a high, dim lit room, the air of which was charged with a
faint, sickly smell of ether.  The furniture was massive, and the books
in the shelves were sombre, and a squat black clock ticked mournfully
on the mantelpiece.  It told him that it was half-past seven, and that
he had been gone an hour and a quarter.  Whatever would the women think
of him!  Every time that a distant door slammed he sprang from his
chair in a quiver of eagerness.  His ears strained to catch the deep
notes of the doctor's voice.  And then, suddenly, with a gush of joy he
heard a quick step outside, and the sharp click of the key in the lock.
In an instant he was out in the hall, before the doctor's foot was over
the threshold.

"If you please, doctor, I've come for you," he cried; "the wife was
taken bad at six o'clock."

He hardly knew what he expected the doctor to do.  Something very
energetic, certainly--to seize some drugs, perhaps, and rush excitedly
with him through the gaslit streets.  Instead of that Dr. Miles threw
his umbrella into the rack, jerked off his hat with a somewhat peevish
gesture, and pushed Johnson back into the room.

"Let's see!  You <i>did</i> engage me, didn't you?" he asked in no very
cordial voice.

"Oh, yes, doctor, last November.  Johnson the outfitter, you know, in
the New North Road."

"Yes, yes.  It's a bit overdue," said the doctor, glancing at a list of
names in a note-book with a very shiny cover.  "Well, how is she?"

"I don't----"

"Ah, of course, it's your first.  You'll know more about it next time."

"Mrs. Peyton said it was time you were there, sir."

"My dear sir, there can be no very pressing hurry in a first case.  We
shall have an all-night affair, I fancy.  You can't get an engine to go
without coals, Mr. Johnson, and I have had nothing but a light lunch."

"We could have something cooked for you--something hot and a cup of
tea."

"Thank you, but I fancy my dinner is actually on the table.  I can do
no good in the earlier stages.  Go home and say that I am coming, and I
will be round immediately afterwards."

A sort of horror filled Robert Johnson as he gazed at this man who
could think about his dinner at such a moment.  He had not imagination
enough to realise that the experience which seemed so appallingly
important to him, was the merest everyday matter of business to the
medical man who could not have lived for a year had he not, amid the
rush of work, remembered what was due to his own health.  To Johnson he
seemed little better than a monster.  His thoughts were bitter as he
sped back to his shop.

"You've taken your time," said his mother-in-law reproachfully, looking
down the stairs as he entered.

"I couldn't help it!" he gasped.  "Is it over?"

"Over!  She's got to be worse, poor dear, before she can be better.
Where's Dr. Miles!"

"He's coming after he's had dinner."  The old woman was about to make
some reply, when, from the half-opened door behind a high whinnying
voice cried out for her.  She ran back and closed the door, while
Johnson, sick at heart, turned into the shop.  There he sent the lad
home and busied himself frantically in putting up shutters and turning
out boxes.  When all was closed and finished he seated himself in the
parlour behind the shop.  But he could not sit still.  He rose
incessantly to walk a few paces and then fell back into a chair once
more.  Suddenly the clatter of china fell upon his ear, and he saw the
maid pass the door with a cup on a tray and a smoking teapot.

"Who is that for, Jane?" he asked.

"For the mistress, Mr. Johnson.  She says she would fancy it."

There was immeasurable consolation to him in that homely cup of tea.
It wasn't so very bad after all if his wife could think of such things.
So light-hearted was he that he asked for a cup also.  He had just
finished it when the doctor arrived, with a small black leather bag in
his hand.

"Well, how is she?" he asked genially.

"Oh, she's very much better," said Johnson, with enthusiasm.

"Dear me, that's bad!" said the doctor.  "Perhaps it will do if I look
in on my morning round?"

"No, no," cried Johnson, clutching at his thick frieze overcoat.  "We
are so glad that you have come.  And, doctor, please come down soon and
let me know what you think about it."

The doctor passed upstairs, his firm, heavy steps resounding through
the house.  Johnson could hear his boots creaking as he walked about
the floor above him, and the sound was a consolation to him.  It was
crisp and decided, the tread of a man who had plenty of
self-confidence.  Presently, still straining his ears to catch what was
going on, he heard the scraping of a chair as it was drawn along the
floor, and a moment later he heard the door fly open and someone come
rushing downstairs.  Johnson sprang up with his hair bristling,
thinking that some dreadful thing had occurred, but it was only his
mother-in-law, incoherent with excitement and searching for scissors
and some tape.  She vanished again and Jane passed up the stairs with a
pile of newly aired linen.  Then, after an interval of silence, Johnson
heard the heavy, creaking tread and the doctor came down into the
parlour.

"That's better," said he, pausing with his hand upon the door.  "You
look pale, Mr. Johnson."

"Oh no, sir, not at all," he answered deprecatingly, mopping his brow
with his handkerchief.

"There is no immediate cause for alarm," said Dr. Miles.  "The case is
not all that we could wish it.  Still we will hope for the best."

"Is there danger, sir?" gasped Johnson.

"Well, there is always danger, of course.  It is not altogether a
favourable case, but still it might be much worse.  I have given her a
draught.  I saw as I passed that they have been doing a little building
opposite to you.  It's an improving quarter.  The rents go higher and
higher.  You have a lease of your own little place, eh?"

"Yes, sir, yes!" cried Johnson, whose ears were straining for every
sound from above, and who felt none the less that it was very soothing
that the doctor should be able to chat so easily at such a time.
"That's to say no, sir, I am a yearly tenant."

"Ah, I should get a lease if I were you.  There's Marshall, the
watchmaker, down the street.  I attended his wife twice and saw him
through the typhoid when they took up the drains in Prince Street.  I
assure you his landlord sprung his rent nearly forty a year and he had
to pay or clear out."

"Did his wife get through it, doctor?"

"Oh yes, she did very well.  Hullo! hullo!"

He slanted his ear to the ceiling with a questioning face, and then
darted swiftly from the room.

It was March and the evenings were chill, so Jane had lit the fire, but
the wind drove the smoke downwards and the air was full of its acrid
taint.  Johnson felt chilled to the bone, though rather by his
apprehensions than by the weather.  He crouched over the fire with his
thin white hands held out to the blaze.  At ten o'clock Jane brought in
the joint of cold meat and laid his place for supper, but he could not
bring himself to touch it.  He drank a glass of the beer, however, and
felt the better for it.  The tension of his nerves seemed to have
reacted upon his hearing, and he was able to follow the most trivial
things in the room above.  Once, when the beer was still heartening
him, he nerved himself to creep on tiptoe up the stair and to listen to
what was going on.  The bedroom door was half an inch open, and through
the slit he could catch a glimpse of the clean-shaven face of the
doctor, looking wearier and more anxious than before.  Then he rushed
downstairs like a lunatic, and running to the door he tried to distract
his thoughts by watching what; was going on in the street.  The shops
were all shut, and some rollicking boon companions came shouting along
from the public-house.  He stayed at the door until the stragglers had
thinned down, and then came back to his seat by the fire.  In his dim
brain he was asking himself questions which had never intruded
themselves before.  Where was the justice of it?  What had his sweet,
innocent little wife done that she should be used so?  Why was nature
so cruel?  He was frightened at his own thoughts, and yet wondered that
they had never occurred to him before.

As the early morning drew in, Johnson, sick at heart and shivering in
every limb, sat with his great coat huddled round him, staring at the
grey ashes and waiting hopelessly for some relief.  His face was white
and clammy, and his nerves had been numbed into a half conscious state
by the long monotony of misery.  But suddenly all his feelings leapt
into keen life again as he heard the bedroom door open and the doctor's
steps upon the stair.  Robert Johnson was precise and unemotional in
everyday life, but he almost shrieked now as he rushed forward to know
if it were over.

One glance at the stern, drawn face which met him showed that it was no
pleasant news which had sent the doctor downstairs.  His appearance had
altered as much as Johnson's during the last few hours.  His hair was
on end, his face flushed, his forehead dotted with beads of
perspiration.  There was a peculiar fierceness in his eye, and about
the lines of his mouth, a fighting look as befitted a man who for hours
on end had been striving with the hungriest of foes for the most
precious of prizes.  But there was a sadness too, as though his grim
opponent had been overmastering him.  He sat down and leaned his head
upon his hand like a man who is fagged out.

"I thought it my duty to see you, Mr. Johnson, and to tell you that it
is a very nasty case.  Your wife's heart is not strong, and she has
some symptoms which I do not like.  What I wanted to say is that if you
would like to have a second opinion I shall be very glad to meet anyone
whom you might suggest."

Johnson was so dazed by his want of sleep and the evil news that he
could hardly grasp the doctor's meaning.  The other, seeing him
hesitate, thought that he was considering the expense.

"Smith or Hawley would come for two guineas," said he.  "But I think
Pritchard of the City Road is the best man."

"Oh, yes, bring the best man," cried Johnson.

"Pritchard would want three guineas.  He is a senior man, you see."

"I'd give him all I have if he would pull her through.  Shall I run for
him?"

"Yes.  Go to my house first and ask for the green baize bag.  The
assistant will give it to you.  Tell him I want the A. C. E. mixture.
Her heart is too weak for chloroform.  Then go for Pritchard and bring
him back with you."

It was heavenly for Johnson to have something to do and to feel that he
was of some use to his wife.  He ran swiftly to Bridport Place, his
footfalls clattering through the silent streets and the big dark
policemen turning their yellow funnels of light on him as he passed.
Two tugs at the night-bell brought down a sleepy, half-clad assistant,
who handed him a stoppered glass bottle and a cloth bag which contained
something which clinked when you moved it.  Johnson thrust the bottle
into his pocket, seized the green bag, and pressing his hat firmly down
ran as hard as he could set foot to ground until he was in the City
Road and saw the name of Pritchard engraved in white upon a red ground.
He bounded in triumph up the three steps which led to the door, and as
he did so there was a crash behind him.  His precious bottle was in
fragments upon the pavement.

