The Crime Doctor

His next breath was a devout thanksgiving, as a fold in the glistening slopes showed the top of the ice-run, and a group of men in sweaters standing out against the fir-trees on the crest. They seemed to be standing very still. Some had their padded elbows lifted as though they were shading their eyes. But there was no sign of a toboggan starting, no sound of one in the invisible crevice of the run. And now man after man detached himself from the group, and came leaping down the subsidiary snow-track meant only for ascent.

But John Dollar and George Edenborough did not see all of this. A yet more ominous figure had appeared in their own path, had grown into Mostyn Scarth, and stood wildly beckoning to them both.

"It's Jack!" he shouted across the snow. "He's had a smash – self and toboggan – flaw in a runner. I'm afraid he's broken his leg."

"Only his leg!" cried Dollar, but not with the least accent of relief. The tone made Edenborough wince behind him, and Scarth in front look round. It was as though even the crime doctor thought Jack Laverick better dead.

He lay on a litter of overcoats, the hub of a wheel of men that broke of itself before the first doctor on the scene. He was not even insensible, neither was he uttering moan or groan; but his white lips were drawn away from his set teeth, and his left leg had an odd look of being no more a part of him than its envelope of knickerbocker and stocking.

"It's a bu'st, doctor, I'm afraid," the boy ground out as Dollar knelt in the snow. "Hurting? A bit – but I can stick it."

Courage was the one quality he had not lost during the last year; nobody could have shown more during the slow and excruciating progress to the village, on a bobsleigh carried by four stumbling men; everybody was whispering about it. Everybody but the crime doctor, who headed the little procession with a face in keeping with the tone which had made Edenborough wince and Scarth look round.

The complex case of the night – this urgent one – both were forgot in Dollar's own case of years ago. He was back again in another Winterwald, another world. It was no longer a land of Christmas-trees growing out of mountains of Christmas cake; the snow melted before his mind's eye; he was hugging the shadows in a street of toy-houses yielding resin to an August sun, between green slopes combed with dark pines, under a sky of intolerable blue. And he was in despair; all Harley Street could or would do nothing for him. And then – and then – some forgotten ache or pain had taken him to the little man – the great man – down this very turning to the left, in the little wooden house tucked away behind the shops.

How he remembered every landmark – the handrail down the slope – the little porch – the bare stairs, his own ladder between death and life – the stark surgery with its uncompromising appliances in full view! And now at last he was there with such another case as his own – the minor case that he had yet burned to bring there – and there was Alt to receive them in the same white jacket and with the same simple countenance as of old!

They might have taken him on to the hotel, as Scarth indeed urged strongly; but the boy himself was against another yard, though otherwise a hero to the end.

"Chloroform?" he cried faintly. "Can't I have my beastly leg set without chloroform? You're not going to have it off, are you? I can stick anything short of that."

The two doctors retired for the further consideration of a point on which they themselves were not of one mind.

"It's the chance of our lives, and the one chance for him," urged Dollar vehemently. "It isn't as if it were such a dangerous operation, and I'll take sole responsibility."

"But I am not sure you have been right," demurred the other. "He has not even had concussion, a year ago. It has been only the ear."

"There's a lump behind it still. Everything dates from when it happened; there's some pressure somewhere that has made another being of him. It's a much simpler case than mine, and you cured me. Alt, if you had seen how his own mother wrote about him, you would be the very last man to hesitate!"

"It is better to have her consent."

"No – nobody's – the boy himself need never know. There's a young bride here who'll nurse him like an angel and hold her tongue till doomsday. She and her husband may be in the secret, but not another soul!"

And when Jack Laverick came out of chloroform, to feel a frosty tickling under the tabernacle of bedclothes in which his broken bone was as the Ark, the sensation was less uncomfortable than he expected. But that of a dull deep pain in the head drew his first complaint, as an item not in the estimate.

"What's my head all bandaged up for?" he demanded, fingering the turban on the pillow.

"Didn't you know it was broken, too?" said Lucy Edenborough gravely. "I expect your leg hurt so much more that you never noticed it!"

