"Shelley was quite right!" exclaimed the young man at the book-shelf,
with the prematurely bent back turned upon Doctor Dollar at his old oak
desk.
"He was never wrong when he stuck to poetry," said the doctor, looking
up from an unfinished prescription on which the ink was nevertheless
dry.
The other gave a guilty start. He was an immaculate young wreck, with
the fashionable glut of hair plastered back from a good enough face, as
if to make the most of its haggard pallor. And he was in full evening
dress, for the crime doctor's patients came at all hours.
"Did I say anything?" he asked with exaggerated embarrassment.
"You thought something aloud," said Dollar, smiling. "Don't let it
worry you; that's not one of the straws that shows an ill wind. What is
it of Shelley's, Mr. Edenborough?"
"Only a bit of one of his letters," said the young man. "I just happened
to open them at something that rather appealed to me." And the book shot
back into its place.
"Not the bit about the prussic acid, I hope?" suggested the doctor, for
all the world as if in fun.
"What was that?" said Edenborough, with a face that would not have
imposed upon an infant.
"A little commission from Shelley to Trelawny, for a small quantity of
the 'essential oil of bitter almonds,' as he called it, so that he might
'hold in his possession that golden key to the chamber of perpetual
peace.'"
"That was it," said the youth at length. "I may as well be honest about
it. But I don't know how on earth you knew!"
The doctor gave a kindly little laugh.
"Only by knowing the book," he assured the patient. "It's rather a
notorious passage--and you had just been clamoring for at least a silver
key to some chamber of temporary peace!"
"You said you would give me one, Doctor Dollar."
"And now I think I won't," said the doctor, rising from his aged chair.
"No; you shall not go without hearing my reasons, and what I am going to
propose to you instead. These keys, Mr. Edenborough"--and he tore the
unfinished prescription into little bits--"gold or silver, they are not
keys at all, but burglars' jemmies that injure and vitiate the chambers
they break into. It certainly is so with the night's rest you want at
any price; it may be the same with the perpetual peace that Shelley took
for granted. Yet I happen to have a Chamber of Peace of sorts here in
this house. It's my latest fad. You've found it a name, and in return I
should like to offer it to you for the night."
"Do you mean a room that sends you off instead of drugs?"
[Illustration: "Did I say anything?"]
Young Edenborough was looking puzzled, but for the moment taken out of
himself. He had heard of Doctor Dollar as a rather eccentric consultant,
but as the very man for him, from no less an authority than the Home
Secretary of England, and no further back than that very evening at
dinner. He had come straight round from Portman Square, foreseeing
miracles and magic potions; but he had not foreseen John Dollar, or his
unprofessional conversation, or the slight cast that actually added to
his magnetic eyes, his cheery yet gentle confidence, or (least of all) a
serious if casual invitation for the night.
"That's exactly what I do mean," said the author of these surprises.
"It's the most silent room in London, and there are other little points
about it. I got our friend Topham to give it a trial during the bread
strike. His verdict was that the Chancellor of the Exchequer would sleep
the sleep of the just there!"
Edenborough had a laugh that turned him back into a schoolboy; but he
checked it sharply, as though the sound put him to shame and pain.
"I would give anything for one decent night," he said. "But you are far
too good, sir, especially to a man you know nothing at all about."
"I ought to know more in the morning, Mr. Edenborough, but it will keep
very well till then. Enough for the night that you're a friend of the
Home Secretary, and at your worst at just the time when a man wants to
be at his best."
Edenborough smote his brow like a young man on the stage, but with a
piteous spontaneity beyond all histrionic art.
"It's on Thursday!" he cried, as one in exquisite dread. "My God, I'm to
be married on Thursday, and this is Sunday night! How can I toe the mark
unless I get some sleep? And how can I sleep----"
"Leave that to me," said Dollar, cutting a pregnant pause as short as
possible; "leave everything to me, and come straight up-stairs. I keep
the room in constant readiness; you shall be fitted with pajamas, and
I'll send a special messenger anywhere you like for whatever you may
want in the morning. Come, my dear man! I am burning to give my Chamber
of Peace a crucial test, because I know we shall all come out with
flying colors!"
There was less confidence in the Doctor Dollar who ran down-stairs a
little later and sat at his telephone with an urgent face. In another
minute he had left the house, and in another two Mr. Topham Vinson was
opening the door to him in Portman Square.
"I call this too bad of you," began the doctor, short of breath and
shorter still of patience with his powerful friend.
"My dear fellow, I couldn't help it," vowed the Minister, with disarming
meekness. "He would go straight to you, and just then I couldn't have
rung you up without giving him away at this end."