For a moment he felt as if it were his wife's body that was lying
there.  But the run had freshened his wits and he saw that the mischief
might be repaired.  He pulled vigorously at the night-bell.

"Well, what's the matter?" asked a gruff voice at his elbow.  He
started back and looked up at the windows, but there was no sign of
life.  He was approaching the bell again with the intention of pulling
it, when a perfect roar burst from the wall.

"I can't stand shivering here all night," cried the voice.  "Say who
you are and what you want or I shut the tube."

Then for the first time Johnson saw that the end of a speaking-tube
hung out of the wall just above the bell.  He shouted up it,--

"I want you to come with me to meet Dr. Miles at a confinement at once."

"How far?" shrieked the irascible voice.

"The New North Road, Hoxton."

"My consultation fee is three guineas, payable at the time."

"All right," shouted Johnson.  "You are to bring a bottle of A. C. E.
mixture with you."

"All right!  Wait a bit!"

Five minutes later an elderly, hard-faced man, with grizzled hair,
flung open the door.  As he emerged a voice from somewhere in the
shadows cried,--

"Mind you take your cravat, John," and he impatiently growled something
over his shoulder in reply.

The consultant was a man who had been hardened by a life of ceaseless
labour, and who had been driven, as so many others have been, by the
needs of his own increasing family to set the commercial before the
philanthropic side of his profession.  Yet beneath his rough crust he
was a man with a kindly heart.

"We don't want to break a record," said he, pulling up and panting
after attempting to keep up with Johnson for five minutes.  "I would go
quicker if I could, my dear sir, and I quite sympathise with your
anxiety, but really I can't manage it."

So Johnson, on fire with impatience, had to slow down until they
reached the New North Road, when he ran ahead and had the door open for
the doctor when he came.  He heard the two meet outside the bed-room,
and caught scraps of their conversation.  "Sorry to knock you up--nasty
case--decent people."  Then it sank into a mumble and the door closed
behind them.

Johnson sat up in his chair now, listening keenly, for he knew that a
crisis must be at hand.  He heard the two doctors moving about, and was
able to distinguish the step of Pritchard, which had a drag in it, from
the clean, crisp sound of the other's footfall.  There was silence for
a few minutes and then a curious drunken, mumbling sing-song voice came
quavering up, very unlike anything which he had heard hitherto.  At the
same time a sweetish, insidious scent, imperceptible perhaps to any
nerves less strained than his, crept down the stairs and penetrated
into the room.  The voice dwindled into a mere drone and finally sank
away into silence, and Johnson gave a long sigh of relief, for he knew
that the drug had done its work and that, come what might, there should
be no more pain for the sufferer.

But soon the silence became even more trying to him than the cries had
been.  He had no clue now as to what was going on, and his mind swarmed
with horrible possibilities.  He rose and went to the bottom of the
stairs again.  He heard the clink of metal against metal, and the
subdued murmur of the doctors' voices.  Then he heard Mrs. Peyton say
something, in a tone as of fear or expostulation, and again the doctors
murmured together.  For twenty minutes he stood there leaning against
the wall, listening to the occasional rumbles of talk without being
able to catch a word of it.  And then of a sudden there rose out of the
silence the strangest little piping cry, and Mrs. Peyton screamed out
in her delight and the man ran into the parlour and flung himself down
upon the horse-hair sofa, drumming his heels on it in his ecstasy.

But often the great cat Fate lets us go only to clutch us again in a
fiercer grip.  As minute after minute passed and still no sound came
from above save those thin, glutinous cries, Johnson cooled from his
frenzy of joy, and lay breathless with his ears straining.  They were
moving slowly about.  They were talking in subdued tones.  Still minute
after minute passing, and no word from the voice for which he listened.
His nerves were dulled by his night of trouble, and he waited in limp
wretchedness upon his sofa.  There he still sat when the doctors came
down to him--a bedraggled, miserable figure with his face grimy and his
hair unkempt from his long vigil.  He rose as they entered, bracing
himself against the mantelpiece.

"Is she dead?" he asked.

"Doing well," answered the doctor.

And at the words that little conventional spirit which had never known
until that night the capacity for fierce agony which lay within it,
learned for the second time that there were springs of joy also which
it had never tapped before.  His impulse was to fall upon his knees,
but he was shy before the doctors.

"Can I go up?"

"In a few minutes."

"I'm sure, doctor, I'm very--I'm very----" he grew inarticulate.  "Here
are your three guineas, Dr. Pritchard.  I wish they were three hundred."

"So do I," said the senior man, and they laughed as they shook hands.

Johnson opened the shop door for them and heard their talk as they
stood for an instant outside.

"Looked nasty at one time."

"Very glad to have your help."

"Delighted, I'm sure.  Won't you step round and have a cup of coffee?"

"No, thanks.  I'm expecting another case."

The firm step and the dragging one passed away to the right and the
left.  Johnson turned from the door still with that turmoil of joy in
his heart.  He seemed to be making a new start in life.  He felt that
he was a stronger and a deeper man.  Perhaps all this suffering had an
object then.  It might prove to be a blessing both to his wife and to
him.  The very thought was one which he would have been incapable of
conceiving twelve hours before.  He was full of new emotions.  If there
had been a harrowing there had been a planting too.

"Can I come up?" he cried, and then, without waiting for an answer, he
took the steps three at a time.

Mrs. Peyton was standing by a soapy bath with a bundle in her hands.
From under the curve of a brown shawl there looked out at him the
strangest little red face with crumpled features, moist, loose lips,
and eyelids which quivered like a rabbit's nostrils.  The weak neck had
let the head topple over, and it rested upon the shoulder.

"Kiss it, Robert!" cried the grandmother. "Kiss your son!"

But he felt a resentment to the little, red, blinking creature.  He
could not forgive it yet for that long night of misery.  He caught
sight of a white face in the bed and he ran towards it with such love
and pity as his speech could find no words for.

"Thank God it is over!  Lucy, dear, it was dreadful!"

"But I'm so happy now.  I never was so happy in my life."

Her eyes were fixed upon the brown bundle.

"You mustn't talk," said Mrs. Peyton.

"But don't leave me,"  whispered his wife.

So he sat in silence with his hand in hers.  The lamp was burning dim
and the first cold light of dawn was breaking through the window.  The
night had been long and dark but the day was the sweeter and the purer
in consequence.  London was waking up.  The roar began to rise from the
street.  Lives had come and lives had gone, but the great machine was
still working out its dim and tragic destiny.




SWEETHEARTS.

It is hard for the general practitioner who sits among his patients
both morning and evening, and sees them in their homes between, to
steal time for one little daily breath of cleanly air.  To win it he
must slip early from his bed and walk out between shuttered shops when
it is chill but very clear, and all things are sharply outlined, as in
a frost.  It is an hour that has a charm of its own, when, but for a
postman or a milkman, one has the pavement to oneself, and even the
most common thing takes an ever-recurring freshness, as though
causeway, and lamp, and signboard had all wakened to the new day.  Then
even an inland city may seem beautiful, and bear virtue in its
smoke-tainted air.

But it was by the sea that I lived, in a town that was unlovely enough
were it not for its glorious neighbour.  And who cares for the town
when one can sit on the bench at the headland, and look out over the
huge, blue bay, and the yellow scimitar that curves before it.  I loved
it when its great face was freckled with the fishing boats, and I loved
it when the big ships went past, far out, a little hillock of white and
no hull, with topsails curved like a bodice, so stately and demure.
But most of all I loved it when no trace of man marred the majesty of
Nature, and when the sun-bursts slanted down on it from between the
drifting rainclouds.  Then I have seen the further edge draped in the
gauze of the driving rain, with its thin grey shading under the slow
clouds, while my headland was golden, and the sun gleamed upon the
breakers and struck deep through the green waves beyond, showing up the
purple patches where the beds of seaweed are lying.  Such a morning as
that, with the wind in his hair, and the spray on his lips, and the cry
of the eddying gulls in his ear, may send a man back braced afresh to
the reek of a sick-room, and the dead, drab weariness of practice.

It was on such another day that I first saw my old man.  He came to my
bench just as I was leaving it.  My eye must have picked him out even
in a crowded street, for he was a man of large frame and fine presence,
with something of distinction in the set of his lip and the poise of
his head.  He limped up the winding path leaning heavily upon his
stick, as though those great shoulders had become too much at last for
the failing limbs that bore them.  As he approached, my eyes caught
Nature's danger signal, that faint bluish tinge in nose and lip which
tells of a labouring heart.

"The brae is a little trying, sir," said I.  "Speaking  as a physician,
I should say that you would do well to rest here before you go further."

He inclined his head in a stately, old-world fashion, and seated
himself upon the bench.  Seeing that he had no wish to speak I was
silent also, but I could not help watching him out of the corners of my
eyes, for he was such a wonderful survival of the early half of the
century, with his low-crowned, curly-brimmed hat, his black satin tie
which fastened with a buckle at the back, and, above all, his large,
fleshy, clean-shaven face shot with its mesh of wrinkles.  Those eyes,
ere they had grown dim, had looked out from the box-seat of mail
coaches, and had seen the knots of navvies as they toiled on the brown
embankments.  Those lips had smiled over the first numbers of
"Pickwick," and had gossiped of the promising young man who wrote them.
The face itself was a seventy-year almanack, and every seam an entry
upon it where public as well as private sorrow left its trace.  That
pucker on the forehead stood for the Mutiny, perhaps; that line of care
for the Crimean winter, it may be; and that last little sheaf of
wrinkles, as my fancy hoped, for the death of Gordon.  And so, as I
dreamed in my foolish way, the old gentleman with the shining stock was
gone, and it was seventy years of a great nation's life that took shape
before me on the headland in the morning.

But he soon brought me back to earth again.  As he recovered his breath
he took a letter out of his pocket, and, putting on a pair of
horn-rimmed eye-glasses, he read it through very carefully.  Without
any design of playing the spy I could not help observing that it was in
a woman's hand.  When he had finished it he read it again, and then sat
with the corners of his mouth drawn down and his eyes staring vacantly
out over the bay, the most forlorn-looking old gentleman that ever I
have seen.  All that is kindly within me was set stirring by that
wistful face, but I knew that he was in no humour for talk, and so, at
last, with my breakfast and my patients calling me, I left him on the
bench and started for home.