IV

Ten days later Mostyn Scarth called at Doctor Alt's, to ask if he mightn't see Jack at last. He had behaved extremely well about the whole affair; others in his position might easily have made trouble. But there had been no concealment of the fact that injuries were not confined to the broken leg, and the mere seat of the additional mischief was enough for a man of sense. It is not the really strong who love to display their power. Scarth not only accepted the situation, but voluntarily conducted the correspondence which kept poor Mrs. Laverick at half Europe's length over the critical period. He had merely stipulated to be the first to see the convalescent, and he took it as well as ever when Dollar shook his head once more.

"It's not our fault this time, Mr. Scarth. You must blame the sex that is privileged to change its mind. Mrs. Laverick has arrived without a word of warning. She is with her son at this moment, and you'll be glad to hear that she thinks she finds him an absolutely changed character – or, rather, what he was before he ever saw Winterwald a year ago. I may say that this seems more or less the patient's own impression about himself."

"Glad!" cried Scarth, who for the moment had seemed rather staggered. "I'm more than glad; I'm profoundly relieved! It doesn't matter now whether I see Jack or not. Do you mind giving him these magazines and papers, with my love? I am thankful that my responsibility's at an end."

"The same with me," returned the crime doctor. "I shall go back to my work in London with a better conscience than I had when I left it – with something accomplished – something undone that wanted undoing."

He smiled at Scarth across the flap of an unpretentious table, on which lay the literary offering in all its glory of green and yellow wrappers; and Scarth looked up without a trace of pique, but with an answering twinkle in his own dark eyes.

"Alt exalted – restored to favor – Jack reformed character – born again – forger forgot – forging ahead, eh?"

It was his best Mr. Jingle manner; indeed, a wonderfully ready and ruthless travesty of his own performance on the night of Dollar's arrival. And that kindred critic enjoyed it none the less for a second strain of irony, which he could not but take to himself.

"I have not forgot anybody, Mr. Scarth."

"But have you discovered who did the forgery?"

"I always knew."

"Have you tackled him?"

"Days ago!"

Scarth looked astounded. "And what's to happen to him, doctor?"

"I don't know." The doctor gave a characteristic shrug. "It's not my job; as it was, I'd done all the detective business, which I loathe."

"I remember," cried Scarth. "I shall never forget the way you went through that prescription, as though you had been looking over the blighter's shoulder! Not an expert – modest fellow – pride that apes!"

And again Dollar had to laugh at the way Mr. Jingle wagged his head, in spite of the same slightly caustic undercurrent as before.

"That was the easiest part of it," he answered, "although you make me blush to say so. The hard part was what reviewers of novels call the 'motivation.'"

"But you had that in Schickel's spite against Alt."

"It was never quite strong enough to please me."

"Then what was the motive, doctor?"

"Young Laverick's death."

"Nonsense!"

"I wish it were, Mr. Scarth."

"But who is there in Winterwald who could wish to compass such a thing?"

"There were more than two thousand visitors over Christmas, I understand," was the only reply.

It would not do for Mostyn Scarth. He looked less than politely incredulous, if not less shocked and rather more indignant than he need have looked. But the whole idea was a reflection upon his care of the unhappy youth. And he said so in other words, which resembled those of Mr. Jingle only in their stiff staccato brevity.

"Talk about 'motivation'! – I thank you, doctor, for that word – but I should thank you even more to show me the thing itself in your theory. And what a way to kill a fellow! What a roundabout, risky way!"

"It was such a good forgery," observed the doctor, "that even Alt himself could hardly swear that it was one."

"Is he your man?" asked Scarth, in a sudden whisper, leaning forward with lighted eyes.

The crime doctor smiled enigmatically. "It's perhaps just as lucky for him, Scarth, that at least he could have had nothing to do with the second attempt upon his patient's life."

"What second attempt?"

"The hand that forged the prescription, Scarth, with intent to poison young Laverick, was the one that also filed the flaw in his toboggan, in the hope of breaking his neck."

"My dear doctor," exclaimed Mostyn Scarth, with a pained shake of the head, "this is stark, staring madness!"