"I can stay five minutes," said Dollar, looking at his watch, "to hear
as much as you can tell me in the time of what I ought to have known
before I saw your neurotic friend."
"Hasn't he told you all about himself?"
"Hardly a word worth anything in a case like this, where the cause
matters more than the effect. Of course I could have insisted, but that
might have finished him off for the night. I gather, however, that he's
one of the First Lord's secretaries, but a friend of yours, on the brink
of being married, and in more than the normal state about it, or
something to do with it."
"I'll take your points in order," said Topham Vinson, who could be
brisker than anybody when he chose. "George Edenborough is not only one
of Stockton's secretaries, but the most private and most confidential of
the crowd. I don't know about his being a friend of mine; I've been a
friend to him for family reasons, and found him a nice enough fellow.
But the girl he's going to marry--if they do marry--is one of us."
"If!" cried the doctor. "Do you mean to say she'd draw back in the last
week?"
"She may not be able to help herself," was the grave reply. "George
Edenborough is under a cloud that may burst at any moment."
"A sudden cloud?"
"Out of the blue for me. I only heard of it from Stockton on Friday
night. But it's no new thing to him. He might have told me sooner, I
think, seeing it was through me that Edenborough ever went to him."
"In some special capacity, I rather gather?"
"Yes; he can draw a bit--in fact, he's not a secretary at all except in
name, but the First Lord's private draftsman. Stockton's a whale for
details but a dunce at technicalities. What he likes is the thing on
paper, as he sees it with his own eyes; so he makes his inspections
with Edenborough and a sketch-block, illustrated notes are taken at
every turn, and all sorts of impossible improvements worked out in
subsequent collaboration. I had that this evening from the boy himself.
It will show you what chances he has had of giving things
away--or--selling them!"
"Is it as bad as that?"
"Stockton swears it is. To me it's inconceivable. But he gives chapter
and verse of at least one drawing that found its way across the North
Sea early in the year. Edenborough admits that he either lost it or had
it stolen from him. He seems to have been more careful--whichever way
you look at it--during the summer. But this autumn the trouble has begun
again. A dockyard sketch-map has flown the German Ocean, come home to
roost by some means into which we'd better not inquire, and is
pronounced by Stockton a bad imitation of one made for him by
Edenborough six weeks ago."
"Why a bad imitation, I wonder?"
"The original has been in the First Lord's archives ever since; he says
the copy must have been made from memory; but he has good reasons why
nobody but Edenborough could have made it."
"Reasons that are not so good in law, apparently?"
"Exactly; as yet there's no case and there has been no accusation. But I
very much fear that traps are being set, and I've taken it on myself to
put the madman on his guard."
"To-night?"
"Yes; it was the first chance of getting hold of him, and that only by
having the poor little bride to dinner as well. Heavy work, Dollar,
drinking their healths and knowing what was in the air! The only comfort
was that Edenborough knew as well as I did; it was written on his face,
if you had the key, and I hadn't to do much beating about the bush when
I got him to myself. He was wonderfully frank, from his point of view.
He told me that the air of suspicion was driving him out of his mind; he
said he hadn't slept for nights and nights."
"Although no accusation has been made?"
"Although not an open word has been said to connect him with the bad
copy of his own map!"
"That's the worst thing you've told me," said Dollar quietly. "He
protested his innocence, of course?"
"In absolute tears!"
"And what was your own impression, Mr. Vinson?"
"Extremely mixed. I felt that he was speaking the truth, and yet not the
whole truth. He had an air of guilty knowledge, if not of actual guilt."
"His physical condition bears you out," observed the doctor with
reluctance. "And the poor devil's to be married in four days' time!"
"There my pity's on the other side."
"But the girl's another friend of yours? May I ask her name?"
"Lucy Trevellyn."
"Any relation of Admiral Trevellyn?"
"Own daughter to the old sea-dog, and if anything the breezier of the
two! I couldn't imagine a young girl more like an old salt at heart.
She'd go to sea if she could; as she can't, she's a little pillar of the
Navy League--and engaged to the First Lord's best young man! Could you
conceive a more ingenious irony, or a greater tragedy when the truth
comes out? Dollar, it must come out before Thursday, if it's ever coming
out at all!"
"Is it otherwise a likely match?"
"The very likeliest, but for this world's goods, and there'll be more of
them one day. She has go enough for two, and they have tastes in common.
I told you he could draw a bit, but she's a little artist, though you
wouldn't think it if you saw her teaching him to skate at Prince's or
taking me on at golf! Lucy Trevellyn's the best type of
sportswoman--just as Vera Moyle is one gone wrong."
John Dollar was on his feet.
"Well, I've stayed longer than I intended," said he abruptly. "I
promised to go up within half an hour to see if he was asleep. And he
will be. But what's a night's rest against such a tragedy as the whole
thing's bound to be!"
