-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
|-
| _
|-
|-
- -


Y u & 2, 4 ºn ºc
CŞ%(Q%:7 S$7(9983/
GO4%66277(9%’
Tºo?ºccº,
barbarb College Libraru
QUEST OF
PRESCOTT
OF 1909











--
“It was struck with—this


The Crime Doctor
By ERNEST W. HORNUNG
AUTHOR of
“Raffles,” “The Amateur Cracksman,”
“The Thousandth Woman,” Etc.
With Frontispiece by ,
FREDERIC DORR STEELE
A. L. BURT COMPANY
PUBLISHERS - - NEW YORK
PUBLished by ARRANGEMENT with The Bobbs, MERRILL Company
-


CopyRIGHT 1913-1914
The Ridgway Company
CopyRichT 1914
The Bobbs-MERRILL Company
HARWARD COLLEGE LIBRARY
BEQUEST OF
WINWARD PRESCOTT
JANUARY 27, 1933


II
III
IV
CONTENTS
THE PHYSIcIAN Who HEALED HIMSELF
THE LIFE-PRESERVER
pace
40
VI
VII
VIII
A HoPEless Case
The Golden KEY
A SchoolMasTER ABROAD .
ONE Possessed
The Doctor’s Assistant .
THE SEconD MURDERER . . . .
77
118
159
199
237
272





THE CRIME DOCTOR
THE PHYSICIAN WHO HEALED HIMSELF
N the course of his meteoric career as Secretary
of State for the Home Department, the Right
Honorable Topham Vinson instituted many re-
forms and earned the reformer's whack of praise
and blame. His methods were not those of the
permanent staff; and while his notorious courage
endeared him to the young, it was not in so strong
a nature to leave friend or foe lukewarm. An
assiduous contempt for tradition fanned the flame
of either faction, besides leading to several of those
personal adventures which were as breath to the
Minister's unregenerate nostrils, but which never
came out without exposing him to almost universal
I


2 THE CRIME DOCTOR
censure. It is matter for thanksgiving that the
majority of his indiscretions were unguessed while
he and his held office; for he was never so uncon-
ventional as in pursuance of those enlightened tac-
tics on which his reputation rests, or in the company
of that kindred spirit who had so much to do with
their inception.
It was early in an autumn session that this re-
markable pair became acquainted. Mr. Vinson
had been tempted by the mildness of the night to
walk back from Westminster to Portman Square.
He had just reached home when he heard his name
cried from some little distance behind him. The
voice tempered hoarse excitement with the restraint
due to midnight in a quiet square; and as Mr. Vin-
son turned on his door-step, a young man rushed
across the road with a gold chain swinging from his
outstretched hand.
“Your watch, sir, your watch!” he gasped, and
displayed a bulbous hunter with a monogram on
one side and the crest of all the Vinsons on the
other.
“Heavens!” cried the Home Secretary, feeling
in an empty waistcoat pocket before he could be-


THE PHYSICIAN 3
lieve his eyes. “Where on earth did you find that?
I had it on me when I left the House.”
“It wasn't a case of findings,” said the young
man, as he fanned himself with his opera hat.
“I’ve just taken it from the fellow who took it
from you.”
“Who? Where?” demanded the Secretary of
State, with unstatesmanlike excitement.
“Some poor brute in North Audley Street, I
think it was.”
“That's it! That was where he stopped me, just
at the corner of Grosvenor Squarel” exclaimed
Vinson. “And I went and gave the old scoundrel
half-a-crown!”
“He probably had your watch while you were
looking in your purse.” w
And the young man dabbed a very good fore-
head, that glistened in the light from the open door,
with a white silk handkerchief just extracted from
his sleeve.
“But where were you?” asked Topham Vinson,
taking in every inch of him.
“I’d just come into the square myself. You
had just gone out of it. The pickpocket was look-


THE PHYSICIAN 5
sion of a practised hand, and led the attack on food
and drink with schoolboy gusto and high spirits.
In the meantime there had been some mutual
note-taking. The Home Secretary, whose emphatic
personality lent itself to the discreet pencil of the
modern caricaturist, was in appearance exactly as
represented in contemporary cartoons; there was
nothing unexpected about him, since his boyish
vivacity was a quality already over-exploited by
the Press. His frankness was something qualified
by a gaze of habitual penetration, but still it was
there, and his manner could evidently be grand or
colloquial at will. The surprise was in his sur-
roundings rather than in the man himself. The
perfect union of luxury and taste is none too com-
mon in the professed Sybarite who is that and
nothing more; in men of action and pugnacious
politicians it is yet another sign of sheer capacity.
The bits of rich old furniture, the old glass twink-
ling at every facet, the brasses blazing in the fire-
light, the few but fine prints on the Morris wall-
paper, might have won the approval of an art stu-
dent, and the creature comforts that of the youngest
epicure.


6 THE CRIME DOCTOR
*The young man from the street was easily pleased
in all such respects; but indoors he no longer looked
quite the young man. He had taken off an over-
coat while his host was opening the champagne,
and evening clothes accentuated a mature gaunt-
ness of body and limb. His hair, which was dark
and wiry, was beginning to bleach at the temples;
and up above one ear there was a little disk of
downright silver, like a new florin. The shaven
face was pale, eager, and austere. Dark eyes burnt
like beacons under a noble brow, and did not lose
in character or intensity by a distinct though slight
strabism. So at least it seemed to Topham Vinson,
who was a really wonderful judge of faces, yet had
seldom seen one harder to sum up.
“I’m sorry you don't smoke,” said he, snipping
a cigar which he had extolled in vain. “And that
champagne, you know ! You haven't touched it,
and you really should.”
The other was on his legs that instant. “I never
smoke and seldom drink,” he exclaimed; “but I
simply can not endure your hospitality, kind as it is,
Mr. Vinson, without being a bit more honest with
you than I’ve been so far. I didn't lose that pick-


THE PHYSICIAN 7
pocket by accident or because he was too quick for
me. I—I purposely packed him off.” -
In the depths of his softest chair Mr. Vinson
lolled smiling—but not with his upturned eyes.
They were the steel eyes of all his tribe, but trebly
keen, as became its intellectual head and chief.
“The fellow pitched a pathetic yarn?” he con-
jectured. He had never seen a more miserable
specimen, he was bound to say.
“It wasn't that, Mr. Vinson. I should have let
him go in any case—once I'd recovered what he'd
taken—as a matter of principle.”
“Principle!” cried the Secretary of State. But
he did not modify his front-bench attitude; it was
only the well-known eyebrows that rose.
“The whole thing is,” his guest continued, yet
more frankly, “that I happen to hold my own
views on crime and its punishment. If I might be
permitted to explain them, however briefly, they
would at least afford the only excuse I have to
offer for my conduct. If you consider it no excuse,
and if I have put myself within reach of the
law, there, sir, is my card; and here am I, pre-
pared to take the consequences of my act.”


8 THE CRIME DOCTOR
The Home Secretary leaned forward and took the
card from a sensitive hand, vibrant as the voice
to which he had just been listening, but no more
tremulous. Again he looked up, into a pale face
grown paler still, and dark eyes smoldering with
suppressed enthusiasm. It was by no means his bap-
tism of that sort of fire; but it seemed to Mr. Vinson
that here was a new type of eccentric zealot; and
it was only by an effort that he resumed his House
of Commons attitude and his smile.
“I see, Doctor Dollar, that you are a near neigh-
bor of mine—only just round the corner in Wel-
beck Street. May I take it that your experience
as a consultant is the basis of the views you men-
tion P”
“My experience as an alienist,” said Doctor Dol.
lar, “so far as I can lay claims to that euphemism.”
“And how far is that, doctor?”
“In the sense that all crime is a form of mad-
ness.”
“Then you would call yourself
The broken sentence ended on a note as tactfully
remote from the direct interrogative as practised
speech could make it.