"I only hope it was – in the would-be murderer," rejoined Dollar gravely. "But he had a lot of method; he even did his bit of filing – a burglar couldn't have done it better – in the domino Jack Laverick had just taken off!"

"How do you know he had taken it off? How do you know the whole job wasn't one of Jack's drunken tricks?"

"What whole job?"

"The one you're talking about – the alleged tampering with his toboggan," replied Scarth, impatiently.

"Oh! I only thought you meant something more." Dollar made a pause. "Don't you feel it rather hot in here, Scarth?"

"Do you know, I do!" confessed the visitor, as though it were Dollar's house and breeding had forbidden him to volunteer the remark. "It's the heat of this stove, with the window shut. Thanks so much, doctor!"

And he wiped his strong, brown, beautifully shaven face; it was one of those that require shaving more than once a day, yet it was always glossy from the razor; and he burnished it afresh with a silk handkerchief that would have passed through a packing-needle's eye.

"And what are you really doing about this – monster?" he resumed, as who should accept the monster's existence for the sake of argument.

"Nothing, Scarth."

"Nothing? You intend to do nothing at all?"

Scarth had started, for the first time; but he started to his feet, while he was about it, as though in overpowering disgust.

"Not if he keeps out of England," replied the crime doctor, who had also risen. "I wonder if he's sane enough for that?"

Their four eyes met in a protracted scrutiny, without a flicker on either side.

"What I am wondering," said Scarth deliberately, "is whether this Frankenstein effort of yours exists outside your own imagination, Doctor Dollar."

"Oh! he exists all right," declared the doctor. "But I am charitable enough to suppose him mad – in spite of his method and his motive."

"Did he tell you what that was?" asked Scarth with a sneer.

"No; but Jack did. He seems to have been in the man's power – under his influence – to an extraordinary degree. He had even left him a wicked sum in a will made since he came of age. I needn't tell you that he has now made another, revoking – "

"No, you need not!" cried Mostyn Scarth, turning livid at the last moment. "I've heard about enough of your mares' nests and mythical monsters. I wish you good morning, and a more credulous audience next time."

"That I can count upon," returned the doctor at the door. "There's no saying what they won't believe – at Scotland Yard!"

VI

ONE POSSESSED

Lieutenant-General Neville Dysone, R.E., V.C., was the first really eminent person to consult the crime doctor by regular appointment in the proper hours. Quite apart from the feat of arms which had earned him the most coveted of all distinctions, the gigantic General, deep-chested and erect, virile in every silver-woven hair of his upright head, filled the tiny stage in Welbeck Street and dwarfed its antique properties, as no being had done before. And yet his voice was tender and even tremulous with the pathetic presage of a heartbreak under all.

"Doctor Dollar," he began at once, "I have come to see you about the most tragic secret that a man can have. I would shoot myself for saying what I have to say, did I not know that a patient's confidence is sacred to any member of your profession – perhaps especially to an alienist?"

"I hope we are all alike as to that," returned Dollar, gently. He was used to these sad openings.

"I ought not to have said it; but it hardly is my secret, that's why I feel such a cur!" exclaimed the General, taking his handkerchief to a fine forehead and remarkably fresh complexion, as if to wipe away its noble flush. "Your patient, I devoutly hope, will be my poor wife, who really seems to me to be almost losing her reason" – but with that the husband quite lost his voice.

"Perhaps we can find it for her," said Dollar, despising the pert professional optimism that told almost like a shot "It is a thing more often mislaid than really lost."

And the last of the other's weakness was finally overcome. A few weighty questions, lightly asked and simply answered, and he was master of a robust address, in which an occasional impediment only did further credit to his delicacy.

"No. I should say it was entirely a development of the last few months," declared the General emphatically. "There was nothing of the kind in our twenty-odd years of India, nor yet in the first year after I retired. All this – this trouble has come since I bought my house in the pine country. It's called Valsugana, as you see on my card; but it wasn't before we went there. We gave it the name because it struck us as extraordinarily like the Austrian Tyrol, where – well, of which we had happy memories, Doctor Dollar."