I never gave him another thought until the next morning, when, at the
same hour, he turned up upon the headland, and shared the bench which I
had been accustomed to look upon as my own.  He bowed again before
sitting down, but was no more inclined than formerly to enter into
conversation.  There had been a change in him during the last
twenty-four hours, and all for the worse.  The face seemed more heavy
and more wrinkled, while that ominous venous tinge was more pronounced
as he panted up the hill.  The clean lines of his cheek and chin were
marred by a day's growth of grey stubble, and his large, shapely head
had lost something of the brave carriage which had struck me when first
I glanced at him.  He had a letter there, the same, or another, but
still in a woman's hand, and over this he was moping and mumbling in
his senile fashion, with his brow puckered, and the corners of his
mouth drawn down like those of a fretting child.  So I left him, with a
vague wonder as to who he might be, and why a single spring day should
have wrought such a change upon him.

So interested was I that next morning I was on the look out for him.
Sure enough, at the same hour, I saw him coming up the hill; but very
slowly, with a bent back and a heavy head.  It was shocking to me to
see the change in him as he approached.

"I am afraid that our air does not agree with you, sir," I ventured to
remark.

But it was as though he had no heart for talk.  He tried, as I thought,
to make some fitting reply, but it slurred off into a mumble and
silence.  How bent and weak and old he seemed--ten years older at the
least than when first I had seen him!  It went to my heart to see this
fine old fellow wasting away before my eyes.  There was the eternal
letter which he unfolded with his shaking fingers.  Who was this woman
whose words moved him so?  Some daughter, perhaps, or granddaughter,
who should have been the light of his home instead of----  I smiled to
find how bitter I was growing, and how swiftly I was weaving a romance
round an unshaven old man and his correspondence.  Yet all day he
lingered in my mind, and I had fitful glimpses of those two trembling,
blue-veined, knuckly hands with the paper rustling between them.

I had hardly hoped to see him again.  Another day's decline must, I
thought, hold him to his room, if not to his bed.  Great, then, was my
surprise when, as I approached my bench, I saw that he was already
there.  But as I came up to him I could scarce be sure that it was
indeed the same man.  There were the curly-brimmed hat, and the shining
stock, and the horn glasses, but where were the stoop and the
grey-stubbled, pitiable face?  He was clean-shaven and firm lipped,
with a bright eye and a head that poised itself upon his great
shoulders like an eagle on a rock.  His back was as straight and square
as a grenadier's, and he switched at the pebbles with his stick in his
exuberant vitality.  In the button-hole of his well-brushed black coat
there glinted a golden blossom, and the corner of a dainty red silk
handkerchief lapped over from his breast pocket.  He might have been
the eldest son of the weary creature who had sat there the morning
before.

"Good morning, Sir, good morning!" he cried with a merry waggle of his
cane.

"Good morning!" I answered, "how beautiful the bay is looking."

"Yes, Sir, but you should have seen it just before the sun rose."

"What, have you been here since then?"

"I was here when there was scarce light to see the path."

"You are a very early riser."

"On occasion, sir; on occasion!"  He cocked his eye at me as if to
gauge whether I were worthy of his confidence.  "The fact is, sir, that
my wife is coming back to me to day."

I suppose that my face showed that I did not quite see the force of the
explanation.  My eyes, too, may have given him assurance of sympathy,
for he moved quite close to me and began speaking in a low,
confidential voice, as if the matter were of such weight that even the
sea-gulls must be kept out of our councils.

"Are you a married man, Sir?"

"No, I am not."

"Ah, then you cannot quite understand it.  My wife and I have been
married for nearly fifty years, and we have never been parted, never at
all, until now."

"Was it for long?" I asked.

"Yes, sir.  This is the fourth day.  She had to go to Scotland.  A
matter of duty, you understand, and the doctors would not let me go.
Not that I would have allowed them to stop me, but she was on their
side.  Now, thank God! it is over, and she may be here at any moment."

"Here!"

"Yes, here.  This headland and bench were old friends of ours thirty
years ago.  The people with whom we stay are not, to tell the truth,
very congenial, and we have, little privacy among them.  That is why we
prefer to meet here.  I could not be sure which train would bring her,
but if she had come by the very earliest she would have found me
waiting."

"In that case----" said I, rising.

"No, sir, no," he entreated, "I beg that you will stay.  It does not
weary you, this domestic talk of mine?"

"On the contrary."

"I have been so driven inwards during these few last days! Ah, what a
nightmare it has been! Perhaps it may seem strange to you that an old
fellow like me should feel like this."

"It is charming."

"No credit to me, sir!  There's not a man on this planet but would feel
the same if he had the good fortune to be married to such a woman.
Perhaps, because you see me like this, and hear me speak of our long
life together, you conceive that she is old, too."

He laughed heartily, and his eyes twinkled at the humour of the idea.

"She's one of those women, you know, who have youth in their hearts,
and so it can never be very far from their faces.  To me she's just as
she was when she first took my hand in hers in '45.  A wee little bit
stouter, perhaps, but then, if she had a fault as a girl, it was that
she was a shade too slender.  She was above me in station, you know--I
a clerk, and she the daughter of my employer.  Oh! it was quite a
romance, I give you my word, and I won her; and, somehow, I have never
got over the freshness and the wonder of it.  To think that that sweet,
lovely girl has walked by my side all through life, and that I have
been able----"

He stopped suddenly, and I glanced round at him in surprise.  He was
shaking all over, in every fibre of his great body.  His hands were
clawing at the woodwork, and his feet shuffling on the gravel.  I saw
what it was.  He was trying to rise, but was so excited that he could
not.  I half extended my hand, but a higher courtesy constrained me to
draw it back again and turn my face to the sea.  An instant afterwards
he was up and hurrying down the path.

A woman was coming towards us.  She was quite close before he had seen
her--thirty yards at the utmost.  I know not if she had ever been as he
described her, or whether it was but some ideal which he carried in his
brain.  The person upon whom I looked was tall, it is true, but she was
thick and shapeless, with a ruddy, full-blown face,  and a skirt
grotesquely gathered up.  There was a green ribbon in her hat, which
jarred upon my eyes, and her blouse-like bodice was full and clumsy.
And this was the lovely girl, the ever youthful!  My heart sank as I
thought how little such a woman might appreciate him, how unworthy she
might be of his love.

She came up the path in her solid way, while he staggered along to meet
her.  Then, as they came together, looking discreetly out of the
furthest corner of my eye, I saw that he put out both his hands, while
she, shrinking from a public caress, took one of them in hers and shook
it.  As she did so I saw her face, and I was easy in my mind for my old
man.  God grant that when this hand is shaking, and when this back is
bowed, a woman's eyes may look so into mine.




A PHYSIOLOGIST'S WIFE.

Professor Ainslie Grey had not come down to breakfast at the usual
hour.  The presentation chiming-clock which stood between the
terra-cotta busts of Claude Bernard and of John Hunter upon the
dining-room mantelpiece had rung out the half-hour and the
three-quarters.  Now its golden hand was verging upon the nine, and yet
there were no signs of the master of the house.

It was an unprecedented occurrence.  During the twelve years that she
had kept house for him, his youngest sister had never known him a
second behind his time.  She sat now in front of the high silver
coffee-pot, uncertain whether to order the gong to be resounded or to
wait on in silence.  Either course might be a mistake.  Her brother was
not a man who permitted mistakes.

Miss Ainslie Grey was rather above the middle height, thin, with
peering, puckered eyes, and the rounded shoulders which mark the
bookish woman.  Her face was long and spare, flecked with colour above
the cheek-bones, with a reasonable, thoughtful forehead, and a dash of
absolute obstinacy in her thin lips and prominent chin.  Snow white
cuffs and collar, with a plain dark dress, cut with almost Quaker-like
simplicity, bespoke the primness of her taste.  An ebony cross hung
over her flattened chest.  She sat very upright in her chair, listening
with raised eyebrows, and swinging her eye-glasses backwards and
forwards with a nervous gesture which was peculiar to her.

Suddenly she gave a sharp, satisfied jerk of the head, and began to
pour out the coffee.  From outside there came the dull thudding sound
of heavy feet upon thick carpet.  The door swung open, and the
Professor entered with a quick, nervous step.  He nodded to his sister,
and seating himself at the other side of the table, began to open the
small pile of letters which lay beside his plate.

Professor Ainslie Grey was at that time forty-three years of
age--nearly twelve years older than his sister.  His career had been a
brilliant one.  At Edinburgh, at Cambridge, and at Vienna he had laid
the foundations of his great reputation, both in physiology and in
zoology.

His pamphlet, On the Mesoblastic Origin of Excitomotor Nerve Roots, had
won him his fellowship of the Royal Society; and his researches, Upon
the Nature of Bathybius, with some Remarks upon Lithococci, had been
translated into at least three European languages.  He had been
referred to by one of the greatest living authorities as being the very
type and embodiment of all that was best in modern science.  No wonder,
then, that when the commercial city of Birchespool decided to create a
medical school, they were only too glad to confer the chair of
physiology upon Mr. Ainslie Grey.  They valued him the more from the
conviction that their class was only one step in his upward journey,
and that the first vacancy would remove him to some more illustrious
seat of learning.

In person he was not unlike his sister.  The same eyes, the same
contour, the same intellectual forehead.  His lips, however, were
firmer, and his long, thin, lower jaw was sharper and more decided.  He
ran his finger and thumb down it from time to time, as he glanced over
his letters.

"Those maids are very noisy," he remarked, as a clack of tongues
sounded in the distance.

"It is Sarah," said his sister; "I shall speak about it."

She had handed over his coffee-cup, and was sipping at her own,
glancing furtively through her narrowed lids at the austere face of her
brother.

