Never again did Alfred Croucher venture out alone, even as far as the
pillar-box; not another letter had he to post, though he received one,
wrapped round a stone, once when his window was open, and literally
devoured every word. He did go out, but only with the crime doctor in
his car, for an hour or two in the afternoon.
More than once they got out at Richmond Park, sent the car across to one
of the other gates, and followed at a brisk walk, shoulder to shoulder,
with Croucher often peeping over his, but Dollar never. The walk was
sometimes broken for as long as it took Croucher to smoke a pipe in one
or another of the beautiful wooded enclosures which are the inner glory
of the most glorious of all public parks. There, under red canopies of
dying leaves, their feet upon a russet carpet of the dead, the smoker
would rest in a restless silence, because the one subject which had made
him eloquent was now tabooed. Even in the Chamber of Peace there was no
peace for Alfred Croucher, and but little sleep, although the doctor had
walked him off his legs and would sit beside him till all hours. So the
literary and conversational treatment had been altered once for all; and
now the patient would hardly read or speak a word.
Late one night, in the second half of the month, the crime doctor,
seated like a waxwork in a chair that never creaked, had just made sure
that his man was asleep at last. He decided to steal out and write some
letters, and take them to the post himself before locking up; and was
getting by inches to his catlike feet, when some sense held him bent
like a bow. It could hardly have been his hearing, in his own
sound-proof sanctuary between double windows and triple doors. Yet
suddenly he was all on edge, listening with nerves laid bare by forced
vigils in that slumberous room, brown as an Arab in its weird lighting;
the silver patch in his hair changed from a florin to a new penny, the
whites of his eyes like broad gold rings; their one flaw augmented by an
infinite fatigue, their one care the human wreckage on the
bed--shattered utterly by him, to be by him built up afresh, but not in
the midst of excursions and alarms. And here was the inmost door
opening, so softly, so slowly, at deadliest dead of night!
It was a woman who entered like a ghost, and he knew her step, though he
could not hear it even now. And though her cloak and head-dress were
those of a trained nurse, he knew, rather than saw, that the wearer was
Lady Vera Moyle.
"Hush!" she was the first to whisper, and very softly closed the last
door, through which he would have hurried her out again. Already her
soundless movements, her air of vast precaution, puzzled him even more
than her presence or her dress; but he still had anxieties on this side
of the door.
"Just asleep," he whispered, pointing to the bed. "Bad time I've given
him, poor brute, but a better one coming, I do believe. Did you come to
see how he was doing?" Even in the stained light she looked so beaming
now, so frankly triumphant, he made sure that was it. "I'd have written,
but thought you were away. Who let you in?"
"This!"
And she held up a new Yale key.
"Where did you get it?"
"Specially cut for me." Every line in his red man's face was a note of
blank interrogation. "Mostyn Scarth has another--cut specially for him!
I've had him watched."
"Vera!"
"_I_ was watching _for_ him--from the nursing home opposite--suffrage
friends of mine."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"You had enough to do."