His blue eyes winced as they flew through the open French window, up the next precipice of bricks and mortar, to the beetling sky-line of other roofs, all a little softened in the faint haze of approaching heat. It cost him a palpable effort to bring them back to the little dark consulting-room, with its cool slabs of aged oak and the summer fernery that hid the hearth.

"It's good of you to let me take my time, doctor, but yours is too valuable to waste. All I meant was to give you an idea of our surroundings, as I know they are held to count in such cases. We are embedded in pines and firs. Some people find trees depressing, but after India they were just what we wanted, and even now my wife won't let me cut down one of them. Yet depression is no name for her state of mind; it's nearer melancholy madness, and latterly she has become subject to – to delusions – which are influencing her whole character and actions in the most alarming way. We are finding it difficult, for the first time in our lives, to keep servants; even her own nephew, who has come to live with us, only stands it for my sake, poor boy! As for my nerves – well, thank God I used to think I hadn't got any when I was in the service; but it's a little hard to be – to be as we are – at our time of life!" His hot face flamed. "What am I saying? It's a thousand times harder on her! She had been looking forward to these days for years."

Dollar wanted to wring one of the great brown, restless hands. Might he ask the nature of the delusions?

The General cried: "I'd give ten years of my life if I could tell you!"

"You can tell me what form they take?"

"I must, of course; it is what I came for, after all," the General muttered. He raised his head and his voice together. "Well, for one thing she's got herself a ferocious bulldog and a revolver."

Dollar did not move a doctor's muscle. "I suppose there must be a dog in the country, especially where there are no children. And if you must have a dog, you can't do better than a bulldog. Is there any reason for the revolver? Some people think it another necessity of the country."

"It isn't with us – much less as she carries it."

"Ladies in India get in the habit, don't they?"

"She never did. And now – "

"Yes, General? Has she it always by her?"

"Night and day, on a curb bracelet locked to her wrist!"

This time there were no professional pretenses. "I don't wonder you have trouble with your servants," said Dollar, with as much sympathy as he liked to show.

"You mayn't see it when you come down, doctor, as I am going to entreat you to do. She has her sleeves cut on purpose, and it is the smallest you can buy. But I know it's always there – and always loaded."

Dollar played a while with a queer plain steel ruler, out of keeping with his other possessions, though it too had its history. It stood on end before he let it alone and looked up.

"General Dysone, there must be some sort of reason or foundation for all this. Has anything alarming happened since you have been at – Valsugana?"

"Nothing that firearms could prevent"

"Do you mind telling me what it is that has happened?"

"We had a tragedy in the winter – a suicide on the place."

"Ah!"

"Her gardener hanged himself. Hers, I say, because the garden is my wife's affair. I only paid the poor fellow his wages."

"Well, come, General, that was enough to depress anybody – "

"Yet she wouldn't have even that tree cut down – nor yet come away for a change – not for as much as a night in town!"

The interruption had come with another access of grim heat and further use of the General's handkerchief. Dollar took up his steel tube of a ruler and trained it like a spy-glass on the ink, with one eye as carefully closed as if the truth lay at the bottom of the blue-black well.

"Was there any rhyme or reason for the suicide?"

"One was suggested that I would rather not repeat."

The closed eye opened to find the blue pair fallen. "I think it might help, General. Mrs. Dysone is evidently a woman of strong character, and anything – "

"She is, God knows!" cried the miserable man. "Everybody knows it now – her servants especially – though nobody used to treat them better. Why, in India – but we'll let it go at that, if you don't mind. I have provided for the widow."

Dollar bowed over his bit of steel tubing, but this time put it down so hastily that it rolled off the table. General Dysone was towering over him with shaking hand outstretched.

"I can't say any more," he croaked. "You must come down and see her for yourself; then you could do the talking – and I shouldn't feel such a damned cur! By God, sir, it's awful, talking about one's own wife like this, even for her own good! It's worse than I thought it would be. I know it's different to a doctor – but – but you're an old soldierman as well, aren't you? Didn't I hear you were in the war?"

"I was."

"Well, then," cried the General, and his blue eyes lit up with simple cunning, "that's where we met! We've run up against each other again, and I've asked you down for this next week-end! Can you manage it? Are you free? I'll write you a check for your own fee this minute, if you like – there must be nothing of that kind down there. You don't mind being Captain Dollar again, if that was it, to my wife?"