"The first great advance of the human race," said the Professor, "was
when, by the development of their left frontal convolutions, they
attained the power of speech.  Their second advance was when they
learned to control that power.  Woman has not yet attained the second
stage."

He half closed his eyes as he spoke, and thrust his chin forward, but
as he ceased he had a trick of suddenly opening both eyes very wide and
staring sternly at his interlocutor.

"I am not garrulous, John," said his sister.

"No, Ada; in many respects you approach the superior or male type."

The Professor bowed over his egg with the manner of one who utters a
courtly compliment; but the lady pouted, and gave an impatient little
shrug of her shoulders.

"You were late this morning, John," she remarked, after a pause.

"Yes, Ada; I slept badly.  Some little cerebral congestion, no doubt
due to over-stimulation of the centers of thought.  I have been a
little disturbed in my mind."

His sister stared across at him in astonishment.  The Professor's
mental processes had hitherto been as regular as his habits.  Twelve
years' continual intercourse had taught her that he lived in a serene
and rarefied atmosphere of scientific calm, high above the petty
emotions which affect humbler minds.

"You are surprised, Ada," he remarked.  "Well, I cannot wonder at it.
I should have been surprised myself if I had been told that I was so
sensitive to vascular influences.  For, after all, all disturbances are
vascular if you probe them deep enough.  I am thinking of getting
married."

"Not Mrs. O'James" cried Ada Grey, laying down her egg-spoon.

"My dear, you have the feminine quality of receptivity very remarkably
developed.  Mrs. O'James is the lady in question."

"But you know so little of her.  The Esdailes themselves know so
little.  She is really only an acquaintance, although she is staying at
The Lindens.  Would it not be wise to speak to Mrs. Esdaile first,
John?"

"I do not think, Ada, that Mrs. Esdaile is at all likely to say
anything which would materially affect my course of action.  I have
given the matter due consideration.  The scientific mind is slow at
arriving at conclusions, but having once formed them, it is not prone
to change.  Matrimony is the natural condition of the human race.  I
have, as you know, been so engaged in academical and other work, that I
have had no time to devote to merely personal questions.  It is
different now, and I see no valid reason why I should forego this
opportunity of seeking a suitable helpmate."

"And you are engaged?"

"Hardly that, Ada.  I ventured yesterday to indicate to the lady that I
was prepared to submit to the common lot of humanity.  I shall wait
upon her after my morning lecture, and learn how far my proposals meet
with her acquiescence.  But you frown, Ada!"

His sister started, and made an effort to conceal her expression of
annoyance.  She even stammered out some few words of congratulation,
but a vacant look had come into her brother's eyes, and he was
evidently not listening to her.

"I am sure, John, that I wish you the happiness which you deserve.  If
I hesitated at all, it is because I know how much is at stake, and
because the thing is so sudden, so unexpected."  Her thin white hand
stole up to the black cross upon her bosom.  "These are moments when we
need guidance, John.  If I could persuade you to turn to spiritual----"

The Professor waved the suggestion away with a deprecating hand.

"It is useless to reopen that question," he said.  "We cannot argue
upon it.  You assume more than I can grant.  I am forced to dispute
your premises.  We have no common basis."

His sister sighed.

"You have no faith," she said.

"I have faith in those great evolutionary forces which are leading the
human race to some unknown but elevated goal."

"You believe in nothing."

"On the contrary, my dear Ada, I believe in the differentiation of
protoplasm."

She shook her head sadly.  It was the one subject upon which she
ventured to dispute her brother's infallibility.

"This is rather beside the question," remarked the Professor, folding
up his napkin.  "If I am not mistaken, there is some possibility of
another matrimonial event occurring in the family.  Eh, Ada?  What!"

His small eyes glittered with sly facetiousness as he shot a twinkle at
his sister.  She sat very stiff, and traced patterns upon the cloth
with the sugar-tongs.

"Dr. James M'Murdo O'Brien----" said the Professor, sonorously.

"Don't, John, don't!" cried Miss Ainslie Grey.

"Dr. James M'Murdo O'Brien," continued her brother inexorably, "is a
man who has already made his mark upon the science of the day.  He is
my first and my most distinguished pupil.  I assure you, Ada, that his
'Remarks upon the Bile-Pigments, with special reference to Urobilin,'
is likely to live as a classic.  It is not too much to say that he has
revolutionised our views about urobilin."

He paused, but his sister sat silent, with bent head and flushed
cheeks.  The little ebony cross rose and fell with her hurried
breathings.

"Dr. James M'Murdo O'Brien has, as you know, the offer of the
physiological chair at Melbourne.  He has been in Australia five years,
and has a brilliant future before him.  To-day he leaves us for
Edinburgh, and in two months' time, he goes out to take over his new
duties.  You know his feeling towards you.  It rests with you as to
whether he goes out alone.  Speaking for myself, I cannot imagine any
higher mission for a woman of culture than to go through life in the
company of a man who is capable of such a research as that which Dr.
James M'Murdo O'Brien has brought to a successful conclusion."

"He has not spoken to me," murmured the lady.

"Ah, there are signs which are more subtle than speech," said her
brother, wagging his head.  "But you are pale.  Your vasomotor system
is excited.  Your arterioles have contracted.  Let me entreat you to
compose yourself.  I think I hear the carriage.  I fancy that you may
have a visitor this morning, Ada.  You will excuse me now."

With a quick glance at the clock he strode off into the hall, and
within a few minutes he was rattling in his quiet, well-appointed
brougham through the brick-lined streets of Birchespool.

His lecture over, Professor Ainslie Grey paid a visit to his
laboratory, where he adjusted several scientific instruments, made a
note as to the progress of three separate infusions of bacteria, cut
half-a-dozen sections with a microtome, and finally resolved the
difficulties of seven different gentlemen, who were pursuing researches
in as many separate lines of inquiry.  Having thus conscientiously and
methodically completed the routine of his duties, he returned to his
carriage and ordered the coachman to drive him to The Lindens.  His
face as he drove was cold and impassive, but he drew his fingers from
time to time down his prominent chin with a jerky, twitchy movement.

The Lindens was an old-fashioned, ivy-clad house which had once been in
the country, but was now caught in the long, red-brick feelers of the
growing city.  It still stood back from the road in the privacy of its
own grounds.  A winding path, lined with laurel bushes, led to the
arched and porticoed entrance.  To the right was a lawn, and at the far
side, under the shadow of a hawthorn, a lady sat in a garden-chair with
a book in her hands.  At the click of the gate she started, and the
Professor, catching sight of her, turned away from the door, and strode
in her direction.

"What! won't you go in and see Mrs. Esdaile?" she asked, sweeping out
from under the shadow of the hawthorn.

She was a small woman, strongly feminine, from the rich coils of her
light-coloured hair to the dainty garden slipper which peeped from
under her cream-tinted dress.  One tiny well-gloved hand was
outstretched in greeting, while the other pressed a thick,
green-covered volume against her side.  Her decision and quick, tactful
manner bespoke the mature woman of the world; but her upraised face had
preserved a girlish and even infantile expression of innocence in its
large, fearless, grey eyes, and sensitive, humorous mouth.  Mrs.
O'James was a widow, and she was two-and-thirty years of age; but
neither fact could have been deduced from her appearance.

"You will surely go in and see Mrs. Esdaile," she repeated, glancing up
at him with eyes which had in them something between a challenge and a
caress.

"I did not come to see Mrs. Esdaile," he answered, with no relaxation
of his cold and grave manner; "I came to see you."

"I am sure I should be highly honoured," she said, with just the
slightest little touch of brogue in her accent.  "What are the students
to do without their Professor?"

"I have already completed my academic duties.  Take my arm, and we
shall walk in the sunshine.  Surely we cannot wonder that Eastern
people should have made a deity of the sun.  It is the great beneficent
force of Nature--man's ally against cold, sterility, and all that is
abhorrent to him.  What were you reading?"

"Hale's Matter and Life."

The Professor raised his thick eyebrows.

"Hale!" he said, and then again in a kind of whisper, "Hale!"

"You differ from him?" she asked.

"It is not I who differ from him.  I am only a monad--a thing of no
moment.  The whole tendency of the highest plane of modern thought
differs from him.  He defends the indefensible.  He is an excellent
observer, but a feeble reasoner.  I should not recommend you to found
your conclusions upon Hale."

"I must read Nature's Chronicle to counteract his pernicious
influence," said Mrs. O'James, with a soft, cooing laugh.

Nature's Chronicle was one of the many books in which Professor Ainslie
Grey had enforced the negative doctrines of scientific agnosticism.

"It is a faulty work," said he; "I cannot recommend it.  I would rather
refer you to the standard writings of some of my older and more
eloquent colleagues."

There was a pause in their talk as they paced up and down on the green,
velvet-like lawn in the genial sunshine.

"Have you thought at all," he asked at last, "of the matter upon which
I spoke to you last night?"

She said nothing, but walked by his side with her eyes averted and her
face aslant.

"I would not hurry you unduly," he continued.  "I know that it is a
matter which can scarcely be decided off-hand.  In my own case, it cost
me some thought before I ventured to make the suggestion.  I am not an
emotional man, but I am conscious in your presence of the great
evolutionary instinct which makes either sex the complement of the
other."

"You believe in love, then?" she asked, with a twinkling, upward glance.

"I am forced to."

"And yet you can deny the soul?"

"How far these questions are psychic and how far material is still sub
judice," said the Professor, with an air of toleration.  "Protoplasm
may prove to be the physical basis of love as well as of life."

"How inflexible you are!" she exclaimed; "you would draw love down to
the level of physics."

"Or draw physics up to the level of love."

"Come, that is much better," she cried, with her sympathetic laugh.
"That is really very pretty, and puts science in quite a delightful
light."

Her eyes sparkled, and she tossed her chin with the pretty, wilful air
of a woman who is mistress of the situation.