"Or such a mystery?" suggested Topham Vinson. "If you could only get to
the bottom of that, Dollar, we might know how to act."
"I'm not a detective," returned the doctor--but the stiff words were
hardly out before the stiff lips relaxed in a smile. "I've said that
before, Vinson, and I shouldn't wonder if you made me say it again. I am
out to stop things happening, not to bother about things that have been
done and can't be mended. But in this case discovery may be the mother
of prevention, and I must have a shot with both barrels while there's
time."
He had come in glum and grumbling; he went off gay and incisive, subtly
enlivened by the very gravity of the matter, as he always was. But it
was grave enough, as was Dollar himself behind the sparkling mask that
he wore unawares in all times of stress. And on one point his confidence
was justified without delay; the young man in the Chamber of Peace was
found drenched already in slumbers worthy of the name he had unwittingly
bestowed upon that magic fastness.
But this was not a case in which the crime doctor could leave well
alone. Every hour of the night he was up-stairs and down again; and, in
the intervals, either deep in such grim reading as the Illustrative
Cases of Transitory Mania, in the terrible fourth volume of _Casper's
Forensic Medicine_, or deeper yet in his own cognate speculations.
In the morning it was he who carried up the patient's suit-case, woke
him up, and watched the rising tide of memory drown the thanks in his
throat. Now was the doctor's chance of checking Mr. Vinson's version of
the young man's troubles; but he waited for George Edenborough to open
his own heart, and waited in vain till the last five minutes, when the
boy began to thank him and ended with the whole story.
It differed very little from the second-hand synopsis, but it confirmed
more than one impression which Dollar would have given much to
relinquish. The talk of intolerable suspicions was indeed more
consistent with a guilty conscience than anything else, since it was
duly followed by the admission that nobody had expressed such suspicions
in anything like so many words. The crime doctor was sorry he had put
the question; it was the only one he asked. But by exhorting Edenborough
to get all the exercise he could, and by saying he had heard great
things of Miss Trevellyn's skating, the reluctant dissembler had little
difficulty in obtaining an immediate invitation to tea at Prince's
Skating Club.
Edenborough had departed with a face almost radiant at the prospect; yet
he had scarcely spoken of his beloved until the subject of skating
cropped up. It was as though that was the only relation in which he
could still think of her without pain and shame; and in due course he
was discovered on the ice with the same look of lingering pride and joy.
It was the height of the skating afternoon, and the glassy strip an
opaque pane on which a little giant might have been scribbling with a
big diamond. The eye swam with pairs rotating as in a circus--with
single practitioners at work under dashing instructors down the middle
of the rink--while the ear sang with a resounding swish of skates. One
of the workers was George Edenborough, who came off one leg, with a
glistening forehead, to find his guest a good place behind the barrier.
"So glad you're not late for the waltzing," he said nervily. "I've had a
long day out of town, and didn't get here myself till much later than I
expected. Lucy's writing a letter in the lounge, but she'll be here in a
minute for the enclosure, and after that we'll have tea."
Dollar ascertained that the waltzing enclosure was a close
quarter-of-an-hour for all but those more or less proficient in that
delicate and astounding art. Edenborough said that he himself was not
quite up to the standard of these displays, and suited the action to the
word by taking the floor unsteadily on his skates. As he seated himself
a gong sounded, the band struck up, beginners dispersed, confident hands
clasped lissome waists, long edges ended in lightning threes, and the
rink was a maze of sweeping grace and symmetry.
Dollar had never seen anything like it in his life, for artificial ice
was in its infancy in London before the war, and ever since he had been
a busy man. He followed first one couple and then another, and each
seemed to him more competent and graceful than the last. Yet the first
short waltz was not over before an involuntary selection had eliminated
all but a dark strong girl in red and a swarthy man with bright eyes and
a black mustache.
"Those two are the best," said he--"that girl in red and the heavy
alien."
"Do you think so?" cried the delighted Edenborough. "Then you're a
judge, because that's Lucy!"
"I didn't mean to insult her partner," said Dollar in some dismay. "He's
the best waltzer on the ice except Miss Trevellyn."
"He's an Italian marquis," returned Edenborough, in another voice.
"Rocchi's his beastly name. I've no use for the fellow. But he can
skate."
The first waltz finished there were two more in quick succession, and
Edenborough had a better word for Miss Trevellyn's next partner. He was
only a glowing schoolboy, home from Eton for his leave, but the past
mistress lent herself to his dash and fling with a gusto equal to his
own.
"I'm glad that's over," said Edenborough, as she escaped with her life
from the desperado's clutches. "I say, confound that fellow Rocchi!"