THE PHYSICIAN 9
“In default of a recognized term,” said Doctor
Dollar, “which time will confer as part of a wider
recognition, I can only call myself a crime doctor.”
“A branch not yet acknowledged by your profes-
sion?”
“Neither by my profession nor by the law, Mr.
Vinson; but both have got to come to it, just as
surely as we all accept the other scientific develop-
ments of the day.”
“But have you reduced your practise to a science,
doctor?”
“I am doing so,” said Doctor Dollar, with the re-
strained confidence which could not but impress
one who knew the value of that quality in himself
and in others. “I have made a start; if it were not
so late I would tell you all about it. You are the
Home Secretary of England, the man of all others
whom I could wish to convert to my views. But
already I have kept you up too long. If you would
grant me an appointment yy
“Not at all,” interrupted Mr. Vinson, as he set-
tled himself even more comfortably in his chair.
“The night is still young—so is my cigar. Pray
say all you care to say, and say it as confidentially


IO THE CRIME DOCTOR
as you please. You interest me, Doctor Dollar;
nor can I forget that I am much indebted to you.”
“I don't want to trade on that,” returned the
doctor, hastily. “But it is an old dream of mine
to tell you, sir, about my work, and how and why I
came to take it up. I was not intended for medi-
cine, you see; my people are army people, were
Border outlaws once upon a time, and fighting folk
ever since. My father was an ensign in the Crimea
—Scots Fusiliers. I joined the Argyll and Suther-
lands the year before South Africa—where, by the
way, I remember seeing you with your Yeomen.”
“I had eighteen months of it without a headache
or a scratch.”
“I wish I could say the same, Mr. Vinson. I was
shot through the head at the Modder, ten days after
I landed.”
“Through the head, did you say?” asked the
Home Secretary, lifting his own some inches.
The doctor touched the silver patch in his dark
strong hair. “That's where the bullet came slinking
out; any but a Mauser would have carried all before
it! As it was, it left me with a bit of a squint, as


12 THE CRIME DOCTOR
“Easily?”
“No. The slander may come home to roost, but
I shall never think much of the London specialist!
I've dropped my two sovereigns and a florin into
too many of their itching palms, beginning with
the baronets and knights and ending up with the
unknown adventures. But not a man-Jack of them
was ashamed to pocket his two guineas (in one
case three) for politely telling me I was as mad as
a hatter to think of such a thing as really was the
matter with me!”
“And in the end?”
“In the end I struck a fellow with an open mind—
but not in England—and if I said that he literally
opened mine it might be an exaggeration, but that's
all. He did go prospecting in my skull—risked his
reputation as against my life—but we both came
out on top.”
“And you've been your own man ever since?”
Topham Vinson asked the question gravely; it
would have taken as keen a superficial observer as
himself to detect much difference in his manner, in
his eyes, in anything about him. Doctor Dollar was
not that kind of observer. To see far one must


THE PHYSICIAN I3
look high, and to look high is to miss things under
one's nose. It is all a matter of mental trajectory.
In the sheer height of his enthusiasm, the soaring
visionary was losing touch with the hard-headed
groundling in the chair.
“I was cured,” he answered with tense simplicity.
“It was a miraculous cure, and yet no miracle. Any-
body could perform its like, given the nerve and
skill. Yet it seemed to me a new thing; its possi-
bilities were almost appalling in their fascination.
I must not speak of them, for in a large measure
they are only possibilities still. But I resolved to
qualify, so that at least I might be in a position to do
as I had been done by. I had already left the
service; but my fighting days were not over. I was
going to fight Crime as it had never been fought
beforeſ"
There was a challenge in the pause made here.
But the listener did not take it up, and the harangue
ended on a humbler note:
“I studied at St. Mary's under men whose
names you know as well as they know yours. I was
at Berlin under Winterschladen, and with Jens Jenn-
sen in Stockholm. Before I was thirty I had put up


I4 THE CRIME DOCTOR
my plate in Welbeck Street, and there I am still.”
“And yet,” said the Home Secretary, with a faint
and wary smile—“and yet the possibilities are still
only possibilities!”
“On the surgical side, yes; there I was misled
by my own abnormal case. When another sudden
injury makes a monkey of an honest man, I know
where to take him; but the average injury is too
gradual, too subtle for the knife. Congenital cases
are, of course, quite hopeless in that respect. Yet
there are ways of curing even what I regard as
the very worst type of congenital criminal at the
present day.”
“I wish I knew of some !” said Mr. Vinson cheer-
ily. “But what, may I ask, do you regard as the
very worst type of congenital criminal at the pres-
ent day?”
“The society type,” replied the crime doctor with-
out an instant's hesitation.
His host permitted himself to open his eyes once
In Ore.
“Your ideas are rather sensational, aren't they,
Doctor Dollar?”
“It's rather a sensational age, isn't it, Mr. Vin-


THE PHYSICIAN I 5
son? Your twentieth-century criminal, with his
telephone and his motor-car—for professional pur-
poses—his high explosives and his scientific tools,
has got to be an educated person, to begin with;
and I am afraid there's an increasing number of
educated people who have got to be criminals or
else paupers all their lives. A vicious circle, I
think you must agree?”
“If you can square it with the truth.”
“Isn't it almost a truism, Mr. Vinson? When
society women making a living out of bridge, traffic
in tickets for Royal enclosures, charge a fat fee for
a presentation at Court, and a small fortune for
launching an unlikely family in their own set, there
must be some reason for it apart from their own
depravity. They are no more naturally depraved
than I am, but their purse is perhaps even smaller,
and their wants are certainly ten times as great.
Cupidity is not the motive power; it's simple short-
age of the needful—from their point of view. So-
ciety increases and multiplies in everything but
money, and transmits its expensive tastes without
the means to indulge them. So we get our good
ladies with their tariff of introductions, and our


I6 THE CRIME DOCTOR
members of the best clubs always ready for a deal
over a horse or a car or anything else that's going
to bring them in a fiver. It's a short step from
that sort of thing to a shady trick, and from a
shady trick to downright crime. But it's a step
often taken by the type I mean—though not neces-
sarily with their eyes open. And that's just where
the crime doctor should come in.”
“In opening their eyes?”
“In saving 'em from themselves while they're still
worth saving; in that prevention which is not only
better than cure, but the vital principle of modern
therapeutics in every other direction. In keeping
good material out of prison at all costs, Mr. Vinson,
and even though you turn your prisons into country
houses with feather beds and moral entertainments
every night in life!”
The Secretary of State smiled again, but this time
with some sympathy and much less restraint. He
was beginning to see some method in what had
seemed at first unmitigated mania, and to take Some
interest in a point of view at least novel and enter-
taining. But the prison system was not to be at-


THE PHYSICIAN 17
tacked, even in terms of fantastic levity, without
protest from its official champion.
“Prisons, my dear Doctor Dollar, exist for the
benefit of those who keep out of them rather than
those who will insist on getting in. Of course, the
ideal thing would be to benefit both sides; and that's
what we're aiming at all the time. It isn't our fault
if a man who gets into quod is a marked man ever
after; he shouldn't get into quod.”
“You've put your finger on your own vulnerable
point!” cried the eager doctor. “Why should he
be a marked man? Why force a professional status
on the mere dabbler in crime, who might never have
dabbled again? It isn't as if it undid anything he's
done; even hanging your murderer doesn't bring
your victim back to life, and the chances are that
he would never want to murder anybody else. On
the other hand, how many serious crimes might be
hushed up without anybody being a bit worse off
than they were the very moment after their commis-
sion l’”
Mr. Vinson had been framing an ironical rebuke
in the name of morality and the Mosaic law; but he


I8 THE CRIME DOCTOR
was not sorry to drop the irony and pin his opponent
down.
“I hope, Doctor Dollar, it is not to be a function
of the new faculty to collaborate in the concealment
of crime and criminals?”
“It is impossible,” replied the enthusiast, duly
drawn, “to define the scope of an embryonic science.
When the crime doctor has come to stay—as he
will—I can see him playing a Protean part with the
full sanction of his profession and of the law. He
will be preventive officer, private detective, and
father confessor in one, if not even privileged ac-
cessory after some awful fact. The humbler pio-
neer can hope for no such powers; his only chance
is to work in the dark on his own lines, to use his
own judgment and to take his own risks as I've
done to-night. If he really can save a man by
screening him, let him do it and blow the odds! If
he can stop a thing without giving it away, all the
better for everybody, and if he fails to stop it all
the worse for him! Let him be a law unto his pa-
tient and himself, but let him stand the racket if
his law won't work.”
“In other words, you would tackle character as


THE PHYSICIAN 19
ordinary doctors and persons devote themselves to
the body and the soul?”
“It would come to that, Mr. Vinson. It's a large
order, I know, and I don't expect to see the goods
delivered in my time. It will take better men than
I am, and many of 'em, even to start delivery on
the scale I dream about. But that's the idea all
right. Punishment has never signified prevention;
what we want is to get under the criminal's skin
before we make it smart, if not before there's an ac-
tual criminal in the case at all !”
“A very plausible confession of faith, Doctor
Dollar.”
The Minister's tone was dry after the other, but
that was all. His fixed eyes seemed to be looking
through the doctor's into the scheme itself, probing
it on its merits in the very spirit in which it had
been propounded. It is only the small men who
laugh in the face of genuine enthusiasm, however
wild and flighty it may seem. Topham Vinson was
not a small man; but he, too, had been guilty of some
wild flights in his day, and office had not altogether
clipped his wings. The sportsman and the charlatan
within him were only too ready to see themselves in