His pathetic eagerness, his sensitive loyalty – even his sudden and solicitous zest in the pious fraud proposed – made between them an irresistible appeal. Dollar had to think; the rooms up-stairs were not empty; but none enshrined a more interesting case than this sounded. On the other hand, he had to be on his guard against a weakness for mere human interest as apart from the esoteric principles of his practise. People might call him an empiric – empiric he was proud to be, but it was and must remain empiricism in one definite direction only. Psychical research was not for him – and the Dysone story had a psychic flavor.

In the end he said quite bluntly:

"I hope you don't suggest a ghost behind all this, General?"

"I? Lord, no! I don't believe in 'em," cried the warrior, with a nervous laugh.

"Does any member of your household?"

"Not – now."

"Not now?"

"No. I think I am right in saying that." But something was worrying him. "Perhaps it is also right," he continued, with the engaging candor of an overthrown reserve, "and only fair – since I take it you are coming – to tell you that there was a fellow with us who thought he saw things. But it was all the most utter moonshine. He saw brown devils in flowing robes, but what he'd taken before he saw them I can't tell you! He didn't stay with me long enough for us to get to know each other. But he wasn't just a servant, and it was before the poor gardener's affair. Like so many old soldiers on the shelf, Doctor Dollar, I am writing a book, and I run a secretary of sorts; now it's Jim Paley, a nephew of ours; and thank God he has more sense."

"Yet even he gets depressed?"

"He has had cause. If our own kith and kin behaved like one possessed – " He stopped himself yet again; this time his hand found Dollar's with a vibrant grip. "You will come, won't you? I can meet any train on Saturday, or any other day that suits you better. I – for her own sake, doctor – I sometimes feel it might be better if she went away for a time. But you will come and see her for yourself?"

Before he left it was a promise; a harder heart than John Dollar's would have ended by making it, and putting the new case before all others when the Saturday came. But it was not only his prospective patient whom the crime doctor was now really anxious to see; he felt fascinated in advance by the scene and every person of an indubitable drama, of which at least one tragic act was already over.

There was no question of meeting him at any station; the wealthy mother of a still recent patient had insisted on presenting Doctor Dollar with a fifteen-horse-power Talboys, which he had eventually accepted, and even chosen for himself (with certain expert assistance), as an incalculable contribution to the Cause. Already the car had vastly enlarged his theater of work; and on every errand his heart was lightened and his faith fortified by the wonderful case of the young chauffeur who sat so upright at the wheel beside him. In the beginning he had slouched there like the worst of his kind; it was neither precept nor reprimand which had straightened his back and his look and all about him. He was what John Dollar had always wanted – the unconscious patient whose history none knew – who himself little dreamed that it was all known to the man who treated him almost like a brother.

The boy had been in prison for dishonesty; he was being sedulously trusted, and so taught to trust himself. He had come in March, a sulky and suspicious clod; and now in June he could talk cricket and sixpenny editions from the Hounslow tram-lines to the wide white gate opening into a drive through a Berkshire wood, with a house lurking behind it in a mask of ivy, out of the sun.

But in the drive General Dysone stepped back into the doctor's life, and, on being directed to the stables, he who had filled it for the last hour drove out of it for the next twenty-four.

"I wanted you to hear something at once from me," his host whispered under the whispering trees, "lest it should be mentioned and take you aback before the others. We've had another little tragedy – not a horror like the last – yet in one way almost worse. My wife shot her own dog dead last night!"

Dollar put a curb upon his parting lips.

"In the night?" he stood still to ask.

"Well, between eleven and twelve."

"In her own room, or where?"

"Out-of-doors. Don't ask me how it happened; nobody seems to know, and don't you know anything if she speaks of it herself."

His fine face was streaming with perspiration; yet he seemed to have been waiting quietly under the trees, he was not short of breath, and he a big elderly man. Dollar asked no questions at all; they dropped the subject there in the drive. Though the sun was up somewhere out of sight, it was already late in the long June afternoon, and the guest was taken straight to his room.