The Crime Doctor Part 13

"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 Ill.u.s.trative 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 n.o.body 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 gla.s.sy 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 pract.i.tioners 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.sion 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 p.r.o.nouncement 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.