2O THE CRIME DOCTOR
another, to hear their own voices on other lips. But
the appeal to temperament does not necessarily com-
promise the mind. And that citadel still flew a
neutral flag.
“What about the practise?” asked Topham Vin-
son, forcing himself back to facts.
“Rome took less building than a London practise,
by an unknown man striking out a new line for
himself.”
“I really don't wonder. Who would come to
consult you about a homicidal tendency, or a trick
of tampering with special offertories?”
“In the first instance, most likely, the patient's
people; then they might send him to see me on some
other pretext.”
“And what form would the treatment take?”
“It would depend, of course, upon the case. They
don't all know that they're being treated for incipient
criminality. The majority think they are in an
ordinary nursing home.”
“A home!” cried the Secretary of State. The
word had brought him to his feet at last, in a frame
of mind no longer to be concealed by nods and
smiles. “You don't mean to tell me, Doctor Dollar,


THE PHYSICIAN 2I
that you actually run a nursing home for uncon-
victed criminals?”
“Potential criminals, Mr. Vinson. I have at pres-
ent no patient who is actually wanted by the police.”
“And where is this extraordinary establishment?”
“Under my own roof here in Welbeck Street.”
“A few hundred yards from where we stand,
yet this is the first I hear of it!”
“I can see that. It's not my fault, sir. I have
done my best to bring it before your notice.”
“How P”
“By writing many times to tell you all about
myself and the home, Mr. Vinson.”
“Then I never saw the letters. A Home Secre-
tary stands to be shot at by every crank who can
hold a pen. I employ more than one young gentle-
man expressly to divert that sort of fire. You should
have got an introduction to me, Doctor Dollar.”
The doctor had smiled at an expression that he
could not but take to himself. His smile sweetened
under the kindlier tone which succeeded that one
unmeasured word.
“I am not sorry I waited for the introduction
which time has given me, Mr. Vinson.”


Te2 THE CRIME DOCTOR
“You wanted me to assist the good work, I take
it?”
“By your countenance and influence—if you
could.”
“I must see something of it first. I must inspect
this home of yours, Doctor Dollar.”
The steel eyes of the Vinsons could seldom have
cut deeper at a glance, or been met by a pair more
candid and unafraid. And yet there was just that
cruel suspicion of a cast, to prejudice both the can-
dor and the courage of the finer face.
“It is open to your inspection day or night,” said
Doctor Dollar.
“Even at this hour? Even to-night?”
The Home Secretary sounded as keen as he
looked; but on the other side there was now just
enough hesitation to correspond with that one slight
flaw in the finer eyes.
“This minute, by all means,” said the doctor,
with resolute cordiality. “There's always somebody
up, and the patients can be seen without being dis-
turbed.”
“Then,” said the Home Secretary, “it’s a chance
at a time when every moment of the day is full.


THE PHYSICIAN 23
Let us strike, doctor, while the iron is as hot as
I can assure you that you have made it.”
II
That deplorable passion for adventure, which
had turned the hope of the last Opposition
into a guerrilla warrior in South Africa, but which
the Home Secretary of England might have sub-
dued before accepting his portfolio, was by no
means a dead volcano as Topham Vinson sallied
forth with his extraordinary companion. It was to
be noticed that he took with him a thick stick in-
stead of an umbrella, though the deserted streets
had become moist with a midnight drizzle. What
he expected can only be surmised. But the odds
are that it did not include the shriek of a police-
whistle in the sedate region of Wigmore Street, and
the instantaneous bolting of Doctor Dollar round
the first corner to the left!
Now, the Secretary of State was one of those
men who keep up their games out of a cold-blooded
regard for the figure; he considered himself as fit
at forty as any man in England, and he gave chase


24 THE CRIME DOCTOR
with his usual confidence. But the long-legged doc-
tor would have left him behind with the lamp-posts,
but for the fact that he was really tearing toward
the sound, not flying from it as his pursuer was
so ready to suppose. In a matter of seconds they
had both fetched up at a brilliantly lighted house,
where a more than usually obese policeman was
alternately pounding on the door and splitting the
sober well-in with his whistle.
“Stop that infernal row !” cried Doctor Dollar,
with incensed authority. “Out of the way with
you—this is my house!”
And the Home Secretary arrived on the scene
of an imminent assault on his police, just in time
to divert the outraged officer's attention by asking
what had happened, while the doctor found his key.
“Lord only knows!” said the policeman, kicking
some broken glass on one side. “Murder, it sounds
like; there's somebody been loosing off
And even as he spoke somebody loosed off again!
The terrific report was followed by screams within
and a fresh shower of glass from the fanlight. But
by this time Doctor Dollar had his latch-key in the


THE PHYSICIAN 25
lock. If the door had opened outward, a tangled
trio would have fallen into the street; as it was,
it hardly would open for the man in white who was
struggling with a woman (in red flannel) and a boy
(in next to nothing) on the mat.
Dollar exclaimed “Barton 1" in blank amazement.
But it was not the unlucky Barton who had run
amuck. “They won't let me at him! They'll get
the lot of us shot dead!” he spluttered, with un-
grateful objurgations; and then the newcomers
grasped the situation. On the stairs, at the end
of the narrow passage, they beheld an enormous
revolver, against a background of pink sleeping-
suit, with a ferocious eye looking down the barrel.
The crime doctor slipped in front of the Ho-
garthian group, and stood between everybody and
the armed man—shaking his head with an expres-
sion that nobody else could see.
“Ozzie, I'm surprised at you!” they heard him
say with severity. “I thought you were a better
sportsman than to go playing the fool the one night
I'm out. If you want to frighten people, do it where
you don't damage their property; if you mean mur-


26 THE CRIME DOCTOR
der, I'm your mark, my lad! Aim at my waistcoat
buttons and perhaps you'll get me in the mouth;
that's better; now blaze away!”
But the pink-striped miscreant was not lowering
his barrel to improve his aim. He lowered it al-
together. And his other wild eye was open now,
and both were blinking with unlovely woe.
“I—I didn't mean any harm,” he faltered. “It
was only a rag—and I'll pay for the door.”
“It’ll be a great rag, won't it, if you fire bang
into your own foot? Better give me that thing be-
fore you do.” Dollar held out the steadiest of
hands. “No, t'other way round if you don't mind;
'tisn't manners to pass knives and forks business-end
first. Ta! Now make yourself scarce before Bar-
ton goes for you by kind permission of his family.”
The young man in pink stood wildly staring, then
fled up-stairs with a smothered sob.
“After him, Barton, before he does something
silly,” said the doctor under his breath. “My dear
Mrs. Barton, you shall tell me the whole thing
from A to Z in the morning; go down to bed like
a good soul, and be satisfied that you prevented
bloodshed. Bobby, take one of the decanters from
the tantalus and give your mother a good night-


THE PHYSICIAN 27
yy
cap.” He turned round as the unpresentable pair
made off. The street-door was shut; the Home
Secretary had sole possession of the mat. “Why,
Mr. Vinson, what's happened to the myrmidon?”
“I thought you would like me to get rid of him,”
said Topham Vinson dryly. “He’s waiting outside
to explain matters to the reinforcements—as a
joke.”
“Rather an unconvincing joke!” said the doctor,
wiping his forehead with the back of his hand.
“I’m glad you admit it, Doctor Dollar. Am I
to understand that the whole thing was a practical
joke, carefully rehearsed for my benefit?”
The doctor opened his shining eyes.
“Does it look like one? Hark back a little, Mr.
Vinson ſ”
“There's no need. I didn't think of it till you
put the word into my mouth. But it's well, rather
a coincidence, doctor, coming on top of the one about
my watch—and you of all men catching the thief ſ”
“Yet this is the sort of thing that's always liable
to happen when one's back is turned, and always
will be unti 22
“Yes?” said the Home Secretary, as Dollar
paused and looked at him.