"I have reason to believe," said the Professor, "that my position here
will prove to be only a stepping-stone to some wider scene of
scientific activity.  Yet, even here, my chair brings me in some
fifteen hundred pounds a year, which is supplemented by a few hundreds
from my books.  I should therefore be in a position to provide you with
those comforts to which you are accustomed.  So much for my pecuniary
position.  As to my constitution, it has always been sound.  I have
never suffered from any illness in my life, save fleeting attacks of
cephalalgia, the result of too prolonged a stimulation of the centres
of cerebration.  My father and mother had no sign of any morbid
diathesis, but I will not conceal from you that my grandfather was
afflicted with podagra."

Mrs. O'James looked startled.

"Is that very serious?" she asked.

"It is gout," said the Professor.

"Oh, is that all?  It sounded much worse than that."

"It is a grave taint, but I trust that I shall not be a victim to
atavism.  I have laid these facts before you because they are factors
which cannot be overlooked in forming your decision.  May I ask now
whether you see your way to accepting my proposal?"

He paused in his walk, and looked earnestly and expectantly down at her.

A struggle was evidently going on in her mind.  Her eyes were cast
down, her little slipper tapped the lawn, and her fingers played
nervously with her chatelain.  Suddenly, with a sharp, quick gesture
which had in it something of <i>abandon</i> and recklessness, she held out her
hand to her companion.

"I accept," she said.

They were standing under the shadow of the hawthorn.  He stooped
gravely down, and kissed her glove-covered fingers.

"I trust that you may never have cause to regret your decision," he
said.

"I trust that you never may," she cried, with a heaving breast.

There were tears in her eyes, and her lips twitched with some strong
emotion.

"Come into the sunshine again," said he.  "It is the great restorative.
Your nerves are shaken.  Some little congestion of the medulla and
pons.  It is always instructive to reduce psychic or emotional
conditions to their physical equivalents.  You feel that your anchor is
still firm in a bottom of ascertained fact."

"But it is so dreadfully unromantic," said Mrs. O'James, with her old
twinkle.

"Romance is the offspring of imagination and of ignorance.  Where
science throws her calm, clear light there is happily no room for
romance."

"But is not love romance?" she asked.

"Not at all.  Love has been taken away from the poets, and has been
brought within the domain of true science.  It may prove to be one of
the great cosmic elementary forces.  When the atom of hydrogen draws
the atom of chlorine towards it to form the perfected molecule of
hydrochloric acid, the force which it exerts may be intrinsically
similar to that which draws me to you.  Attraction and repulsion appear
to be the primary forces.  This is attraction."

"And here is repulsion," said Mrs. O'James, as a stout, florid lady
came sweeping across the lawn in their direction.  "So glad you have
come out, Mrs. Esdaile!  Here is Professor Grey."

"How do you do, Professor?" said the lady, with some little pomposity
of manner.  "You were very wise to stay out here on so lovely a day.
Is it not heavenly?"

"It is certainly very fine weather," the Professor answered.

"Listen to the wind sighing in the trees!" cried Mrs. Esdaile, holding
up one finger.  "It is Nature's lullaby.  Could you not imagine it,
Professor Grey, to be the whisperings of angels?"

"The idea had not occurred to me, madam."

"Ah, Professor, I have always the same complaint against you.  A want
of rapport with the deeper meanings of nature.  Shall I say a want of
imagination.  You do not feel an emotional thrill at the singing of
that thrush?"

"I confess that I am not conscious of one, Mrs. Esdaile."

"Or at the delicate tint of that background of leaves?  See the rich
greens!"

"Chlorophyll," murmured the Professor.

"Science is so hopelessly prosaic.  It dissects and labels, and loses
sight of the great things in its attention to the little ones.  You
have a poor opinion of woman's intellect, Professor Grey.  I think that
I have heard you say so."

"It is a question of avoirdupois," said the Professor, closing his eyes
and shrugging his shoulders.  "The female cerebrum averages two ounces
less in weight than the male.  No doubt there are exceptions.  Nature
is always elastic."

"But the heaviest thing is not always the strongest," said Mrs.
O'James, laughing.  "Isn't there a law of compensation in science?  May
we not hope to make up in quality for what we lack in quantity?"

"I think not," remarked the Professor, gravely.  "But there is your
luncheon-gong.  No, thank you, Mrs. Esdaile, I cannot stay.  My
carriage is waiting.  Good-bye.  Good-bye, Mrs. O'James."

He raised his hat and stalked slowly away among the laurel bushes.

"He has no taste," said Mrs. Esdaile--"no eye for beauty."

"On the contrary," Mrs. O'James answered, with a saucy little jerk of
the chin.  "He has just asked me to be his wife."


As Professor Ainslie Grey ascended the steps of his house, the
hall-door opened and a dapper gentleman stepped briskly out.  He was
somewhat sallow in the face, with dark, beady eyes, and a short, black
beard with an aggressive bristle.  Thought and work had left their
traces upon his face, but he moved with the brisk activity of a man who
had not yet bade good-bye to his youth.

"I'm in luck's way," he cried.  "I wanted to see you."

"Then come back into the library," said the Professor; "you must stay
and have lunch with us."

The two men entered the hall, and the Professor led the way into his
private sanctum.  He motioned his companion into an arm-chair.

"I trust that you have been successful, O'Brien," said he.  "I should
be loath to exercise any undue pressure upon my sister Ada; but I have
given her to understand that there is no one whom I should prefer for a
brother-in-law to my most brilliant scholar, the author of Some Remarks
upon the Bile-Pigments, with special reference to Urobilin."

"You are very kind, Professor Grey--you have always been very kind,"
said the other.  "I approached Miss Grey upon the subject; she did not
say No."

"She said Yes, then?"

"No; she proposed to leave the matter open until my return from
Edinburgh.  I go to-day, as you know, and I hope to commence my
research to-morrow."

"On the comparative anatomy of the vermiform appendix, by James M'Murdo
O'Brien," said the Professor, sonorously.  "It is a glorious subject--a
subject which lies at the very root of evolutionary philosophy."

"Ah! she is the dearest girl," cried O'Brien, with a sudden little
spurt of Celtic enthusiasm--"she is the soul of truth and of honour."

"The vermiform appendix----" began the Professor.

"She is an angel from heaven," interrupted the other.  "I fear that it
is my advocacy of scientific freedom in religious thought which stands
in my way with her."

"You must not truckle upon that point.  You must be true to your
convictions; let there be no compromise there."

"My reason is true to agnosticism, and yet I am conscious of a void--a
vacuum.  I had feelings at the old church at home between the scent of
the incense and the roll of the organ, such as I have never experienced
in the laboratory or the lecture-room."

"Sensuous-purely sensuous," said the Professor, rubbing his chin.
"Vague hereditary tendencies stirred into life by the stimulation of
the nasal and auditory nerves."

"Maybe so, maybe so," the younger man answered thoughtfully.  "But this
was not what I wished to speak to you about.  Before I enter your
family, your sister and you have a claim to know all that I can tell
you about my career.  Of my worldly prospects I have already spoken to
you.  There is only one point which I have omitted to mention.  I am a
widower."

The Professor raised his eyebrows.

"This is news indeed," said he.

"I married shortly after my arrival in Australia.  Miss Thurston was
her name.  I met her in society.  It was a most unhappy match."

Some painful emotion possessed him.  His quick, expressive features
quivered, and his white hands tightened upon the arms of the chair.
The Professor turned away towards the window.

"You are the best judge," he remarked "but I should not think that it
was necessary to go into details."

"You have a right to know everything--you and Miss Grey.  It is not a
matter on which I can well speak to her direct.  Poor Jinny was the
best of women, but she was open to flattery, and liable to be misled by
designing persons.  She was untrue to me, Grey.  It is a hard thing to
say of the dead, but she was untrue to me.  She fled to Auckland with a
man whom she had known before her marriage.  The brig which carried
them foundered, and not a soul was saved."

"This is very painful, O'Brien," said the Professor, with a deprecatory
motion of his hand.  "I cannot see, however, how it affects your
relation to my sister."

"I have eased my conscience," said O'Brien, rising from his chair; "I
have told you all that there is to tell.  I should not like the story
to reach you through any lips but my own."

"You are right, O'Brien.  Your action has been most honourable and
considerate.  But you are not to blame in the matter, save that perhaps
you showed a little precipitancy in choosing a life-partner without due
care and inquiry."

O'Brien drew his hand across his eyes.

"Poor girl!" he cried.  "God help me, I love her still!  But I must go."

"You will lunch with us?"

"No, Professor; I have my packing still to do.  I have already bade
Miss Grey adieu.  In two months I shall see you again."

"You will probably find me a married man."

"Married!"

"Yes, I have been thinking of it."

"My dear Professor, let me congratulate you with all my heart.  I had
no idea.  Who is the lady?"

"Mrs. O'James is her name--a widow of the same nationality as yourself.
But to return to matters of importance, I should be very happy to see
the proofs of your paper upon the vermiform appendix.  I may be able to
furnish you with material for a footnote or two."

"Your assistance will be invaluable to me," said O'Brien, with
enthusiasm, and the two men parted in the hall.  The Professor walked
back into the dining-room, where his sister was already seated at the
luncheon-table.

"I shall be married at the registrar's," he remarked; "I should
strongly recommend you to do the same."

Professor Ainslie Grey was as good as his word.  A fortnight's
cessation of his classes gave him an opportunity which was too good to
let pass.  Mrs. O'James was an orphan, without relations and almost
without friends in the country.  There was no obstacle in the way of a
speedy wedding.  They were married, accordingly, in the quietest manner
possible, and went off to Cambridge together, where the Professor and
his charming wife were present at several academic observances, and
varied the routine of their honeymoon by incursions into biological
laboratories and medical libraries.  Scientific friends were loud in
their congratulations, not only upon Mrs. Grey's beauty, but upon the
unusual quickness and intelligence which she displayed in discussing
physiological questions.  The Professor was himself astonished at the
accuracy of her information.  "You have a remarkable range of knowledge
for a woman, Jeannette," he remarked upon more than one occasion.  He
was even prepared to admit that her cerebrum might be of the normal
weight.