She was waltzing with the handsome brute again; for he looked no less,
with his deep blue chin and insolent eyes, and his air of conscious
mastery. Edenborough plainly loathed him, chafing visibly as the pair
swept past with certainly the appearance of some extra verve for his
benefit. Dollar himself was very disagreebly impressed, and that down to
the end, when Rocchi skated up with the lady, whom he surrendered with a
gleam of palpable bravado.
Yet that impression altered with the very opening of Miss Trevellyn's
not less resolute mouth. She had good teeth and a hearty voice, and
eyes of a breezy and humane audacity. Dollar thought of Topham Vinson's
tribute, and agreed with all except the odious comparison. There was,
indeed, no comparing types as different as Lucy Trevellyn and Vera
Moyle; but the one had never puzzled him in the past more completely
than did the other before he took his leave.
And they had talked about the wedding, and their presents, and the
wedding trip, as though neither God nor man could interfere!
"Only three days to go!" said Dollar to himself. And two of the three
were soon gone without alarums or excursions, except on the part of the
crime doctor himself. He was neglecting his practise for the case in
hand; he was nowhere to be found when badly wanted on the Tuesday night,
nor yet on the Wednesday morning; and this was the more extraordinary in
that it was George Edenborough who wanted him, now with an ashier face
than ever, and now on the telephone in a frantic voice.
At dusk on the Wednesday his key turned in the latch, and next day's
bridegroom burst from the waiting-room at the same moment.
"At last!" cried Edenborough; and looked so ghastly in the electric
light that Dollar did not switch it on in the consulting-room, or ask a
question as he shut the door.
It was one of those mild unseasonable days on which the best of servants
keep up the biggest fires; the doctor opened the French window that led
from his den, down rusty steps, into a foul and futile enclosure of
grimy gravel and moribund shrubs. In the meantime Edenborough had not
taken a seat as mechanically bidden, but had planted himself in defiant
pose before the fire; and the glow showed restless hands twitching into
fists, but not the face of which one look had been enough.
"You might have left word where you were!" he began with great
bitterness.
"I have just done so," returned Dollar, "at your rooms. I was wanting to
see you--presently. It seems like fate, to find you here before me."
"I suppose you've heard the latest, wherever you've been?" pursued
Edenborough, aware and jealous of some independent perplexity on the
part of Dollar.
"I have heard so much!" said the doctor, dropping into a chair. "Better
be explicit--and as expeditious as you can, my dear fellow. I have an
appointment almost directly."
"Oh! there's not much to say," rejoined the other sardonically. "You
remember when you came to Prince's, doctor?"
"I do, indeed."
They both spoke as if it were weeks ago.
"You know I told you I'd had a hard day out of town?"
"I remember."
"I meant with my chief--Lord Stockton--seeing his new brood of
submarines."
"In their unfledged state, I suppose?"
"That was it--and making the usual sketches. That's my job--or was! I
was Stockton's walking Kodak until yesterday afternoon; then I got the
boot for a wedding present, and a chance of the jug for my honeymoon!"
The harsh voice broke, for all its sudden slang and satire. Dollar was
driven to his only policy.
"I'm not going to pretend I don't know of this," he said. "I know of it
from the Home Secretary. A duplicate of one of those last drawings of
yours----"
"A duplicate!"
"Well, a bad imitation, if you like."
The doctor paused as though he had finished a sentence, as though the
amended phrase had interrupted his thought.
"Well?" said Edenborough grimly. "Did you hear how they got hold of it?"
"Intercepted in the post, I gathered, on its way abroad."
"In our post," said Edenborough. "Almost a _casus belli_ in itself, I
should have thought!"
"And have you no idea how it came there?" asked the doctor bluntly--but
now he meant to be blunt; he was not sorry when his man flew into a
feeble passion on the spot.
"What the devil do you mean, Doctor Dollar? I know no more about the
matter than--I was going to say, than you do--but I begin to think you
know more than you pretend!"
"I didn't think I had pretended," said Dollar, simply.
"Well, what _do_ you know?" demanded Edenborough, in a fury of
suspicion. "All, I suppose?" he added, with a schoolboy sneer, when the
answer was slow to come.
"Yes; all," said the doctor, very gravely and reluctantly, as though
driven into a pronouncement of life or death.
There was no outcry of surprise from Edenborough. He had some pride. But
his knees began to tremble in the firelight, and his unclenched hands to
twitch.
"I don't believe it," he exclaimed at length. "You tell me what you
know!"
"All that you yourself suspected, and made yourself ill with
suspecting--and couldn't sleep for suspecting--long ago!"
Pitiful tone and tender hand carried a heavier conviction than the
words. And now it was the patient who had sunk into the chair, the
doctor bending over his bowed and quivering shoulders.