28 THE CRIME DOCTOR
“Until you make it at least as difficult to buy
revolvers and ammunition, Mr. Vinson, as a dose of
prussic acidſ Here's a young man, unsteady, and an
epileptic, who has just been placed under my care.
I don't run a private asylum, nor is he ripe for one.
I must give him his head a little, and this happens
in a minute! If it should lead to fresh revolver
regulations—but I mustn't forget myself in my ex-
citement. If you would come in here and smoke
a cigarette, I shall have to make a round directly
to see how things are quieting down, and should
be only too glad to take you with me.”
The round was made after further conversation
in a dining-room as Spartan as the rest of the crime
doctor's characteristic abode. An instructed taste
in aged but uncomfortable oak gave it the chill
severity of a refectory; and the suggestion was
strengthened by a glance into the minute consulting-
room next door, which struck the visitor, perhaps
in the light of one of Dollar's own similitudes, as
a sort of monkish cell and confessional in one. The
carven table, rugged yet elaborate, pale with age,
might once have been an altar; the chair behind
it was certainly an ecclesiastical chair. The cum-


THE PHYSICIAN 29
brous pieces were yet the fruit of a fastidious eye,
and apparently its only fruit. Everything else
throughout the house was ultra-sanitary, refresh-
ingly utilitarian, twentieth century. No shred nor
thread made for dust on the linoleum, no picture
harbored it on the glazed paper. Walls and floors
were of the same uncompromising type up-stairs
and down. Yet, when a peep was taken through
one of the numbered doors above, hothouse flowers
bloomed in glass bowls on glass tables, and the bed-
room ware was glass again. The very books were
bound in glassy vellum; there was a pile of them
beside the bed, in which a very young man, swathed
in bandages, lay reading under the green glass shade
of an electric lamp.
The doctor expressed his sorrow for the occur-
rence down-stairs; the patient, scarcely looking up,
said that since he could not have moved to save
his life, he had gone on reading all the time; and
they left him at it, obviously glad to be rid of
them.
“That,” whispered the doctor on the landing,
“is a young fellow who will one day be—well, never
mind! Until he came to me he had never of his
*


30 THE CRIME DOCTOR
own free will read anything but a bad novel or a
newspaper; he is now deep in the immortal work
of another weak young man who was swayed by
strength, and is himself for the time being under
Doctor Johnson's salutary thumb.”
“What was his weakness?”
“Pyromania.”
“What?”
“A passion for setting places on fire. He started
it as quite a small boy; they licked it out of him
then. All his boyhood he went in fear of the rod,
and it kept him straight. Only the other day he
goes up to Oxford, and promptly sets fire to his
rooms.” -
“Some form of atavism, I presume?”
“A very subtle case, if I were free to give you its
whole history.”
“I should be even more interested in your treat-
ment.”
“Well, I needn't tell you that he's bandaged up
for burns; but you might not guess that he has
come by this lot since I’ve had him, if not almost
at my hands.”
“Nonsense, man!”


THE PHYSICIAN 31
“At any rate I’m responsible for what happened,
and it's going to cure him. It was a case of un-
disciplined imagination acting on a bonnet with just
one bee in it. He had never realized what a hell let
loose a fire really was; now he knows through his
own skin.”
The statesman's eyebrows were like the backs of
two mutually displeased cats.
“But surely that's an old wives' trick pushed be-
yond all bounds?”
“Pushed further than I intended, Mr. Vinson,
I must confess. I only meant him to see a serious
fire. So I arranged with the brigade to ring me up
when there was a really bad one, and with my man
to take the boy out at night for all his walks. There
was another good reason for that; and altogether
nothing can have seemed more natural than the
way they both appeared on the scene of this ghastly
riding-school affair.”
“I know what's coming!” cried the Home Secre-
tary. “This is the fellow who dashed in to help
save the horses, and got away afterward without
giving his name!”
“That's it. He says he'll hear those horses till
º


THE PHYSICIAN 33
This was what came:
“Doctor Dollar, I should prefer not to ask you
to show me or tell me any more. I know a good
man when I see one, and I know good work when
I catch him at it. Perhaps that was necessary in
the case of such extraordinary work as yours; yet
you say it was a sheer coincidence that I caught you
at it to-night—or rather that such tough work was
waiting for you when we got here?”
“Do you still doubt it? Why, you yourself in-
sisted on coming round to see the place in the middle
of this blessed night!”
“Exactly. That establishes your second coinci-
dence; but with all respect, doctor, I don't believe
in two of the same sort on the same night to the
same two people!”
“What was the other coincidence?” demanded
the doctor, huskily.
“Your catching any old pickpocket with my
watch—and letting him off! Come, doctor, do one
more thing for me, and I'll do all in my power
for you and your great work. That is, of course, if
you still want me to take the interest I certainly
should have taken if I had seen your letters.”


THE PHYSICIAN 35
at a venerable one-handed clock, whose unprotected
pendulum shaved the wall with noisy sweeps. It
was two o'clock in the morning, but already night
must have been turned into dreadful and disturbing
day for all the inmates. The doctor abandoned that
excuse unmade, and faced his visitor in desperation.
“So you want to see him—now?”
“I do. I have my reasons. But it shall end
at that—if I do see him. That won't nip my good-
will in the bud!” It was obvious what would.
“You shall see him,” said the doctor, as though
racking his mind once more. “But there are difficul-
ties you perhaps can't quite appreciate. It means
giving away a patient—don't you see?”
“Perfectly. It seems to me a very proper punish-
ment, since it's all he'll get. Yet you don't want
to lose your hold. Couldn't you send him down
here on some pretext, instead of taking me up to
him?”
The crime doctor's face lit up as if by electricity.
“I can and I will !” he cried. “Wait here, Mr.
Vinson. He's another reader; he shall come down
for a book!”
The great man waited with the satisfaction of a


36 THE CRIME DOCTOR
slightly overbearing personality for once very near-
ly overborne. He was now intensely interested in
the crime doctor and his unique establishment. It
was an interest that he had no intention of sharing
with his closest colleague, until he had gone deeper
into a theory and practise that were already a revela-
tion to him. They might both prove unworkable
on any large scale, and yet they might light the
way to sensational legislation of the very type that
Topham Vinson was the very man to introduce.
Boundless ambition was one of the forces of a
nature that responded to the call of any sufficiently
dazzling crusade; but the passion for adventure ran
ambition hard; and a crusade calculated to gratify
both appetites was dazzling even to eyes of triple
steel !
Only, he must show this new ally his power
before they struck up their alliance; that was the
great reason for insisting on seeing the pickpocket.
But there was a little reason besides. An excellent
memory had supplied Mr. Vinson with a kind of
post-impression of the pickpocket. And within one
minute of the doctor's departure, and one second


THE PHYSICIAN 37
of the patient's prompt appearance, a certain small
suspicion had been confirmed.
“I think we've met before, my man?” he had
begun. His man started stagily—was altogether
of the stage—a bearded scarecrow in rags too
ragged to be true. Vinson found the switches and
made more light. “Not half a bad disguise,” he
continued, “whoever you may be I suppose they're
supplied on the premises for distinguished patients?”
“How do you know it's a disguise?” croaked the
hairy man, with downcast eyes.
“Well, you don't look a distinguished patient,
do you?” said the Home Secretary airily. “On
the other hand, your kit doesn't convince me at all;
looks to me as if it would fall to pieces but for what
the ladies call a foundation—eh?”
And he swooped down on the ragged tails as their
owner turned a humiliated back. And the “foun-
dation” was a perfectly good overcoat turned in-
side out; moreover, it was a coat that Topham
Vinson seemed to know; it was a coat that he
suddenly remembered, as he shot up to his full
height and then stood deadly still.


38 THE CRIME DOCTOR
The pickpocket had not turned round. But his
wig and beard lay at his elbow on the mantelpiece;
his diminished head had sunk into his hands; and
the electric light blazed upon a medallion of silver
hair, up above one burning ear.
“Doctor—Dollar!” exclaimed Topham Vinson.
And the ingenuous ring of his own startled voice
only added to his sense of outrage.
“Yes! I was the man. . . . It was only to
get at you—you know that!”
It was a hoarse voice muttering to the wall, in a
dire discomfiture that had its effect on the insulted
Minister.
“So that was your weakness!” The plain com-
ment was icier than any sneer. “Picking and steal-
ing
and your hand still keeps its cunning!”
“Yes. That was how my wound had taken me.”
There was less shame in the hoarse voice, thanks
to the bracing coldness of the other. “It started
in the field hospital—orderlies laughed and encour-
aged me—nurses at Netley just as bad! Everybody
treated it as a joke; the doctor used to ask for his
watch or his handkerchief after every visit; and the
great score was when he thought I had one, and it


THE PHYSICIAN 39
was really the other—or both—or the keys out of
his trousers pocket! It amused the ward and made
me popular—made me almost suicidal—because I
alone knew that I couldn't help doing it to save
my life. . . . And the rest you know.”
“I do, indeed!”
“This beastly kit, I had it made on purpose so
that I could run after you one minute with what
I'd taken from you the minute before It was a
last attempt to gain your ear—to get you interested.
And now >>
“And now,” said Topham Vinson, with a kind
hand on the bent shoulders, yet a keen eye on the
bent head—“and now I suppose you think you've
put the lid on it? So you have, my dear doctor—
on any sneaking doubts I had about you! You've
struck a job after my own heart, and you've led
me into it as I never was led into anything in my
life before. Well, you've just got to keep me in it
now; and I'm conceited enough to believe I shall
be worth my place. Don't you think you might
turn round, Doctor Dollar, and let us shake hands
on that?”


