Dr. Carmichael turned on the light in the hall, and opened the front
door. A tall, dark man of military aspect loomed out of the mist, and,
behind him, at the curbstone, the outline of a big motorcar was dimly
visible. He held out a visiting-card inscribed "Baron de Mortemer,"
and spoke slowly and courteously, but with a strong nasal accent and a
tone of insistent domination.
"You are the Dr. Carmichael, yes? You speak French--no? It is a pity.
There is need of you at once--a patient--it is very pressing. You will
come with me, yes?"
"But I do not know you, sir," said the doctor; "you are----"
"The Baron de Mortemer," broke in the stranger, pointing to the card
as if it answered all questions. "It is the Baroness who is very
suffering--I pray you to come without delay."
"But what is it?" asked the doctor. "What shall I bring with me? My
instrument-case?"
The Baron smiled with his lips and frowned with his eyes. "Not at
all," he said, "Madame expects not an arrival--it is not so bad as
that--but she has had a sudden access of anguish--she has demanded
you. I pray you to come at the instant. Bring what pleases you, what
you think best, but come!"
The man's manner was not agitated, but it was strangely urgent,
overpowering, constraining; his voice was like a pushing hand.
Carmichael threw on his coat and hat, hastily picked up his
medicine-satchel and a portable electric battery, and followed the
Baron to the motor.
The great car started easily and rolled softly purring down the
deserted street. The houses were all asleep, and the college buildings
dark as empty fortresses. The moon-threaded mist clung closely to the
town like a shroud of gauze, not concealing the form beneath, but
making its immobility more mysterious. The trees drooped and dripped
with moisture, and the leaves seemed ready, almost longing, to fall at
a touch. It was one of those nights when the solid things of the
world, the houses and the hills and the woods and the very earth
itself, grow unreal to the point of vanishing; while the impalpable
things, the presences of life and death which travel on the unseen
air, the influences of the far-off starry lights, the silent messages
and presentiments of darkness, the ebb and flow of vast currents of
secret existence all around us, seem so close and vivid that they
absorb and overwhelm us with their intense reality.
Through this realm of indistinguishable verity and illusion, strangely
imposed upon the familiar, homely street of Calvinton, the machine ran
smoothly, faintly humming, as the Frenchman drove it with
master-skill--itself a dream of embodied power and speed. Gliding by
the last cottages of Town's End where the street became the highroad,
the car ran swiftly through the open country for a mile until it came
to a broad entrance. The gate was broken from the leaning posts and
thrown to one side. Here the machine turned in and laboured up a
rough, grass-grown carriage-drive.
Carmichael knew that they were at Castle Gordon, one of the "old
places" of Calvinton, which he often passed on his country drives. The
house stood well back from the road, on a slight elevation, looking
down over the oval field that was once a lawn, and the scattered elms
and pines and Norway firs that did their best to preserve the memory
of a noble plantation. The building was colonial; heavy stone walls
covered with yellow stucco; tall white wooden pillars ranged along a
narrow portico; a style which seemed to assert that a Greek temple was
good enough for the residence of an American gentleman. But the clean
buff and white of the house had long since faded. The stucco had
cracked, and, here and there, had fallen from the stones. The paint on
the pillars was dingy, peeling in round blisters and narrow strips
from the grey wood underneath. The trees were ragged and untended, the
grass uncut, the driveway overgrown with weeds and gullied by
rains--the whole place looked forsaken. Carmichael had always supposed
that it was vacant. But he had not passed that way for nearly a month,
and, meantime, it might have been reopened and tenanted.
The Baron drove the car around to the back of the house and stopped
there.
"Pardon," said he, "that I bring you not to the door of entrance; but
this is the more convenient."
He knocked hurriedly and spoke a few words in French. The key grated
in the lock and the door creaked open. A withered, wiry little man,
dressed in dark grey, stood holding a lighted candle, which flickered
in the draught. His head was nearly bald; his sallow, hairless face
might have been of any age from twenty to a hundred years; his eyes
between their narrow red lids were glittering and inscrutable as those
of a snake. As he bowed and grinned, showing his yellow, broken teeth,
Carmichael thought that he had never seen a more evil face or one more
clearly marked with the sign of the drug-fiend.
"My chauffeur, Gaspard," said the Baron, "also my valet, my cook, my
chambermaid, my man to do all, what you call factotum, is it not? But
he speaks not English, so pardon me once more."
He spoke a few words to the man, who shrugged his shoulders and smiled
with the same deferential grimace while his unchanging eyes gleamed
through their slits. Carmichael caught only the word "Madame" while he
was slipping off his overcoat, and understood that they were talking
of his patient.
"Come," said the Baron, "he says that it goes better, at least not
worse--that is always something. Let us mount at the instant."
The hall was bare, except for a table on which a kitchen lamp was
burning, and two chairs with heavy automobile coats and rugs and veils
thrown upon them. The stairway was uncarpeted, and the dust lay thick
under the banisters. At the door of the back room on the second floor
the Baron paused and knocked softly. A low voice answered, and he went
in, beckoning the doctor to follow.