[Illustration: "Mark my words closely"]
"You are not the first man, my dear Edenborough," he went on, "who would
seem to have been betrayed in cold blood by a woman--by _the_ woman.
Mark my words closely. I say it seems so. I would not condemn the
greatest malefactor unheard. I meant to hear Miss Trevellyn
first--feeling in my bones, against all reason, that there may still be
some unimaginable explanation. But, if the worst be true of her, then
the best is true of you; for you are the first man I have known bear the
brunt as you have borne it, my very dear fellow!"
"What makes you suspect her?" groaned Edenborough to the ground.
"It's not a case of suspicion--don't deceive yourself as to that,
Edenborough. I _know_ that Miss Trevellyn produced--and parted
with--those last two sketches about which there's been all the trouble.
I only _suspect_ that she got you to show her the originals, almost as
soon as they were made, on the plea of her tremendous interest in the
Navy."
"Quite true; she did," said Edenborough, but as though he did not
appreciate what he was saying, as though something else had stuck in his
mind. "But it _was_ a tremendous interest!" he exclaimed, jumping up.
"It was her father's interest; his life, indeed! Isn't it inconceivable
that his daughter--apart from everything else I've found her--that she
of all people should do a thing like this?"
"I am afraid the inconceivable happens almost as often as the
unexpected," said Dollar, with a sigh. "Criminology, indeed, prepares us
for little else. Think of the perfectly good mothers who have flown to
infanticide as the first relief of a mind unhinged! The inversion of the
ruling passions is one of the sure symptoms of insanity."
"But of course she's mad," cried Edenborough, "if she's guilty at all.
But that's what I can't and won't believe. I can believe it one minute
but not the next, just as I've suspected and laughed at my suspicions
all this nightmare time. One look in her face has always been enough,
and would be at this minute."
"Well, we shall soon see," said Dollar, glancing at the clock. "But I
can only warn you that my evidence is overwhelming."
"Let's have it, then; what is your evidence?" demanded Edenborough, in a
fresh fit of stone-blind defiance.
"My dear fellow, you force my hand!" said Dollar. "God knows you have a
right--and it can't make matters worse than they are. My evidence
consists of a full and circumstantial confession by a scoundrel to whom
I took your own dislike at sight, and whose career I have spent the week
investigating. I needn't tell you I mean the infamous Rocchi."
"Rocchi!" whispered Edenborough at the second attempt, as though his
very tongue rejected the abhorrent name. Yet now he stood perfectly
still, like a man who sees at last. "Well," he added in an ominously
rational voice, "I must live long enough to send _him_ to hell, whatever
else I do."
"You will have to find him first," said Dollar. "He has gone back to his
paymasters--not his own countrymen--they kicked him out long ago. I've
taken it on myself to do the same, instead of handing him over to the
police and doing an infinite deal more harm than good."
But Edenborough was not listening to a word; he was talking to himself,
and he talked aloud as soon as he was given a chance.
"Now we know why she was so keen on my wretched job ... on the whole
Navy?... No, not a life-long fraud like that.... And she pretended to
dislike that brute as much as I did! I believe she did, too, but for his
waltzing.... No, never jealous of him, and I'm not now ... but so much
the worse, so much the more damnably cold-blooded!"
Dying philosopher could not have displayed a more acute detachment. But
the last touch was lost upon Dollar, whose expectant ear had caught the
ting of an electric bell.
"Edenborough," he said, in the voice of urgent conciliation, "the time
has come for you to show what's in you. So far you have kept your head
and played the man; keep it now, and you will play the hero! I still
can't imagine what Miss Trevellyn can have to say for herself--but I
implore you to hear her out, for I believe she is being admitted at this
moment."
"Lucy--here--and you expected her?"
"I told you I had another appointment. But you were here first, one
thing led to another, and it may be better as it is. You were bound to
have this out between you--and to-day. If you wish me to be
present--but no human being can help!"
"Unless it's you!" suggested Edenborough in a panic-stricken whisper. "I
can't face her alone--I can't trust myself!"
Dollar took no notice of a knock at the door. "Edenborough, you must,"
he said gently; "and whatever she may have to say--much or little, and
it may be much--you must hear patiently to the end. It's your duty, man!
Don't flinch from it, for God's sake!"
"But I do flinch from it!" cried Edenborough below his breath. "I flinch
from it for her sake as much as mine. I'm not the one to shame her, even
if Rocchi's telling----"
The door opened in response to Dollar's decisive call. It was the little
Barton boy, to say that Miss Trevellyn was in the waiting-room.
"Show her in," said Dollar. "I have more than Rocchi's bare word,
Edenborough."