One foggy, drizzling morning they returned to Birchespool, for the next
day would re-open the session, and Professor Ainslie Grey prided
himself upon having never once in his life failed to appear in his
lecture-room at the very stroke of the hour.  Miss Ada Grey welcomed
them with a constrained cordiality, and handed over the keys of office
to the new mistress.  Mrs. Grey pressed her warmly to remain, but she
explained that she had already accepted an invitation which would
engage her for some months.  The same evening she departed for the
south of England.

A couple of days later the maid carried a card just after breakfast
into the library where the Professor sat revising his morning lecture.
It announced the re-arrival of Dr. James M'Murdo O'Brien.  Their
meeting was effusively genial on the part of the younger man, and
coldly precise on that of his former teacher.

"You see there have been changes," said the Professor.

"So I heard.  Miss Grey told me in her letters, and I read the notice
in the British Medical Journal.  So it's really married you are.  How
quickly and quietly you have managed it all!"

"I am constitutionally averse to anything in the nature of show or
ceremony.  My wife is a sensible woman--I may even go the length of
saying that, for a woman, she is abnormally sensible.  She quite agreed
with me in the course which I have adopted."

"And your research on Vallisneria?"

"This matrimonial incident has  interrupted  it, but I have resumed my
classes, and we shall soon be quite in harness again."

"I must see Miss Grey before I leave England.  We have corresponded,
and I think that all will be well.  She must come out with me.  I don't
think I could go without her."

The Professor shook his head.

"Your nature is not so weak as you pretend," he said.  "Questions of
this sort are, after all, quite subordinate to the great duties of
life."

O'Brien smiled.

"You would have me take out my Celtic soul and put in a Saxon one," he
said.  "Either my brain is too small or my heart is too big.  But when
may I call and pay my respects to Mrs. Grey?  Will she be at home this
afternoon?"

"She is at home now.  Come into the morning-room.  She will be glad to
make your acquaintance."

They walked across the linoleum-paved hall.  The Professor opened the
door of the room, and walked in, followed by his friend.  Mrs. Grey was
sitting in a basket-chair by the window, light and fairy-like in a
loose-flowing, pink morning-gown.  Seeing a visitor, she rose and swept
towards them.  The Professor heard a dull thud behind him.  O'Brien had
fallen back into a chair, with his hand pressed tight to his side.

"Jinny!" he gasped--"Jinny!"

Mrs. Grey stopped dead in her advance, and stared at him with a face
from which every expression had been struck out, save one of
astonishment and horror.  Then with a sharp intaking of the breath she
reeled, and would have fallen had the Professor not thrown his long,
nervous arm round her.

"Try this sofa," said he.

She sank back among the cushions with the same white, cold, dead look
upon her face.  The Professor stood with his back to the empty
fireplace and glanced from the one to the other.

"So, O'Brien," he said at last, "you have already made the acquaintance
of my wife!"

"Your wife," cried his friend hoarsely.  "She is no wife of yours.  God
help me, she is <i>my</i> wife."

The Professor stood rigidly upon the hearthrug.  His long, thin fingers
were intertwined, and his head sunk a little forward.  His two
companions had eyes only for each other.

"Jinny!" said he.

"James!"

"How could you leave me so, Jinny?  How could you have the heart to do
it?  I thought you were dead.  I mourned for your death--ay, and you
have made me mourn for you living.  You have withered my life."

She made no answer, but lay back among her cushions with her eyes still
fixed upon him.

"Why do you not speak?"

"Because you are right, James.  I <i>have</i> treated you cruelly--shamefully.
But it is not as bad as you think."

"You fled with De Horta."

"No, I did not.  At the last moment my better nature prevailed.  He
went alone.  But I was ashamed to come back after what I had written to
you.  I could not face you.  I took passage alone to England under a
new name, and here I have lived ever since.  It seemed to me that I was
beginning life again.  I knew that you thought I was drowned.  Who
could have dreamed that fate would throw us together again!  When the
Professor asked me----"

She stopped and gave a gasp for breath.

"You are faint,"  said the Professor--"keep the head low; it aids the
cerebral circulation."  He flattened down the cushion.  "I am sorry to
leave you, O'Brien; but I have my class duties to look to.  Possibly I
may find you here when I return."

With a grim and rigid face he strode out of the room.  Not one of the
three hundred students who listened to his lecture saw any change in
his manner and appearance, or could have guessed that the austere
gentleman in front of them had found out at last how hard it is to rise
above one's humanity.  The lecture over, he performed his routine
duties in the laboratory, and then drove back to his own house.  He did
not enter by the front door, but passed through the garden to the
folding glass casement which led out of the morning-room.  As he
approached he heard his wife's voice and O'Brien's in loud and animated
talk.  He paused among the rose-bushes, uncertain whether to interrupt
them or no.  Nothing was further from his nature than play the
eavesdropper; but as he stood, still hesitating, words fell upon his
ear which struck him rigid and motionless.

"You are still my wife, Jinny," said O'Brien; "I forgive you from the
bottom of my heart.  I love you, and I have never ceased to love you,
though you had forgotten me."

"No, James, my heart was always in Melbourne.  I have always been
yours.  I thought that it was better for you that I should seem to be
dead."

"You must choose between us now, Jinny.  If you determine to remain
here, I shall not open my lips.  There shall be no scandal.  If, on the
other hand, you come with me, it's little I care about the world's
opinion.  Perhaps I am as much to blame as you.  I thought too much of
my work and too little of my wife."

The Professor heard the cooing, caressing laugh which he knew so well.

"I shall go with you, James," she said.

"And the Professor----?"

"The poor Professor!  But he will not mind much, James; he has no
heart."

"We must tell him our resolution."

"There is no need," said Professor Ainslie Grey, stepping in through
the open casement.  "I have overheard the latter part of your
conversation.  I hesitated to interrupt you before you came to a
conclusion."

O'Brien stretched out his hand and took that of the woman.  They stood
together with the sunshine on their faces.  The Professor paused at the
casement with his hands behind his back, and his long black shadow fell
between them.

"You have come to a wise decision," said he.  "Go back to Australia
together, and let what has passed be blotted out of your lives."

"But you--you----" stammered O'Brien.

The Professor waved his hand.

"Never trouble about me," he said.

The woman gave a gasping cry.

"What can I do or say?" she wailed.  "How could I have foreseen this?
I thought my old life was dead.  But it has come back again, with all
its hopes and its desires.  What can I say to you, Ainslie?  I have
brought shame and disgrace upon a worthy man.  I have blasted your
life.  How you must hate and loathe me!  I wish to God that I had never
been born!"

"I neither hate nor loathe you, Jeannette," said the Professor,
quietly.  "You are wrong in regretting your birth, for you have a
worthy mission before you in aiding the life-work of a man who has
shown himself capable of the highest order of scientific research.  I
cannot with justice blame you personally for what has occurred.  How
far the individual monad is to be held responsible for hereditary and
engrained tendencies, is a question upon which science has not yet said
her last word."

He stood with his finger-tips touching, and his body inclined as one
who is gravely expounding a difficult and impersonal subject.  O'Brien
had stepped forward to say something, but the other's attitude and
manner froze the words upon his lips.  Condolence or sympathy would be
an impertinence to one who could so easily merge his private griefs in
broad questions of abstract philosophy.

"It is needless to prolong the situation," the Professor continued, in
the same measured tones.  "My brougham stands at the door.  I beg that
you will use it as your own.  Perhaps it would be as well that you
should leave the town without unnecessary delay.  Your things,
Jeannette, shall be forwarded."

O'Brien hesitated with a hanging head.

"I hardly dare offer you my hand," he said.

"On the contrary.  I think that of the three of us you come best out of
the affair.  You have nothing to be ashamed of."

"Your sister----"

"I shall see that the matter is put to her in its true light.
Good-bye!  Let me have a copy of your recent research.  Good-bye,
Jeannette!"

"Good-bye!"

Their hands met, and for one short moment their eyes also.  It was only
a glance, but for the first and last time the woman's intuition cast a
light for itself into the dark places of a strong man's soul.  She gave
a little gasp, and her other hand rested for an instant, as white and
as light as thistle-down, upon his shoulder.

"James, James!" she cried.  "Don't you see that he is stricken to the
heart?"

He turned her quietly away from him.

"I am not an emotional man," he said. "I have my duties--my research on
Vallisneria.  The brougham is there.  Your cloak is in the hall.  Tell
John where you wish to be driven.  He will bring you anything you need.
Now go."

His last two words were so sudden, so volcanic, in such contrast to his
measured voice and mask-like face, that they swept the two away from
him.  He closed the door behind them and paced slowly up and down the
room.  Then he passed into the library and looked out over the wire
blind.  The carriage was rolling away.  He caught a last glimpse of the
woman who had been his wife.  He saw the feminine droop of her head,
and the curve of her beautiful throat.

Under some foolish, aimless impulse, he took a few quick steps towards
the door.  Then he turned, and throwing himself into his study-chair he
plunged back into his work.


There was little scandal about this singular domestic incident.  The
Professor had few personal friends, and seldom went into society.  His
marriage had been so quiet that most of his colleagues had never ceased
to regard him as a bachelor.  Mrs. Esdaile and a few others might talk,
but their field for gossip was limited, for they could only guess
vaguely at the cause of this sudden separation.

The Professor was as punctual as ever at his classes, and as zealous in
directing the laboratory work of those who studied under him.  His own
private researches were pushed on with feverish energy.  It was no
uncommon thing for his servants, when they came down of a morning, to
hear the shrill scratchings of his tireless pen, or to meet him on the
staircase as he ascended, grey and silent, to his room.  In vain his
friends assured him that such a life must undermine his health.  He
lengthened his hours until day and night were one long, ceaseless task.

Gradually under this discipline a change came over his appearance.  His
features, always inclined to gauntness, became even sharper and more
pronounced.  There were deep lines about his temples and across his
brow.  His cheek was sunken and his complexion bloodless.  His knees
gave under him when he walked; and once when passing out of his
lecture-room he fell and had to be assisted to his carriage.

