THE TALE THE DOCTOR TOLD
The General read the telegram again. He was, despite his erratic
temperament, a shrewd and intelligent man.
“What does that mean?” he asked quietly for him. “Where is Gilbert?
And where does he wire from?”
He picked up the telegram and inspected it. It was handed in at the
General Post Office at London at 6.35 p.m.
The General’s hour for dining was consonant with his breakfast hour,
and it was a quarter after nine when the dinner gong brought Edith
Standerton down from her room.
She was worried; she could not understand the reference to the jewels.
What had made Gilbert send this message? Had she known more of the
circumstances of what had happened on the previous afternoon she would
have wondered rather how he was able to send the message.
The General took the warning seriously, but not so seriously that he
was prepared to remove his jewellery to any other receptacle. Indeed,
the purchase of the safe had been made necessary by the fact that
beyond the butler’s strong room, which was strong only in an
etymological sense, there was no security for property of any value.
He had made an inspection of the jewels in the safe and had relocked
the door, leaving a servant in the library, with strict instructions
not to come out until he was instructed to leave by his master.
Edith came down to find that another guest had arrived, a guest who
greeted her with a cheery and familiar smile.
“How do you do, Doctor?” she said. “It is not so long since I met you
at mother’s. You remember me?”
“I remember you perfectly,” said Dr. Barclay-Seymour.
He was a tall, thin man with a straggling iron-grey beard and a high
forehead.
A little absent in his manner, he conveyed the impression, never a
very flattering one, that he had matters more weighty to think about
than the conversation which was being addressed to him. He was,
perhaps, the most noteworthy of the provincial doctors. He came out of
his shell sufficiently to recognise her and to remember her mother.
Mrs. Cathcart had been a great friend of Barclay’s. They had grown up
together.
“Your mother is a very wonderful woman,” said Dr. Barclay-Seymour as
he took the girl in to dinner, “a remarkable woman.”
Edith was seized with an almost overwhelming temptation to ask why. It
would have been unpardonable of her had she done so, but never did a
word so tremble upon a human being’s lips as that upon hers.
They ate through dinner, which was made a little uncomfortable by the
fact that General Sir John Standerton was unquestionably nervous.
Twice during the course of the meal he sent out one of the three
footmen who waited at table to visit what he termed the outpost.
Nothing untoward had happened on either occasion.
“I do not know what to do about this jewellery. I hope that Gilbert is
not playing the fool,” he said.
He turned to Edith with a genial scowl.
“Has he developed any kittenish ways of late?”
She smiled.
“There is no word which less describes Gilbert than kittenish,” she
said.
“Is it not remarkable that he sent that message?” the General went on
testily. “I hardly know what to do. I could get a constable up, but
the police here are the most awful and appalling idiots. I have a
great mind to have my bed put in the library and sleep there myself.”
He brightened up at the thought.
He had reached the stage in life when sleeping in any other room than
that to which he was accustomed represented a form of heroism. After
the dinner was through they made their way to the drawing-room.
The General was fidgety, and though Edith played and sang a little
French love song with no evidence of agitation, she was as nervous as
the General.
“I tell you what we will do,” said Sir John suddenly, “we will all
adjourn to the library. It is a jolly nice room if you do not mind our
smoking.”
It was an excellent suggestion, and one that she accepted with
pleasure. She was the only lady of the party, and remarked on the fact
as she went upstairs with Sir John.
He glanced hurriedly round.
“I always regard a doctor as a fit chaperone for any lady,” he said
with a chuckle--it amused him.
Later he found the complement of the joke, and discoursed loudly upon
old women of all professions, a discourse which was arrested by the
arrival of the Doctor and Jack Frankfort.
The library was a big room, and it was chiefly remarkable for the fact
that it contained no more evidence of Sir John’s literary taste than a
number of volumes of the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ and a shelf full
of _Ruff’s Guide to the Turf_. It was, however, a delightful room,
panelled in old oak with mullioned windows standing in deep recesses.
These, explained Sir John, opened out on to a terrace--an excellent
reason for his apprehension.
“Pull the curtain, William,” said Sir John to the waiting footman,
“and then you can clear out. Have the coffee brought in here.”
The man pulled the heavy velvet curtains across the big recesses,
placed a chair for the girl, and retired.
“Excuse me,” said Sir John.
He went across to the safe and opened it again. He inspected the case.
Nothing had been disturbed.
“Ah,” he breathed--It was a sigh of infinite relief.
“This wire of Gilbert’s is getting on my nerves,” he excused himself
irritably. “What the devil did he wire for? Is he the sort of man that
sends telegrams to save himself the bother of licking down an
envelope?”
Edith shook her head.
“I am as much in the dark as you,” she said, “but I assure you that
Gilbert is not an alarmist.”
“How do you get on with him?” he asked her.
The girl flushed a little.
“I get on very well,” she said, and strove to turn the conversation.
But it was a known fact that no human soul had ever turned Sir John
from his set inquisitional course.
“Happy, and that sort of thing?” he asked.