The distracted youth looked about him like a wild creature in a cage,
and saw his loophole at the last moment.
"I won't be the one to shame her, whatever she has done!" he whimpered
through his teeth. "If there's any explanation, she need never know I
knew; if there's not, good-by!"
And he slipped through the open window, out upon the iron steps, as
Dollar switched on the lights that turned the outer dusk to darkness;
and the door opened even as the curtain was drawn in desperation, with a
last signal to Edenborough to stand his ground and at least hear all.
"Good evening, Doctor Dollar," said Miss Trevellyn, briskly, and with
that she stopped in her sturdy stride. "Is anything the matter?"
"Is it possible you don't know what?"
"Is it anything to do with George? You're his doctor, aren't you?" These
questions quicker, but with a sensible check on any premature anxiety.
"He has consulted me, but the matter more directly concerns yourself.
It's no use beating about the bush, Miss Trevellyn!" exclaimed the
doctor, with a sudden irritation at her straight carriage and straighter
look. "I have to speak to you about the Marchese Rocchi."
"Have you, indeed!"
Miss Trevellyn had winced at the name, but already her eyes looked
brighter and bolder, and the firm face almost serenely obdurate.
"The Marchese Rocchi," he continued, "fled the country yesterday, Miss
Trevellyn."
"I wondered why he was not at Prince's!"
"He fled because of a scandal in which you are implicated," said Dollar
very sternly. "He has been trafficking in naval secrets--this country's
secrets, Miss Trevellyn--and he swears you sold them to him. Is it
true?"
"One moment," said the girl, with a first trace of emotion. "Is all this
of your own accord, or on behalf of Mr. Edenborough?"
"Of my own accord entirely."
"You've been ferreting things out for yourself, have you?"
"You are entitled to put it so."
"Detective as well as doctor, it appears?"
"Miss Trevellyn, I implore you to tell me if these things are true!"
"So that you may tell your patient, I suppose?"
"No. I shall not tell him," said Dollar, disingenuously enough, but with
the deeper sorrow.
"Very well! I'll tell you, and you can shout it from the roof for all I
care now. It's perfectly true!"
Dollar started, not at the thing that had to come, but at the
manner in which it came. It seemed, indeed, the last word in
wickedness--impenitent, unblushing, even vainglorious to eye and ear
alike. His glance flew to the curtained window, but no sound or movement
came from the iron stair outside.
"True that you sold those drawings to this man Rocchi?" he heard himself
saying at last, in a tone so childish that he scarcely wondered at the
smile it drew.
"Perfectly true," said Miss Trevellyn.
"Drawings made by George Edenborough for the First Lord of the
Admiralty, and shown to you because you were the stronger character and
insisted on seeing them, but only in such confidence as might almost be
justified between future man and wife?"
"I didn't sell his drawings," said Miss Trevellyn, impatiently. "I
copied them, more or less from memory, and sold my own efforts."
"Of course I know that! It was a slip of the tongue," he admonished
her, while marveling more and more. "And you can put the whole thing
plainly without so much as a blush!"
"I am going to put you to the blush instead, Doctor Dollar," returned
the lady, with a lighter touch. "You are very clever at finding out what
I did, but you don't ask why I did it; that's not so clever of such a
clever man, and I must just enlighten you before I go. The first drawing
was not a copy; it was the original they got that time, and it was
stolen from Mr. Edenborough on his way home from the Admiralty. He never
knew exactly where it was stolen, but I always thought I knew. You are a
bit of a detective, Doctor Dollar; well, so am I in my way. You have not
let me into the secret of your success, and I shouldn't think of boring
you with mine. I thought it happened at Prince's, and I suspected
Rocchi, that was all. It was last spring, and I had all the summer to
think about it. But when Prince's opened I set to work, for there was
Rocchi making up to us both as before. He didn't get much change out of
George, but perhaps I made amends when George wasn't there, and
sometimes even when he was! He could waltz, you see, and so can I,"
said Lucy Trevellyn, with something like a sigh for her bereavement on
the rink.
"Yet you copied the other two drawings, and you even admit you sold him
the copies?"
"I sold them quite well," said Miss Trevellyn, with sparkling eyes--"and
you may guess what I did with the money--but it's not fair to call them
copies. I made them as inaccurate as possible without spoiling
everything, and indeed I couldn't have made them very accurate from
memory, and they were only rough sketches to begin with! Of course
George was wrong to let me see them, but he was assisting in the best of
causes. Rocchi was an expert professional spy. I soon sized him down as
one. But he was not a naval expert--and I'm that as well! That's my last
boast, Doctor Dollar; but it's not unjustifiable, if you come to think
of George and me between us keeping a national enemy out of serious
mischief, feeding a friendly Power with false plans, and giving the
money to our own dear Navy League!"