This was just before the end of the session and soon after the holidays
commenced the professors who still remained in Birchespool were shocked
to hear that their brother of the chair of physiology had sunk so low
that no hopes could be entertained of his recovery.  Two eminent
physicians had consulted over his case without being able to give a
name to the affection from which he suffered.  A steadily decreasing
vitality appeared to be the only symptom--a bodily weakness which left
the mind unclouded.  He was much interested himself in his own case,
and made notes of his subjective sensations as an aid to diagnosis.  Of
his approaching end he spoke in his usual unemotional and somewhat
pedantic fashion.  "It is the assertion," he said, "of the liberty of
the individual cell as opposed to the cell-commune.  It is the
dissolution of a co-operative society.  The process is one of great
interest."

And so one grey morning his co-operative society dissolved.  Very
quietly and softly he sank into his eternal sleep.  His two physicians
felt some slight embarrassment when called upon to fill in his
certificate.

"It is difficult to give it a name," said one.

"Very," said the other.

"If he were not such an unemotional man, I should have said that he had
died from some sudden nervous shock--from, in fact, what the vulgar
would call a broken heart."

"I don't think poor Grey was that sort of a man at all."

"Let us call it cardiac, anyhow," said the older physician.

So they did so.




THE CASE OF LADY SANNOX.

The relations between Douglas Stone and the notorious Lady Sannox were
very well known both among the fashionable circles of which she was a
brilliant member, and the scientific bodies which numbered him among
their most illustrious confreres.  There was naturally, therefore, a
very widespread interest when it was announced one morning that the
lady had absolutely and for ever taken the veil, and that the world
would see her no more.  When, at the very tail of this rumour, there
came the assurance that the celebrated operating surgeon, the man of
steel nerves, had been found in the morning by his valet, seated on one
side of his bed, smiling pleasantly upon the universe, with both legs
jammed into one side of his breeches and his great brain about as
valuable as a cap full of porridge, the matter was strong enough to
give quite a little thrill of interest to folk who had never hoped that
their jaded nerves were capable of such a sensation.

Douglas Stone in his prime was one of the most remarkable men in
England.  Indeed, he could hardly be said to have ever reached his
prime, for he was but nine-and-thirty at the time of this little
incident.  Those who knew him best were aware that, famous as he was as
a surgeon, he might have succeeded with even greater rapidity in any of
a dozen lines of life.  He could have cut his way to fame as a soldier,
struggled to it as an explorer, bullied for it in the courts, or built
it out of stone and iron as an engineer.  He was born to be great, for
he could plan what another man dare not do, and he could do what
another man dare not plan.  In surgery none could follow him.  His
nerve, his judgment, his intuition, were things apart.  Again and again
his knife cut away death, but grazed the very springs of life in doing
it, until his assistants were as white as the patient.  His energy, his
audacity, his full-blooded self-confidence--does not the memory of them
still linger to the south of Marylebone Road and the north of Oxford
Street?

His vices were as magnificent as his virtues, and infinitely more
picturesque.  Large as was his income, and it was the third largest of
all professional men in London, it was far beneath the luxury of his
living.  Deep in his complex nature lay a rich vein of sensualism, at
the sport of which he placed all the prizes of his life.  The eye, the
ear, the touch, the palate--all were his masters.  The bouquet of old
vintages, the scent of rare exotics, the curves and tints of the
daintiest potteries of Europe--it was to these that the quick-running
stream of gold was transformed.  And then there came his sudden mad
passion for Lady Sannox, when a single interview with two challenging
glances and a whispered word set him ablaze.  She was the loveliest
woman in London, and the only one to him.  He was one of the handsomest
men in London, but not the only one to her.  She had a liking for new
experiences, and was gracious to most men who wooed her.  It may have
been cause or it may have been effect that Lord Sannox looked fifty,
though he was but six-and-thirty.

He was a quiet, silent, neutral-tinted man, this lord, with thin lips
and heavy eyelids, much given to gardening, and full of home-like
habits.  He had at one time been fond of acting, had even rented a
theatre in London, and on its boards had first seen Miss Marion Dawson,
to whom he had offered his hand, his title, and the third of a county.
Since his marriage this early hobby had become distasteful to him.
Even in private theatricals it was no longer possible to persuade him
to exercise the talent which he had often shown that he possessed.  He
was happier with a spud and a watering-can among his orchids and
chrysanthemums.

It was quite an interesting problem whether he was absolutely devoid of
sense, or miserably wanting in spirit.  Did he know his lady's ways and
condone them, or was he a mere blind, doting fool?  It was a point to
be discussed over the teacups in snug little drawing-rooms, or with the
aid of a cigar in the bow windows of clubs.  Bitter and plain were the
comments among men upon his conduct.  There was but one who had a good
word to say for him, and he was the most silent member in the
smoking-room.  He had seen him break in a horse at the university, and
it seemed to have left an impression upon his mind.

But when Douglas Stone became the favourite, all doubts as to Lord
Sannox's knowledge or ignorance were set for ever at rest.  There, was
no subterfuge about Stone.  In his high-handed, impetuous fashion, he
set all caution and discretion at defiance.  The scandal became
notorious.  A learned body intimated that his name had been struck from
the list of its vice-presidents.  Two friends implored him to consider
his professional credit.  He cursed them all three, and spent forty
guineas on a bangle to take with him to the lady.  He was at her house
every evening, and she drove in his carriage in the afternoons.  There
was not an attempt on either side to conceal their relations; but there
came at last a little incident to interrupt them.

It was a dismal winter's night, very cold and gusty, with the wind
whooping in the chimneys and blustering against the window-panes.  A
thin spatter of rain tinkled on the glass with each fresh sough of the
gale, drowning for the instant the dull gurgle and drip from the eves.
Douglas Stone had finished his dinner, and sat by his fire in the
study, a glass of rich port upon the malachite table at his elbow.  As
he raised it to his lips, he held it up against the lamplight, and
watched with the eye of a connoisseur the tiny scales of beeswing which
floated in its rich ruby depths.  The fire, as it spurted up, threw
fitful lights upon his bold, clear-cut face, with its widely-opened
grey eyes, its thick and yet firm lips, and the deep, square jaw, which
had something Roman in its strength and its animalism.  He smiled from
time to time as he nestled back in his luxurious chair.  Indeed, he had
a right to feel well pleased, for, against the advice of six
colleagues, he had performed an operation that day of which only two
cases were on record, and the result had been brilliant beyond all
expectation.  No other man in London would have had the daring to plan,
or the skill to execute, such a heroic measure.

But he had promised Lady Sannox to see her that evening and it was
already half-past eight.  His hand was outstretched to the bell to
order the carriage when he heard the dull thud of the knocker.  An
instant later there was the shuffling of feet in the hall, and the
sharp closing of a door.

"A patient to see you, sir, in the consulting-room," said the butler.

"About himself?"

"No, sir; I think he wants you to go out."

"It is too late," cried Douglas Stone peevishly.  "I won't go."

"This is his card, sir."

The butler presented it upon the gold salver which had been given to
his master by the wife of a Prime Minister.

"'Hamil Ali, Smyrna.'  Hum!  The fellow is a Turk, I suppose."

"Yes, sir.  He seems as if he came from abroad, sir.  And he's in a
terrible way."

"Tut, tut!  I have an engagement.  I must go somewhere else.  But I'll
see him.  Show him in here, Pim."

A few moments later the butler swung open the door and ushered in a
small and decrepit man, who walked with a bent back and with the
forward push of the face and blink of the eyes which goes with extreme
short sight.  His face was swarthy, and his hair and beard of the
deepest black.  In one hand he held a turban of white muslin striped
with red, in the other a small chamois leather bag.

"Good-evening," said Douglas Stone, when the butler had closed the
door.  "You speak English, I presume?"

"Yes, sir.  I am from Asia Minor, but I speak English when I speak
slow."

"You wanted me to go out, I understand?"

"Yes, sir.  I wanted very much that you should see my wife."

"I could come in the morning, but I have an engagement which prevents
me from seeing your wife to-night."

The Turk's answer was a singular one.  He pulled the string which
closed the mouth of the chamois leather bag, and poured a flood of gold
on to the table.

"There are one hundred pounds there," said he, "and I promise you that
it will not take you an hour.  I have a cab ready at the door."

Douglas Stone glanced at his watch.  An hour would not make it too late
to visit Lady Sannox.  He had been there later.  And the fee was an
extraordinarily high one.  He had been pressed by his creditors lately,
and he could not afford to let such a chance pass.  He would go.

"What is the case?" he asked.

"Oh, it is so sad a one!  So sad a one!  You have not, perhaps, heard
of the daggers of the Almohades?"

"Never."

"Ah, they are Eastern daggers of a great age and of a singular shape,
with the hilt like what you call a stirrup.  I am a curiosity dealer,
you understand, and that is why I have come to England from Smyrna, but
next week I go back once more.  Many things I brought with me, and I
have a few things left, but among them, to my sorrow, is one of these
daggers."

"You will remember that I have an appointment, sir," said the surgeon,
with some irritation.  "Pray confine yourself to the necessary details."

"You will see that it is necessary.  To-day my wife fell down in a
faint in the room in which I keep my wares, and she cut her lower lip
upon this cursed dagger of Almohades."

"I see," said Douglas Stone, rising.  "And you wish me to dress the
wound?"

"No, no, it is worse than that."

"What then?"

"These daggers are poisoned."

"Poisoned!"

"Yes, and there is no man, East or West, who can tell now what is the
poison or what the cure.  But all that is known I know, for my father
was in this trade before me, and we have had much to do with these
poisoned weapons."

"What are the symptoms?"

"Deep sleep, and death in thirty hours."

"And you say there is no cure.  Why then should you pay me this
considerable fee?"

"No drug can cure, but the knife may."

"And how?"

"The poison is slow of absorption.  It remains for hours in the wound."

"Washing, then, might cleanse it?"

"No more than in a snake-bite.  It is too subtle and too deadly."

"Excision of the wound, then?"

"That is it.  If it be on the finger, take the finger off.  So said my
father always.  But think of where this wound is, and that it is my
wife.  It is dreadful!"