II
THE LIFE-PRESERVER
HE Lady Vera Moyle had made herself no-
T torious in a cause that scored some points
through her allegiance. She it was who cajoled the
Home Secretary outside Palace Yard, and sent him
about his weighty business with the colors of a
hated Union pinned to his unconscious back. It is
true that some of her excesses had less to redeem
them, but all were committed with a pious zest
which recalled the saying that the Moyles were a
race of Irish rebels who had intermarried with the
saints. It was reserved for Lady Vera to combine
the truculence of her forefathers with the serene
solemnity of their wives, and to enact her devil-
ments, as she took their consequences, with a buxom
austerity all her own.
But she was not at her best when she went to see
Doctor Dollar on Christmas Eve; for it was just
4O


THE LIFE-PRESERVER 4I
two months after the autumn raid, which had caused
the retirement of Lady Vera Moyle, and some of
her political friends, for precisely that period.
Otherwise, the autumn raid had been a triumph for
the raiders, thanks to a fog of providential density,
which had fought on their side as the stars in their
courses fought against Sisera for the earliest mili-
tant. Never had private property been destroyed
on so generous a scale, with fewer casualties on the
side of the destroying angels; and yet there had
been one unnecessary blot on the proceedings, which
they were the first to repudiate and condemn.
A vile male member of the common criminal
classes had not only taken occasion to loot a jewel-
er's window, broken by some innocent lady, but had
coolly murdered a policeman who interfered with
him in the perpetration of his selfish crime. For-
tunately the wretch had been traced through the
stolen trinkets, expeditiously committed and con-
demned, and was on the point of paying the Supreme
penalty. No sane person could doubt his guilt, and
yet there were those who sought to fix a certain
responsibility on the women! The charge of moral
complicity had disgraced and stultified both Press


42 THE CRIME DOCTOR
and platform, and the Home Secretary, pestered for
a reprieve, had only sealed the murderer's fate at
the eleventh hour. Even the steel nerves of the
Vinsons had suffered under a complex strain: it
was just as well that he was on the point of de-
parture for the holidays.
A deplorable circumstance was the way the
Minister's last hours in town had been embit-
tered by his implacable tormentor, Lady Vera
Moyle. That"ingrate had celebrated her release by
trying to invade the Home Office, and by actually
waylaying the Secretary of State in Whitehall. An
unobtrusive body-guard had nipped the annoyance
in the bud; but it had caused Topham Vinson to re-
quire champagne at his club, whither he was pro-
ceeding on the arm of his last ally and most secret
adviser, Doctor John Dollar of Welbeck Street.
And before dark the doctor had been invaded in
his turn.
“You must blame the Home Secretary for this
intrusion,” began Lady Vera, with all the precision
of a practised speaker who knew what she had to
say. “He refused, as you heard, to listen to what


THE LIFE-PRESERVER 43
I had to say to him this morning; but the detective-
in-waiting informed me that you were not only a
friend of Mr. Vinson's, but yourself a medical ex-
pert in criminology. I have therefore a double
reason for coming to you, Doctor Dollar, though it
would not have been necessary if Mr. Topham
Vinson had treated me with ordinary courtesy.”
“I am very glad you have done so, Lady Vera,”
rejoined the doctor in his most conciliatory manner.
“Mr. Vinson, to be frank with you, is not in a fit
state for the kind of scene he was afraid you were
going to make. He is in a highly nervous condi-
tion for a man of his robust temperament. Truth,
Lady Vera, compels me to add that you and your
friends have had something to do with this, but the
immediate cause is a far more unhappy case which
he has just settled.”
“Has he settled it?” cried Lady Vera, turning
paler than before between her winter sables and a
less seasonable hat.
“This morning,” said Dollar, with a very solemn
air.
“He isn't going to hang that poor man?”


44 THE CRIME DOCTOR
No breath came between the opened lips that
prison had bleached and parched, but neither did
they tremble as the doctor bowed.
“If you mean Alfred Croucher,” said he, “con-
victed of the murder of Sergeant Simpkins during
the last suffragist disturbance, I can only say there
would be an end of capital punishment if he had
been reprieved.”
“Doctor Dollar,” returned Lady Vera, under
great control, “it was about this case, and nothing
else, that I wanted to speak to the Home Secretary.
I never heard of it until this morning, for I have
been out of the way of newspapers, as you may
know; and it is difficult to take in a whole trial at
one hurried reading. Do you mind telling me why
everybody is so sure that this man is the murderer?
Did anybody see him do it?”
The crime doctor smiled as he shook his head.
“Very few murders are actually witnessed, Lady
Vera; yet this would have been one of the few,
but for the fog. Croucher was plainly seen through
the jeweler's window, helping himself one moment,
then struggling with the unfortunate sergeant.”
“Was the struggle seen as plainly as the robbery?”
“Not quite, perhaps, but the evidence was equally


THE LIFE-PRESERVER 45
convincing about both. Then the stolen goods were
found, some of them, still in Croucher's possession;
and the way he tried to account for that, in the wit-
ness-box, was only less suicidal than his fatal at-
tempt at an alibi.”
“Poor fool!” exclaimed Lady Vera, with perhaps
less pity than impatience. “Of course he was there
—I saw him!”
Dollar was not altogether unprepared for this.
“You were there yourself, then, Lady Vera?”
“I should think I was 1”
“It-it wasn't you who broke the window for
him?”
“Of course it was! Yet nobody tried to find me
as a witness! It is only by pure chance that I come
out in time to save an innocent man's life, for
innocent he is of everything but theft. I know—too
well!”
Her voice was no longer under inhuman control;
and there was something in its passionate pitch that
sent a cold thrill of conviction down Dollar's spine.
He gazed in horror at the unhappy girl, in her luxu-
rious sables, drawn up to her last inch in the pitiless
glare of his electric light; and even as he gazed—
and guessed—all horror melted into the most pro-


46 THE CRIME DOCTOR
found emotion he had ever felt. It was she who
first found her voice, and now it was calmer than
it had been as yet.
“One thing more about the trial,” she said. “What
was the weapon he is supposed to have used?”
“His knife.”
“Yet it seems to have been a small wound?”
“It had a small blade.”
“But was there any blood on it?”
She had to press him for these details; any
squeamishness was on his side, and he a doctor!
“There was,” he said. “Croucher had an explana-
tion, but it wasn't convincing.”
“The truth often isn't,” said Lady Vera, bitterly.
“You may be surprised to hear that the blow wasn't
struck with a knife at all. It was struck with—
this!”
Her right hand flew from her glossy muff; in
it was no flashing steel, but a short, black, round-
knobbed life-preserver, that she handed over with-
out more words.
“But his skull wasn't smashed ” exclaimed John
Dollar, and for an instant he looked at his visitor
with the eye of the alienist. “It was a puncture


THE LIFE-PRESERVER 47
of the carotid artery, and you couldn't do that with
this if you tried.”
“Hit the floor with it,” said Lady Vera, “but
don't hold it quite by the end.”
Dollar bent down and did as directed; at the blow,
a poniard flew out of the opposite end to the round
knob; the point caught in his sleeve.
“That's how it was done,” continued Lady Vera.
“And I am the person it was done by, Doctor Dol-
lar !”
“It was—an accident?” he said, hoarsely. He
could look at her as though the accident had not
been fatal; he had less command of his voice.
“I call it one; the law may not,” said she re-
signedly. “Yet I didn't even know that I possessed
such a weapon as this; it was sold to me as a life-
preserver, and nothing else, out of a pawnbroker's
window, where I happened to see it on the very
morning of the raid. I thought it would be just
the thing for smashing other windows, especially
with that thong to go round one's wrist. I thought,
too—I don't mind telling you—that, if I were
roughly handled, it was a thing I could use in self-
defense as I couldn't very well use a hammer.”


48 THE CRIME DOCTOR
And here she showed no more shame than a
soldier need feel about his bayonet after battle; and
Dollar met her eyes on better terms. He had been
making mechanical experiments with the life-pre-
server. Some spring was broken. That was why
it became a dagger at every blow, instead of only
when you gave it a jerk.
“And you were roughly handled by Sergeant
Simpkins?” he suggested eagerly.
“Very,” she said, with a certain reluctance. “But
I expect the poor fellow was as excited as I was
when I tried to beat him off.”
“I suppose you hardly knew what you were 'do-
ing, Lady Vera?”
“Not only that, Doctor Dollar, but I didn't know
what I had done.”
“Thank God for that!”
“But did you imagine it for a moment? That's
the whole point and explanation of everything that
has happened. The worst was over in a few
seconds, in the thick of that awful fog, but, of
course I never dreamt what I had done. I did
think that I had knocked him out. But that was all
that ever entered my head until this very morning.”


THE LIFE-PRESERVER 49
“Were you close to your broken window at the
time?”
“Very close, and yet out of sight in the fog.”
“And you had seen nothing of this man Croucher,
and his hand in the affair?”
“Not after I'd done my part. I did just before.
I'm certain it was the same huge man that they
describe. But I heard the whole thing while we
were struggling. They were blowing a police-
whistle and calling out “Thieves!' I remember hop-
ing that the policeman would hear them, and let
me go. But I suppose his blood was up, as well
as mine.”
“And after you had—freed yourself?” said the
doctor, trying not to set his teeth.
“I ran off, of course! I knew that I had done
much more than I ever intended; but that's all I
knew, or suspected, even when I found this horrid
thing open in my hand. I tried to shut it again,
but couldn't. So I hid it in my dress, and ran
up Dover Street to my club, where I put it straight
into a bag that I had there. Then I made myself
decent and—turned out again with a proper ham-
Iner.


