The Crime Doctor Part 23

"We are rather a grim party! And yet my old uncle is absolutely the finest man I ever struck."

"I don't wonder that you admire him."

"You don't know what he is, Captain Dollar. He got the V.C. when he was my age in Burmah, but he deserves one for almost every day of his ordinary home life."

Dollar made no remark; the young fellow offered him a cigarette, and was encouraged to light another himself. He required no encouragement to talk.

"The funny thing is that he's not really my uncle. I'm _her_ nephew; and she's a wonderful woman, too, in her way. She runs the whole place like a book; she's thrown away here. But--I can't help saying it--I should like her better if I didn't love him!"

"Talking of books," said Dollar, "the General told me he was writing one, and that you were helping him?"

"He didn't tell you what it was about?"

"No."

"Then I mustn't. I wish I could. It's to be the last word on a certain subject, but he won't have it spoken about. That's one reason why it's getting on his nerves."

"_Is_ it his book?"

"It and everything. Doesn't he remind you of a man sitting on a powder-barrel? If he weren't what he is, there'd be an explosion every day. And there never is one--no matter what happens!"

Dollar watched the pale youth swallowing his smoke.

"Do they often talk about crime?"

"Always! They can't keep off it. And Aunt Essie always changes the subject as though she hadn't been every bit as bad as uncle. Of course they've had a good lot to make them morbid. I suppose you heard about poor Dingle, the last gardener?"

"Only just"

"He was the last man you would ever have suspected of such a thing. It was in those trees just outside." The crickets made extra merry as he paused. "They didn't find him for a day and a night!"

"Look here! I'm not going to let you talk about it," said Dollar. But the good-humored rebuff cost him an effort. He wanted to hear all about the suicide, but not from this worn lad with an old man's smile. He knew and liked the type too well.

"I'm sorry, Captain Dollar." Jim Paley looked sorry. "Yet, it's all very well! I don't suppose the General told you what happened last night?"

"Well, yes, he did, but without going into any particulars."

And now the doctor made no secret of his curiosity; this was a matter on which he could not afford to forego enlightenment. Nor was it like raking up an old horror; it would do the boy more good than harm to speak of this last affair.

"I can't tell you much about it myself," said he. "I was wondering if I could, just now on the lawn. That's where it happened, you know."

"I didn't know."

"Well, it was, and the funny thing is that I was there at the time. I used to go out with the dog for a cigarette when they turned in; last night I was foolish enough to fall asleep in a chair on the lawn. I had been playing tennis all the afternoon, and had a long bike-ride both ways. Well, all I know is that I woke up thinking I'd been shot; and there was my aunt with a revolver she insists on carrying--and poor Muggins as dead as a door-nail."

"Did she say it was an accident?"

"She behaved as if it had been; she was all over the poor dead brute."

"Rather a savage dog, wasn't it?"

"I never thought so. But the General had no use for him--and no wonder!

Did he tell you he had bitten him in the shoulder?"

"No."

"Well, he did, only the other day. But that's the old General all over.

He never told me till the dog was dead. I shouldn't be surprised if----"

"Yes?"

"----if my aunt hadn't been in it somehow. Poor old Muggins was such a bone between them!"

"You don't suppose he'd ended by turning on her?"

"Hardly. He was like a kitten with her, poor brute!"

Another cigarette was lighted; more inhaling went on unchecked.

"Was Mrs. Dysone by herself out there--but for you?"

"Well--yes."

"Does that mean she wasn't?"

"Upon my word, I don't know!" said young Paley, frankly. "It sounds most awful rot, but just for a moment I thought I saw somebody in a sort of surplice affair. But I can only swear to Aunt Essie, and she was in her dressing-gown, and it wasn't white."

Dollar did not go to bed at all. He sat first at one window, watching the black trees turn blue, and eventually a variety of sunny greens; then at the other, staring down at the pretty scene of a deed ugly in itself, but uglier in the peculiar quality of its mystery.

A dog; only a dog, this time; but the woman's own dog! There were two new sods on the place where he supposed it had lain withering....

But who or what was it that these young men had seen--the one the General had told him about, and this obviously truthful lad whom he himself had questioned? "Brown devils in flowing robes" was perhaps only the old soldier's picturesque phrase; they might have turned brown in his Indian mind; but what of Jim Paley's "somebody in a sort of surplice affair"? Was that "body" brown as well?

In the wood of worse omen the gay little birds tuned up to deaf ears at the open window. And a cynical soloist went so far as to start saying, "Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty!" in a liquid contralto. But a little sharp shot, fired two nights and a day before, was the only sound to get across the spare-room window-sill....

The bathroom was next door; in that physically admirable house there was boiling hot water at six o'clock in the morning; the servants made tea when they heard it running; and the garden before breakfast was almost a delight. It might have been an Eden ... it _was_ ... with the serpent still in the gra.s.s!

Blinds went up like eyelids under bushy brows of ivy. The gra.s.s remained gray with dew; there was not enough sun anywhere, though the whole sky beamed. Dollar wandered indoors the way the General had taken him the day before. It was the way through his library. Libraries are always interesting; a man's bookcase is sometimes more interesting than the man himself, sometimes the one existing portrait of his mind. Dollar spent the best part of an absorbing hour without taking a single volume from its place. But this was partly because those he would have dipped into were under gla.s.s and lock and key. And partly it was due to more accessible distractions crowning that very piece of ostensible antiquity which contained the books, and of which the top drawer drew out into the General's desk.

The distractions were a peculiarly repulsive gilded idol, squatting with its tongue out, as if at the amateur author, and a heathen sword on the wall behind it. Nothing more; but Dollar also had served in India in his day, and his natural interest was whetted by a certain smattering of lore. He was still standing on a newspaper and a chair when a voice hailed him in no hospitable tone.

"Really, Captain Dollar! I should have asked the servants for a ladder while I was about it!"

Of course it was Mrs. Dysone, and she was not even pretending to look pleased. He jumped down with an apology which softened not a line of her sallow face and bony figure.

"It was an outrage," he owned. "But I did stand on a paper to save the chair. I say, though, I never noticed it was this week's _Field_."

Really horrified at his own behavior, he did his best to smooth and wipe away his footmarks on the wrapper of the paper. But those subtle eyes, like blots of ink on old parchment, were no longer trained on the offender, who missed yet another look that might have helped him.