Dollar surveyed the radiant minx with eyes that needed rubbing. His only
sorrow was that Edenborough did not burst through the curtains without
more ado; he must have extraordinary self-control, when he liked.
"Not that George was a conscious party to the fraud; he wouldn't have
approved of it, he couldn't possibly, poor George!" said George's bride.
"But I shall tell him all about it now; of course I always meant to tell
him--after to-morrow--but he has had quite enough bothers of his own,
and this was my show. I suppose you don't know what's been bothering
him, Doctor Dollar? He says it's overwork, and I do think Lord
Stockton's an old slave-driver; do you know, I haven't even seen George
since the day before yesterday at Prince's?"
"Nor I," said Dollar, no longer with the least compunction, "from that
hour to this."
"Of course I know he's all right," concluded Miss Trevellyn, as they
were parting perfect friends, "because he has rung me up several times
to say so, and he looked better on Monday than for ever so long. But I
must own I shall be glad when I get him away for a real good rest."
She had refused to hear another word from Dollar in explanation, or of
regret, and she made her departure with all the abruptness of a
constitutionally decided person. But she had blushed once at least in
the last few minutes. And the doctor ran back into his den with singing
heart, ready to fall upon his patient's neck in deep thanksgiving and
even more profound congratulation.
No patient was there to meet him even now, but the curtain swayed a
little before the open window. Dollar reached it at a bound; but there
was nobody outside on the iron steps, and the curtain filled behind him
as the inner door banged in the draft. The horrid little space at the
back of the house, between the high black walls with the broken-bottle
coping, lay empty of all life in the plentiful light from the back
windows--but for an early cat that fled before Dollar's precipitate
descent into the basement.
"The gentleman's gone," said Mrs. Barton at once. "He come through this
way some time ago--said he couldn't wait no longer out there!"
"How long do you suppose he had waited?"
"Not long," said Mrs. Barton firmly. "Bob here was at his tea when he
had to go up to show the young lady in; and the young gentleman, it
couldn't've been more than three or four minutes before he was through
'ere as if something had 'appened."
"I didn't hear him."
"He was anxious you shouldn't be disturbed, sir."
"Did you show him out, Bobby?"
The master had never been so short with them. Mrs. Barton felt that
something was the matter, but Bobby quaked.
"Yes, sir!"
"Which way did he go--and how--foot or taxi?"
"I--please, sir--I never stopped to see, sir!"
Dollar flew to his telephone; forsook it for a taxicab; drew
Edenborough's rooms in vain; inquired as vainly (as an anonymous wedding
guest, uncertain of the church) at Admiral Trevellyn's; was at the House
of Commons by half past six, and at Scotland Yard (armed with written
injunctions from the Secretary of State) before seven.
At that hour and place the matter passed out of the hands of Doctor John
Dollar, who could only hasten home to Welbeck Street, there to enter
upon the most shattering vigil of his life--the terrible telephone at
his elbow--and still more terrible inquirers on the telephone as the
night wore on!
But never one word of news.
Toward midnight Topham Vinson arrived with the elaborate sandwiches and
even the champagne that he had found awaiting him at home. It was the
measure of a born leader; the doctor had not broken his fast since
lunch; and in the small hours he once dozed for some minutes in his
chair.
But the politician had not the temperament to wait for the telephone to
talk to him; he talked repeatedly into the telephone, set a round dozen
of myrmidons by the ears, and at last was rightly served by being sent
off to Hammersmith to identify the dead body of a defaulting clerk, just
recovered from the Thames.
"I'm not coming with you," Dollar had said, even when the description
seemed to tally. "Edenborough wouldn't drown himself--and this is my
place."
It was a being ten years older who opened his own front door again at
daybreak. His face was as gray as the wintry dawn, the whole man bowed
and broken. Topham Vinson stood aghast on the step.
"It isn't all over, is it?"
The doctor nodded with compressed lips.
"When and where?"
"I don't know. Come in. They're getting up down-stairs; there'll be some
tea in a minute."
"For God's sake tell me what you've heard!"
"Haven't I told you? They rang up just after you went. He bought prussic
acid yesterday!"
Dollar had dropped into his elaborate old chair; the bent head between
his hands drooped over its own reflection in the monastic writing-table.
"Who rang up?" asked the man on his legs.
"Some of your people."
"Was that all they had to tell you?"
"That was all; we shan't have long to wait for the rest."
"Where did he buy it?"
"At his own chemist's--'to put a poor old dog out of its misery!' His
very words, Vinson, so they tell me! I shall hear them all my life."