50 THE CRIME DOCTOR
The doctor groaned; he could not help it. Yet it
was his first audible expression of disapproval; he
had restrained himself while all the worst was be-
ing told; and the girl's face acknowledged his con-
sideration. Her color had come at last. Thus far,
in recounting her intentional misdeeds, as though
they were all in the great day's work, she had shown
a divine indifference to his opinion of her or her
proceedings. There had been nothing aggressive
about it—he merely doubted whether the question
of his views had ever entered her mind. But now
he could see that it did; he had shown her some-
thing that she did not want to lose, and her fine
candor hid that fact as little as any other.
“I didn't know what I’d done, remember 1’’ she
said with sharp solicitude. “I never did know until
this morning, when I heard of the case for the first
time, and for the first time saw the stains on the
dagger—at which you've been trying so hard not
to look! Do look at them, Doctor Dollar. Of
course, there can be no doubt what they are, but
I shall be only too glad for you to prove it to every-
body's satisfaction.”
“‘Only too glad, Lady Vera?"
They gazed at each other for several seconds.


THE LIFE-PRESERVER 51
Her face was tragic to him now; but emotion, ap-
parently, was the one thing she would condescend
to hide. But for her eyes, she might have been in-
credibly callous and cold-blooded; her blue Irish
eyes were great and glassy with a grief not soluble
in tears.
“Doctor Dollar,” she said, tensely, “nothing can
undo this hideous thing, though I hope to live long
enough to make such poor amends as a human being
can. But in this other direction they must be made
at once. It's no use thinking of what can't be un-
done till we have undone what we can—if we are
quick! That's why I tried to go straight to the
Home Secretary, and why I have come straight to
you. Take me to him, Doctor Dollar, and help me
to convince him that what I have told you is the
whole truth and nothing else! If you think it will
make it easier, satisfy yourself about those blood-
stains. Then we can take the dagger with us.”
The doctor applied a crude test on the spot. He
stooped over the fire, heated the stained steel be-
tween the bars, cooled it at the open window, picked
off a scale and examined it briefly under a micro-
scope. All this was done with tremendous energy
tempered by extreme precision and nicety. And


52 THE CRIME DOCTOR
Lady Vera followed the operation with an imper-
sonal interest that could not but include the operator,
so intent upon his task, so obviously thankful to have
a task of any sort in hand. But when he rose from
his microscope it was with a shrug of the shoulders,
an almost angry shake of the head.
“Of course, this is all no good, you know!” he
cried, as if it were her test. “It would take hours
to make the analysis that's really wanted.”
“But as far as you have gone, Doctor Dollar?”
“As far as I have gone—which isn't a legal or
medical inch—it certainly does look like blood,
Lady Vera.”
“Of course it is blood. There's another thing
that will help us, too.”
“What’s that?”
“One of the best points in the defense, so far as
I've had time to make out, was about the prisoner's
knife. Now, if we take this with us, either to the
Home Secretary, or, if he still refuses to see me, to
New Scotland Yar 22
“Lady Vera !” the doctor interrupted, aghast at
her suicidal zeal. “Is it possible that you realize


THE LIFE-PRESERVER 53
the position you are in? It isn't only a situation
that you've got to face; that you have already done,
superbly l But have you any conception of the con-
sequences?”
“I think I have,” said Lady Vera, smiling. “I
don't believe they will hang me; it would be affec-
tation to pretend I did. But, of course, that's their
business—mine is to change places with an inno-
cent man.”
“That you will never do,” replied the doctor
warmly. “There's no innocent man in the case;
this Croucher is a thief and a perjurer, besides
being an old convict who has spent half his life in
prison | He would have had five years for the other
night's work, without any question of a murder;
they'll simply pack him off to Dartmoor or Port-
land when we've saved his miserable neck. And
save it we will, no fear about that; but at what a
price—at what a price!”
“I don't see that you need trouble about it,”
said Lady Vera, concerned at his distress, “beyond
putting me in touch with Mr. Vinson. The rest
will be up to him, as they say; and, after all, it


54 THE CRIME DOCTOR
won't be anything so very terrible to me. I am
an old prisoner myself, you must remember!”
There was a gleam of her notorious audacity
with all this; but it was like the glow of flowers on
a grave. The horror of things to happen had never
possessed her valiant eyes, and yet it must have
been there, for all at once Dollar missed it. He
read her look. He had relieved her mind about the
man in the cell, only to open it at last to the man in
his grave. Grief crippled her as horror had not;
prisons could be broken, but not the prison to
which her hand had sent a fellow creature. Yet
her grief was mastered in its turn, forced out of
sight before his eyes, even while her flippant speech
rang through him as the bravest utterance he had
ever heard.
It blew a bugle in the man's brain, and the call
was clear and definite. He knew his own mind only
less instantaneously than he had penetrated hers.
Never in all his days had he known his mind quite
so well as when she thought better of the very
words which had enlightened him, and went on to
add to them in another key:
“So now, Doctor Dollar, will you crown all


THE LIFE-PRESERVER 55
your great kindness by taking me to see the "Home
Secretary at once?”
“Lady Vera,” he exclaimed, with unreasonable
irritation, “what is the good of asking impossibili-
ties? I couldn't take you to Topham Vinson even
if I would. He would begin by doubting your san-
ity; there would be all manner of silly difficulties.
Moreover, he's not in town.”
She showed displeasure at the statement of fact
only.
“Doctor Dollar, are you serious?”
“Perfectly.”
“Have you forgot that I saw you together at
almost two o'clock?”
“I think not quite so late as that. The Home
Secretary left Euston at 2:45.”
“Where for?”
She looked panic-stricken.
“I’ll tell you, Lady Vera, if you promise not to
follow him by the next train.”
“When does it go?”
“Not for some time. There's only one more;
we debated which he should take. But you mustn't
take the other, Lady Vera; you must leave that to


56 THE CRIME DOCTOR
me. I want you to leave the whole thing to me—
from this very moment till you hear from me
again.”
“When would that be, Doctor Dollar?”
“As soon as I have seen Mr. Vinson.”
“You would undertake to tell him everything?”
“Every detail, exactly as you have told me.”
“Will it seem credible at second-hand?”
“Quite enough so to justify a respite. That's the
first object; and this is the first step to it, believe
me! There's plenty of time between this and—
Tuesday.”
“Oh! I know that,” she returned, bluntly disdain-
ful of a well-meant hesitation. “There's still not a
moment to lose while that poor man lies facing
death.”
“I’m not sure that he does, Lady Vera. The de-
cision's only just been made; it won't be out till the
day after to-morrow. I don't believe they would
break it to Croucher on Christmas Day.”
“They can break the good news instead. Where
is Mr. Vinson? It's all right, I won't attempt to
tackle him till you have. That's a promise—and I
don't break them like windows!"


THE LIFE-PRESERVER 57
John Dollar ignored that boast with difficulty.
He saw through her tragic levity as through a glass,
and his heart cried out with a sympathy hard in-
deed to keep to himself; but it was obviously the
last thing required of him by Lady Vera Moyle. He
gave her the required information in a voice only
less well managed than her own. And he thought
her eyes softened with the faintest recognition of
his restraint.
“I thought the Duke had washed his hands of
his notorious nephew,” she remarked. “Well, we
shall have to spoil the family gathering, I'm afraid.”
“That's my job, Lady Vera.”
“And I never thanked you for taking it on!
Nor will I, Doctor Dollar; thanks don't meet a case
like this!” Very frankly she took his hand instead:
it was hotter and less steady than her own. “And
now what about your train?”
“I'm afraid there's not one till seven o'clock.
Vinson talked of going down by it at first.”
The time-table confirmed his fear; he threw it
down, and plunged into the telephone directory in-
stead. Lady Vera watched him narrowly. He had
dropped into his old oak chair, and the sheen of


58 THE CRIME DOCTOR
age on the table betrayed his face as though it were
bent over clear brown water. She could see its
anxiety as he had not allowed her to see it yet.
“I suppose you wouldn't care to face it in a
motor P”
She was faltering for the first time.
“That's exactly what I mean to do,” he answered,
without looking up from the directory. “I’m just
going to telephone for a car.”
“Then you needn't!” she cried joyfully. “We
have at least two eating their bonnets off in our
mews. I'll go home in a taxi, and send one of them
straight round with a driver who knows the way,
and a coat that you must promise to wear, Doctor
Dollar. All my people are away except my mother,
and she won't know; she isn't strong enough to
use the cars. But I mustn't speak of poor mother,
or I shall make a fool of myself yet. It's partly
my fault as it is, you see, and of course all this will
make her worse. But I'm not so sure of that,
either! My mother is the kind of person who has
all the modern ailments and no modern ideas—but
she could show us all how to play the game at a
pinch. She will be the first to back me up in the
only conceivable course.”