But familiarity with such grim matters may take the finer edge from a
man's sympathy.  To Douglas Stone this was already an interesting case,
and he brushed aside as irrelevant the feeble objections of the husband.

"It appears to be that or nothing," said he brusquely.  "It is better
to lose a lip than a life."

"Ah, yes, I know that you are right.  Well, well, it is kismet, and
must be faced.  I have the cab, and you will come with me and do this
thing."

Douglas Stone took his case of bistouries from a drawer, and placed it
with a roll of bandage and a compress of lint in his pocket.  He must
waste no more time if he were to see Lady Sannox.

"I am ready," said he, pulling on his overcoat.  "Will you take a glass
of wine before you go out into this cold air?"

His visitor shrank away, with a protesting hand upraised.

"You forget that I am a Mussulman, and a true follower of the Prophet,"
said he.  "But tell me what is the bottle of green glass which you have
placed in your pocket?"

"It is chloroform."

"Ah, that also is forbidden to us.  It is a spirit, and we make no use
of such things."

"What!  You would allow your wife to go through an operation without an
anaesthetic?"

"Ah! she will feel nothing, poor soul.  The deep sleep has already come
on, which is the first working of the poison.  And then I have given
her of our Smyrna opium.  Come, sir, for already an hour has passed."

As they stepped out into the darkness, a sheet of rain was driven in
upon their faces, and the hall lamp, which dangled from the arm of a
marble caryatid, went out with a fluff.  Pim, the butler, pushed the
heavy door to, straining hard with his shoulder against the wind, while
the two men groped their way towards the yellow glare which showed
where the cab was waiting.  An instant later they were rattling upon
their journey.

"Is it far?" asked Douglas Stone.

"Oh, no.  We have a very little quiet place off the Euston Road."

The surgeon pressed the spring of his repeater and listened to the
little tings which told him the hour.  It was a quarter past nine.  He
calculated the distances, and the short time which it would take him to
perform so trivial an operation.  He ought to reach Lady Sannox by ten
o'clock.  Through the fogged windows he saw the blurred gas-lamps
dancing past, with occasionally the broader glare of a shop front.  The
rain was pelting and rattling upon the leathern top of the carriage and
the wheels swashed as they rolled through puddle and mud.  Opposite to
him the white headgear of his companion gleamed faintly through the
obscurity.  The surgeon felt in his pockets and arranged his needles,
his ligatures and his safety-pins, that no time might be wasted when
they arrived.  He chafed with impatience and drummed his foot upon the
floor.

But the cab slowed down at last and pulled up.  In an instant Douglas
Stone was out, and the Smyrna merchant's toe was at his very heel.

"You can wait," said he to the driver.

It was a mean-looking house in a narrow and sordid street.  The
surgeon, who knew his London well, cast a swift glance into the
shadows, but there was nothing distinctive--no shop, no movement,
nothing but a double line of dull, flat-faced houses, a double stretch
of wet flagstones which gleamed in the lamplight, and a double rush of
water in the gutters which swirled and gurgled towards the sewer
gratings.  The door which faced them was blotched and discoloured, and
a faint light in the fan pane above it served to show the dust and the
grime which covered it.  Above, in one of the bedroom windows, there
was a dull yellow glimmer.  The merchant knocked loudly, and, as he
turned his dark face towards the light, Douglas Stone could see that it
was contracted with anxiety.  A bolt was drawn, and an elderly woman
with a taper stood in the doorway, shielding the thin flame with her
gnarled hand.

"Is all well?" gasped the merchant.

"She is as you left her, sir."

"She has not spoken?"

"No; she is in a deep sleep."

The merchant closed the door, and Douglas Stone walked down the narrow
passage, glancing about him in some surprise as he did so.  There was
no oilcloth, no mat, no hat-rack.  Deep grey dust and heavy festoons of
cobwebs met his eyes everywhere.  Following the old woman up the
winding stair, his firm footfall echoed harshly through the silent
house.  There was no carpet.

The bedroom was on the second landing.  Douglas Stone followed the old
nurse into it, with the merchant at his heels.  Here, at least, there
was furniture and to spare.  The floor was littered and the corners
piled with Turkish cabinets, inlaid tables, coats of chain mail,
strange pipes, and grotesque weapons.  A single small lamp stood upon a
bracket on the wall.  Douglas Stone took it down, and picking his way
among the lumber, walked over to a couch in the corner, on which lay a
woman dressed in the Turkish fashion, with yashmak and veil.  The lower
part of the face was exposed, and the surgeon saw a jagged cut which
zigzagged along the border of the under lip.

"You will forgive the yashmak," said the Turk.  "You know our views
about woman in the East."

But the surgeon was not thinking about the yashmak.  This was no longer
a woman to him.  It was a case.  He stooped and examined the wound
carefully.

"There are no signs of irritation," said he.  "We might delay the
operation until local symptoms develop."

The husband wrung his hands in incontrollable agitation.

"Oh! sir, sir!" he cried.  "Do not trifle. You do not know.  It is
deadly.  I know, and I give you my assurance that an operation is
absolutely necessary.  Only the knife can save her."

"And yet I am inclined to wait," said Douglas Stone.

"That is enough!" the Turk cried, angrily.  "Every minute is of
importance, and I cannot stand here and see my wife allowed to sink.
It only remains for me to give you my thanks for having come, and to
call in some other surgeon before it is too late."

Douglas Stone hesitated.  To refund that hundred pounds was no pleasant
matter.  But of course if he left the case he must return the money.
And if the Turk were right and the woman died, his position before a
coroner might be an embarrassing one.

"You have had personal experience of this poison?" he asked.

"I have."

"And you assure me that an operation is needful."

"I swear it by all that I hold sacred."

"The disfigurement will be frightful."

"I can understand that the mouth will not be a pretty one to kiss."

Douglas Stone turned fiercely upon the man.  The speech was a brutal
one.  But the Turk has his own fashion of talk and of thought, and
there was no time for wrangling.  Douglas Stone drew a bistoury from
his case, opened it and felt the keen straight edge with his
forefinger.  Then he held the lamp closer to the bed.  Two dark eyes
were gazing up at him through the slit in the yashmak.  They were all
iris, and the pupil was hardly to be seen.

"You have given her a very heavy dose of opium."

"Yes, she has had a good dose."

He glanced again at the dark eyes which looked straight at his own.
They were dull and lustreless, but, even as he gazed, a little shifting
sparkle came into them, and the lips quivered.

"She is not absolutely unconscious," said he.

"Would it not be well to use the knife while it would be painless?"

The same thought had crossed the surgeon's mind.  He grasped the
wounded lip with his forceps, and with two swift cuts he took out a
broad V-shaped piece.  The woman sprang up on the couch with a dreadful
gurgling scream.  Her covering was torn from her face.  It was a face
that he knew.  In spite of that protruding upper lip and that slobber
of blood, it was a face that he knew.  She kept on putting her hand up
to the gap and screaming.  Douglas Stone sat down at the foot of the
couch with his knife and his forceps.  The room was whirling round, and
he had felt something go like a ripping seam behind his ear.  A
bystander would have said that his face was the more ghastly of the
two.  As in a dream, or as if he had been looking at something at the
play, he was conscious that the Turk's hair and beard lay upon the
table, and that Lord Sannox was leaning against the wall with his hand
to his side, laughing silently.  The screams had died away now, and the
dreadful head had dropped back again upon the pillow, but Douglas Stone
still sat motionless, and Lord Sannox still chuckled quietly to himself.

"It was really very necessary for Marion, this operation," said he,
"not physically, but morally, you know, morally."

Douglas Stone stooped forwards and began to play with the fringe of the
coverlet.  His knife tinkled down upon the ground, but he still held
the forceps and something more.

"I had long intended to make a little example," said Lord Sannox,
suavely.  "Your note of Wednesday miscarried, and I have it here in my
pocket-book.  I took some pains in carrying out my idea.  The wound, by
the way, was from nothing more dangerous than my signet ring."

He glanced keenly at his silent companion, and cocked the small
revolver which he held in his coat pocket.  But Douglas Stone was still
picking at the coverlet.

"You see you have kept your appointment after all," said Lord Sannox.

And at that Douglas Stone began to laugh.  He laughed long and loudly.
But Lord Sannox did not laugh now.  Something like fear sharpened and
hardened his features.  He walked from the room, and he walked on
tiptoe.  The old woman was waiting outside.

"Attend to your mistress when she awakes," said Lord Sannox.

Then he went down to the street.  The cab was at the door, and the
driver raised his hand to his hat.

"John," said Lord Sannox, "you will take the doctor home first.  He
will want leading downstairs, I think.  Tell his butler that he has
been taken ill at a case."

"Very good, sir."

"Then you can take Lady Sannox home."

"And how about yourself, sir?"

"Oh, my address for the next few months will be Hotel di Roma, Venice.
Just see that the letters are sent on.  And tell Stevens to exhibit all
the purple chrysanthemums next Monday and to wire me the result."




A QUESTION OF DIPLOMACY.

The Foreign Minister was down with the gout.  For a week he had been
confined to the house, and he had missed two Cabinet Councils at a time
when the pressure upon his department was severe.  It is true that he
had an excellent undersecretary and an admirable staff, but the
Minister was a man of such ripe experience and of such proven sagacity
that things halted in his absence.  When his firm hand was at the wheel
the great ship of State rode easily and smoothly upon her way; when it
was removed she yawed and staggered until twelve British editors rose
up in their omniscience and traced out twelve several courses, each of
which was the sole and only path to safety.  Then it was that the
Opposition said vain things, and that the harassed Prime Minister
prayed for his absent colleague.

The Foreign Minister sat in his dressing-room in the great house in
Cavendish Square.  It was May, and the square garden shot up like a
veil of green in front of his window, but, in spite of the sunshine, a
fire crackled and sputtered in the grate of the sick-room.  In a
deep-red plush armchair sat the great statesman, his head leaning back
upon a silken pillow, one foot stretched forward and supported u

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