"And it has taken all night to learn this, has it, from the chemist's
where the poor devil dealt!"
Dollar understood this outburst of truculent emotion.
"That was my fault," said he. "I told them to confine their attention
to entries made in the poison books after five o'clock yesterday
afternoon. Edenborough had signed his name and got the stuff earlier in
the day."
"Before you told him anything?"
"He had his own suspicions, you must remember. I had confirmed them--and
_her_ first words left no more to be said, that he could bear to hear!
If only he had waited another minute! If only I had dragged him back to
face it out!" groaned Dollar, in a bottomless pit of self-reproach. "I
call myself a crime doctor, yet I let my patient creep into space with a
bottle of prussic acid, and commit the one crime I had to prevent!"
"Why prussic acid, I wonder?"
The idle question was not asked for information, but it happened to be
one that Dollar could answer, and it brought him to his book-shelves
with a certain alacrity.
"I know," he said, "though I never thought of it till this minute! I was
trying to write him a prescription on Sunday night, when the poor chap
suddenly remarked that Shelley was right, and I found him dipping into
these Letters, and had the luck to spot the very bit he'd struck. It
was this"--and he read out the passage beginning: "You, of course, enter
into society at Leghorn: should you meet with any scientific person,
capable of preparing the _Prussic Acid, or essential oil of bitter
almonds_, I should regard it as a great kindness if you could procure me
a small quantity"--down to "it would be a comfort to me to hold in my
hands that golden key to the chamber of perpetual peace."
Topham Vinson's only comment was to pick up the book, which had fallen
to the floor with the concluding words. Dollar was swaying where he
stood, glancing in horror toward the door; at that moment it opened, and
Mrs. Barton entered with the tea-tray.
"Mrs. Barton," said the doctor, in a voice that failed him as it had not
done all night, "I don't want to hurt your feelings, but did that boy of
yours speak the truth when he told me he had seen Mr. Edenborough out?"
"He did not, sir, and his father thrashed him for it!" cried the good
woman. "And that was very wrong of Barton, because I was as bad as the
boy, in not telling you at the time. So we've all done wrong together,
and we don't deserve to stay, as I told the both of them!"
The poor soul was forgiven and consoled, with an unconscious sympathy
not lost on Topham Vinson, to whom it was extended a moment later.
"Take a drink of your tea," said Dollar. "It will do you good."
"What about you?"
"I'm going up-stairs first."
"You've thought of something!"
"I have," replied Dollar in a tragic whisper. "I've thought of my
'chamber of perpetual peace.'"
That sanctuary was on the second floor, and it had triple doors so
spaced that each could be shut in turn before the next was opened. The
house might have been in an uproar, and yet one might have entered this
room without admitting the slightest sound by the door. The window was
of triple glass that would have deadened an explosion on its sill, and
the walls were thickly wadded behind an inner paneling of aromatic pine.
The first sensation on entering was one of ineffable peace and quiet;
next came a subtle, soothing scent, as of all the spices of Arabia; and
lastly a surprising sense of scientific ventilation, as though the four
sound-proof walls were yet not impervious to the outer air, but as
though it were the pungent air of pine-clad mountains, in miraculous
circulation here in the heart of London.
All this would have struck the visitor by degrees; but to John Dollar,
who had devised and superintended every detail, it all came home
together and afresh as he entered softly with the Home Secretary; and a
certain composite effect, unforeseen in the beginning and still
unexplained, fell upon him even now, and with it all the weight of his
own fatigue; so that he could have flung himself on bed or couch as a
doomed wretch sinks into the snow, but for the light in the room and
what the light revealed.
It was light of a warm, strange, coppery shade, that he had found for
himself by dyeing frosted electric lamps as children dye Easter eggs; it
was the very softest and yet least sensuous shade that eyes ever
penetrated with perfect ease, and it turned the room into a little hall
of bronze. The simple curtains might have been golden lace, richly
tarnished with age; the furniture solid copper; the bed an Eastern
divan, and the form upon the bed a sleeping Arab.
It was George Edenborough lying there in all his clothes, a girl's
photograph beside him on the coverlet, and beside the photograph a tiny
phial that caught the light.
"Stay where you are!" whispered Dollar in a voice that thrilled his
companion to the core. And he stole to the bed, stooped over it for a
little lifetime, and so came stealing back.
"How long has he been dead?" said Topham Vinson, harshly; but in realty
his blood was freezing at an unearthly smile in that unearthly light.
"Dead?" was the doctor's husky echo. "Don't you know the smell of bitter
almonds, and have you smelt it yet? Here's the golden bottle he hadn't
opened when he lay down--perhaps for the first time since he was here on
Sunday night--and this is his wedding morning, and he's only--only fast
asleep!"
V