THE LIITE-PRESERVER 59
This speech had not come quite so fluently as
might be supposed, though Dollar had only inter-
rupted it to send for a taxicab. It had interrupted
itself when Lady Vera Moyle was betrayed into
speaking of poor Lady Armagh, whose heartfelt dis-
approval of her daughter's escapades was public
property. Dollar had heard from Topham Vinson—
that very day at lunch—that the last one had made
her seriously ill; then what indeed of impending
resolutions, and the nine days' tragic scandal which
was the very least that could come of them
unless—
“Unless!”
In the doctor's mind so many broken sentences
began with that will-o'-the-wisp among words, that
others really spoken fell upon stony ears, and he
knew as little what he said in reply. In a dream he
saw a small hand wave as the taxicab vanished round
the corner to the right; in a dream he sprang up-
stairs, hiding under his coat the weapon with which
that little hand had dealt out death; and awoke in
his wintriest clothes, his greatest coat, to find him-
self called upon to top the lot with another of un-
kempt fur sent with the car.
That aluminium clipper—a fifteen-horse-power


60 THE CRIME DOCTOR
Invincible Talboys—was indeed at the door in in-
credibly quick time. Twin headlights lit long
wedges of London mud; two pairs of goblin gog-
gles mounted up behind them—one sent with the
coat and a message that was more than law. The
dapper chauffeur huddled down behind the wheel;
the passenger sat bolt upright at his side; the
Barton family, his faithful creatures, carried out
an impromptu tableau in the background. Mother
and son—those unpresentable features of a former
occasion—now appeared as immaculate cook and
page at the top of the area steps and on the
lighted threshold respectively. Barton himself
leaned out of an upper window, still in his white
suit—it was the typically muggy Christmas of a
degenerate young century—but with all the black
cares of the strange establishment quite apparent
on his snowy shoulders. The dapper driver gave
his horn a spiteful pinch. And then they were off,
only to be held up in Oxford Street by the Christmas
traffic, but doing better in the Edgware Road, and
soon on the way to Edgware itself, and Elstree
and St. Albans, and all the lighted towns and
pitch-dark roads that lie by night between the capi-
tal of England and her smallest county.


THE LIFE-PRESERVER 61
"Least trem-lines this wye,” said the dapper one.
a mile or two out; and said no more for another
fifty. But he drove like a little genius, and the car
responded to his cunning hands as a horse that
knows its master. She proved to be a sound roadster
whose only drawback was a lack of racing speed; the
lad had her in prime condition, and the good road
ran from under her like silk from a silent loom.
Dollar sat beside him, in the shelter of a wind-
screen that glazed and framed a continuous study
in nocturnal values. Now the fine shades would be
broken by a cluster of lights, soon to scatter and go
out like sparks from a pipe; now only by the acety-
lene lamps that kept the foreground in a blaze be-
tween villages. Often a ghostly portent appeared
hovering over the road ahead; but this was only the
doctor's own anxious face, seen dimly in the screen.
And yet he was not really anxious for those first
fifty miles. At the start he was too thankful to be
under way, and the road was never empty of excit-
ing and diverting possibilities. But at Bedford
they stopped for supper: it was Dollar's sudden
idea, the hour being now between eight and nine;
but the treasure at the wheel professed his readinest,
to push on, and it would have been better for Dollar


62 THE CRIME DOCTOR
to have taken him at his word. The break in the
run also broke up the dreamy lull induced by the
keen air and the low smooth hum of the car. In
the warm hotel, all holly and Christmas cheer, he
came back to real life with a thud, and its most im-
mediate problem beset him all the rest of the way.
Hitherto his one anxiety had been to get at the
Home Secretary that night; henceforth he was hav-
ing the interview over and over again, with a dif-
ferent result every time. He knew, indeed, what he
meant to say himself; he had known that before he
said good-by to Lady Vera Moyle. But what would
the Home Secretary say? Was it conceivable that
the blood-stained life-preserver would be enough fol
him? It would be supported by the sworn state-
ment of a man whom he had learned to trust. But
was such utterly indirect evidence in the least likely
to upset a decision already taken, if not already
communicated to the man in the condemned cell?
The very thought of that hapless wretch was
fraught with definite and vivid horror. The crime
doctor had once seen the inside of a condemned cell;
he could see it still. The door was open, the pitiful
occupant at exercise in an adjacent yard. He had


THE LIFE-PRESERVER 63
looked in. The cell was not so gloomy as it should
have been. Texts on the walls, sunlight through
the bars, and on the fixed flap of clean worn wood,
a big open book.
Dollar recalled every detail with morbid fidelity.
He had gone in to look at the book, and found it a
bound volume of Good Words, open at a laudable
serial by a lady then in vogue with the virtuous.
Yet that particular reader had cut a woman's throat
over a quarrel about a shilling, and Dollar had
seen him striding jauntily up and down the narrow
yard, cracking some joke with the attendant ward-
ers, a smile on his scrubby lips and in his bold
blue eyes. He could see the fellow as he had
seen him for ten seconds years ago. Yet his pity
for one in the same awful case, for a crime he had
not committed, was as nothing to his infinite sorrow
and compassion for her who had committed it un-
awares, comparatively light as the punishment for
such a deed was bound to be.
But was it? Not for Lady Vera Moyle, at all
events! Either she would go scot-free, or her pun-
ishment might well be worse than death. It might
easily kill her mother; then the tragedy would be a


64 THE CRIME DOCTOR
double tragedy after all, and Lady Vera would
still be its author. Supposing she had not discovered
her own crime! Croucher would have been no loss
to the community; life-long criminals like Croucher
were best out of the way, murderers or no murder-
ers. The crime doctor was convinced of that. They
were the incurables; extermination was the only
thing for them.
“I would shut up my penitentiaries, but enlarge
my lethal chamber,” he sometimes said, and would
be quite serious about it. Yet not for a moment
could he have carried his ideas to their logical con-
clusion in the concrete case of Alfred Croucher and
Lady Vera Moyle. He could have let a man of
that stamp go technically innocent to the gallows—
or he thought he could just then. But he could
not have allowed the greatest monster to suffer for
Lady Vera's sins—and that he felt in his bones. It
was the personal equation as supplied by her that
made the thing impossible. Such a load on such a
soul! Better any punishment than that!
At Kettering a right-hand turn led up-hill and
down-dale into little Rutland, and Dollar ceased
glaring at his own ghost in the wind-screen; a health-


THE LIFE-PRESERVER 65
ily immediate anxiety kept him peering at his watch
instead. But now they were skirting one of the
longest and stumpiest stone walls in feudal England,
and all of a sudden it parted in twin turrets joined
by triple gates. Over the central arch heraldic
monsters pawed the stars; underneath an arc lamp
hung resplendent; all three gates were open, and
the drive beyond was a perspective of guiding lights.
It was evidently a case of Christmas festivities on a
suitable scale at Stockersham Hall.
Miles up the drive, a semicircle of motor-cars
fringed a country edition of the Horseguards Par-
ade, dominated by an escaped hotel; and the car
that really was from London had becoming palpi-
tations in the zone of light. Before a comparatively
simple portico a superlatively splendid menial looked
askance at the doctor's borrowed furs, but was not
unimpressed by a curt inquiry for Mr. Topham Vin-
son, and consented to inquire in his turn.
“Be quick and quiet, and give him this card,”
said the doctor, slipping half-a-sovereign underneath
it. “I want to see Mr. Vinson—no one else—on
urgent business from the Home Office.”
Yet the next minute merely brought forth an im-


66 THE CRIME DOCTOR
posing personage whom the dapper driver did not
fail to salute; even Dollar was not positive whether
it was the Duke or his butler until summoned in-
doors with the subtle condescension of the supreme
servitor. He went as he was, in hirsute coat and
goggles, the butler stalking at arm's length, with an
air of personal repudiation happily not lost upon
the little London lynx in charge of the car.
That artist would have been an endless joy to
eyes not turned within. His silent endurance and
efficiency, his phlegmatic zest in an adventure which
might have a professional interest for him, but
obviously did not engage his curiosity, were quali-
ties which even the tormented Dollar had appre-
ciated at intervals on the road. But now he missed
a treat. The little Cockney ran his engine till the
first flunkey returned and said things through the
noise. Then he looked under his bonnet, as a
monkey into its offspring's head. But the climax
arrived with sandwiches on a lordly tray, when a
glass of beer was sent back, and one of champagne
brought instead to this choice specimen of a contem-
porary type. It was scarcely down before the pas-
senger reappeared, accompanied by another swollen