Edith nodded, keeping her eyes on the wall behind the General’s head.
“I suppose you love him--hey?”
Edith was embarrassed, and no less so were the two men; but Sir John
was not alone in imagining that doctors have little sense of decency
and lawyers no idea of propriety. They were saved further discussion
by the arrival of the coffee, and the girl was thankful.
“I am going to keep you here until Gilbert comes up for you,” said the
old man suddenly. “I suppose you know, but probably you do not, that
you are the first of your sex that I have ever tolerated in my house.”
She laughed.
“It is a fact,” he said seriously. “You know I do not get on with
women. They do not realise that though I am an irritable old chap
there is really no harm in me, and I _am_ an irritable old chap,” he
confessed. “It is not that they are impertinent or rude, but it is
their long-suffering meekness that I cannot stand. If a lady tells me
to go to the devil I know where I am. I want the plain, blunt truth
without gaff. I prefer my medicine without sugar.”
The Doctor laughed.
“You are different from most people, Sir John. I know men who are
rather sensitive about the brutal truth.”
“More fools they,” said Sir John.
“I do not know,” said the Doctor reflectively. “I sympathise with a
man who does not want the whole bitterness of fact hurled at his head
in the shape of an honest half a brick, although there is an advantage
in knowing the truth sometimes, it saves a lot of needless
unhappiness,” he added a little sadly. He seemed to have aroused some
unpleasant train of thought. “I will give you an extraordinary
instance,” he went on in his usual deliberate manner.
“What’s that?” asked the General suddenly.
“I think it was a noise in the hall,” said Edith.
“I thought it was a window,” growled the General, rather ashamed that
he should have been detected in his jump.
“Go on with your story, Doctor.”
“A few months ago,” Dr. Seymour recalled, “a young man came to me. He
was a gentleman, and evidently not a townsman of Leeds, at any rate I
did not know him. I found afterwards that he had come from London to
consult me. He had some little tooth trouble, a jagged molar, a very
commonplace thing, and he had made a slight incision in the inside of
his mouth. Apparently it worried him, the more so when he discovered
that the tiny scratch would not heal. Like most of us, he had a
terrible dread of cancer.” He lowered his voice as a doctor often will
when he speaks of this most dreadful malady. “He did not want to go to
his own doctor; as a matter of fact, I do not think he had one. He
came to me, and I examined him. I had my doubt as to there being
anything wrong with him, but I cut a minute section of the membrane
for microscopic examination.”
The girl shivered.
“I am sorry,” said the Doctor hastily, “that is all there is in the
story which is gruesome unless you think---- However,” he went on, “I
promised to send him the result of my examination, and I wanted his
address to send it. This, however, he refused. He was very, very
nervous. ‘I know I am a moral coward,’ he said, ‘but somehow I do not
want to know just the bare truth in bald language; but if it is as I
fear, I would like the news broken to me in the manner which is the
least jarring to me.’”
“And what was that?” asked Sir John, interested in spite of himself.
The Doctor drew a long breath.
“It seems,” he said, “that he was something of a musician”--Edith sat
upright, clasping her hands, her face set, her eyes fixed upon the
Doctor--“he was something of a musician, that is to say, he was very
keen on music, and the method he had of breaking the news to himself
was unique, I have never heard anything quite like it before in my
life. He gave me two cards and an addressed envelope, addressed to an
old musician in London whom he patronised.”
Edith saw the room go swaying round and round, but held herself in
with an effort. Her face was white, her hands that held the chair were
clenched so tightly that the bones shone white through them.
“They were addressed to an old friend of his, as I say, and they were
identically worded with this exception. One of them said in effect you
will go to such and such a place and you will play the ‘Melody in F,’
and the other gave the same instructions but varied to this extent,
that he was to play the ‘Spring Song.’ Now here comes the tragedy.” He
raised his finger. “He gave me the ‘Melody in F’ to signal to him the
fact that he had cancer.”
There was a long silence, which only the quick breathing of the girl
broke.
“And, and--?” whispered Edith.
“And”--the Doctor looked at her with his far-away eyes--“I sent the
wrong card,” he said. “I sent it and destroyed the other before I
remembered my error.”
“Then he has not cancer?” whispered the girl.
“No, and I do not know his address, and I cannot get at him,” said
Barclay-Seymour. “It was tragic in many ways. I think he was just
going to marry, for he said this much to me: ‘If this is true, and I
am married, I will leave my wife a pauper,’ and he asked me a curious
question,” added the Doctor. “He said, ‘Don’t you think that a man
condemned to die is justified in taking any action, committing any
crime, for the protection of the loved ones he leaves behind?’”
“I see,” said Edith.
Her voice was hollow and sounded remote to her.
“What is that?” said the General, and jumped up.
This time there was no doubt. Jack Frankfort sprang to the curtain
that covered the recess and pulled it aside. There stood Gilbert
Standerton, white as a ghost, his eyes staring into vacancy, the hand
at his mouth shaking.
“The wrong card!” he said. “My God!”