THE LIFE-PRESERVER 67
figure in motoring disguise, as well as by my Lord
Duke, who saw them off himself, and did look less
ducal than the butler after all.
The many lights of Stockersham dwindled and
disappeared into the night and one long wave of
incandescence flowed back as it had come, by fine-
spun hedge and wirework thicket, through dead
villages and sleeping towns, like phosphorescent
foam before a vessel's bows. And in the torpedo
body of the Invincible Talboys, where Dollar now
sat behind his companion of the outward trip, and
the Home Secretary of England behind a fat cigar,
there was a strained silence through two entire
counties, but something like an explosion on the
confines of the third.
“Do you still refuse to give her name?” demand-
ed Topnam Vinson, exactly as though they had
been talking all the time. The stump of his second
cigar was so short that angry light and angry mouth
Were One.
“I must,” said Dollar, in a muffled voice, and he
pointed to the hunched shoulders within a yard of
their noses.
“In that case we have no secrets,” replied the


68 THE CRIME DOCTOR
Home Secretary with a sneer. “But why must
you, Dollar? She seems to have made no reserva-
tions with you, yet you would make this enormous
one with me.”
“It’s a secret of the consulting-room, Mr. Vinson;
those of the confessional are not more sacred, as you
know perfectly well.”
“And you expect me to eat my decision on the
strength of a hearsay anonymous confession?”
“I do—in the first instance,” said Dollar decided-
ly. “An immediate respite would commit you to
nothing, but I don't ask even for that on the un-
supported strength of what I told you at Stocker-
sham. You know what you've got in your overcoat
pocket. Hand it over to your own analyst; have
an exhumation, if you like, and see if the weapon
doesn't actually fit the wound; if it doesn't, hang
your man.” -
“I’m much obliged for your valuable advice. But
it's got to be one thing or the other, once for all; the
poor devil has been on tenter-hooks quite long
enough.”
“And have you forgotten how nearly you de.


THE LIFE-PRESERVER 69
cided in his favor, Mr. Vinson, without all this to
turn the scale?”
It was perhaps an ominous feature of their mush-
room intimacy that the younger man had not yet
been invited to drop the formal prefix in addressing
his senior by a short decade. But this would not
have been the moment even for a familiarity en-
couraged in happier circumstances. And yet Dollar
dared to pat the great man's arm as he spoke; and
the gesture was as the button on the foil; it pre-
vented a shrewd thrust from drawing blood, and if
anything it improved Topham Vinson's temper.
“It's no good, my dear fellow!” he exclaimed in
friendly settlement of the general question. “I
must have the lady's name, unless she's determined
to defeat her own ends.” -
“Do you mean to say that it's her name or
Croucher’s life?”
Topham Vinson had not meant to say any such
thing—in so many words—and it was annoying to
have them put into his mouth. But he had decided
not to be annoyed any more. It did not pay with
this fellow Dollar; at least, it had not paid on that


7o THE CRIME DOCTOR
occasion; but anybody might be at a disadvantage
after a heavy political strain, a lengthy journey, an
excellent dinner, and a development as untimely
as it was embarrassing. Mr. Vinson relapsed into
silence and an attitude unconsciously modeled on
that of the gallant little driver. His body sank
deep into the rugs, his head as deep between his
shoulders. It was almost Hertfordshire before he
spoke again.
“Vera Moyle was one of the Oxford Street divi-
sion,” he remarked at last. “I know all about her
movements on the night of battle; otherwise I should
want to know about them now. If I thought she
was the woman >>
“What's that?” said Dollar lethargically. “I
was almost asleep.”
The remarks did not gain weight by repetition,
but the broken sentence was finished with some
effect: “I’d let her drain the cup.”
“I don't wonder,” rejoined Dollar, sympathet-
ically.
“Yet you would have me risk my political exist-
ence for one of her kidney!”


THE LIFE-PRESERVER 7L
*I don’t follow.”
“You would reprieve the apparent murderer, and
let the real one continue militant here on earth?”
“I believe she has had her fill of militancy.”
“Not she ſ”
“I’ll go bail for her if you like. It was an acci-
dent. She is heart-broken about it—and you don't
know her—I do! I'd back her not to run the risk
of such another accident!”
“And what if she rounded on me? However
such a thing came out, it would be my ruin, Dollar.”
“It wouldn't come out through her!”
A certain fervor crept into the doctor's voice. It
was obviously unconscious, and Topham Vinson
was far too astute a person to engender conscious-
ness and caution by so much as a rallying syllable.
But he did hazard a leading question, subtly intro-
duced as nothing of the sort.
“I’m not trying to get at what I want in a round-
about way,” he had the nerve to state. “I’ve given
up trying to pump you, Dollar; but—would it make
a very great scandal if we had to fix this thing on
this particular young lady?”


72 THE CRIME DOCTOR
“I can't answer about scandals,” replied the still
not unwary doctor. “It would break hearts—prob-
ably cause death—make her a double murderer in
her own eyes, and God knows what else as a result!
And it wouldn't do anybody the least bit of good,
because you would still have to give Croucher a
suitable term for his authentic offense.”
It was three o'clock on Christmas morning when
they saw the lights of London from the top of
Brockley Hill; a minute later they were on the tram-
lines at the foot, and almost immediately in the
purlieus of the town.
The trip did not end without a telling taste of
Mr. Vinson's very individual quality. In Maida
Vale he suddenly announced his intention of having
the life-preserver identified in those very small hours
by the pawnbroker who had sold it on the morning
of the autumn raid. The crime doctor was terri-
fied; for aught he knew the man might be well
aware that he had sold it to Lady Vera Moyle. She
was notorious enough, in all conscience; his only
hope lay in the fact that he himself had not known
her by sight before that day. In vain he raised
various objections; they were well met by his own


THE LIFE-PRESERVER 73
previous arguments for the immediate reprieve of
Alfred Croucher, and he feared to press them. He
knew only the name of the pawnbroker's street, but
here Cockney sharpness came in again, and they
were pounding on the right shutters by half past
three. An up-stairs window flew alight, up went
a sash, and out came an angry head.
“My name is Topham Vinson,” said one of the
swaddled men in a sepulchral voice. “I’m the
Home Secretary, but I can't force you to come
down and speak to me because of that. I can only
make it more or less worth your while.”
He was fishing for his sovereign-case as he spoke.
In another minute the private door had shut be-
hind him and Doctor Dollar, and an obsequious
sack of humanity shuffled before them into a sanc-
tum still redolent of a somewhat highly-seasoned
meal.
“I remember 'aving it in the thop,” said the un-
kempt head protruding from the sack. “But I can't
thay 'ow it came here—that I can thwear in a court
of juthtith, my lord l It’th a narthy, beathly thing,
but I thwear it wath here when I took over the
bithneth.”


74 THE CRIME DOCTOR
“I don't care how or when it came here,” said
Topham Vinson, counting the sovereigns in the gold
case attached to the watch-chain of other memories.
“I want to know if you remember selling this life-
preserver?”
“Yeth, I do!”
“When?”
“It would be—let me thee—thome time lartht
October or November.”
“Do you remember who bought it?”
“Yeth—a young lady!”
Dollar breathed again. The man did not know
her name; at first he was extremely shaky on the
point of personal appearance. But the doctor as-
sisted him by unscrupulously suggesting a number
of marked characteristics which Lady Vera Moyle
did not happen to possess. The man fell straight
into the trap, recalled every imaginary feature, and
finally earned big gold by quite convincingly con-
necting the sale of the life-preserver with the date
of the great women's raid. Mr. Vinson looked
very stern as he led the way out into the street; and
it was he who sharply woke the little chauffeur,
who was snoring heartily over his wheel.


THE LIFE-PRESERVER 75
“I like that lad,” he muttered in the car. “He
does nothing by halves. No more do I! Do you
mind dropping me first at Portman Square?”
Dollar gave the order, and they slid through the
empty streets as though man and car were fresh
from the garage. There was not a soul in Portman
Square, or a light in any of the houses except
the Home Secretary's. They had telephoned
through from Stockersham after his departure, and
the door opened as he emptied his remaining sov-
ereigns into the chauffeur's hand, before taking
Dollar's with no lack of warmth.
“I can't ask you in this time,” said Topham Vin-
son, smiling. “Apart from the hour, I've got to go
straight to the telephone, get through to Penton-
ville, and spoil the Governor's night!”
“Reprieved?” gasped the doctor. It was the one
word that would come.
The Home Secretary nodded rather grimly, but
was smiling as he shut the door almost on the
hand with which John Dollar would have seized
his once more. There was a shooting of bolts in-
side.
Dollar turned slowly round, wondering if at last


76 THE CRIME DOCTOR
he could tell the little driver something about the
night's enterprise in which he had played so heroic
a part. There was no need. The driver had kept
eyes and ears wide open—and collapsed once more
over the wheel. This time it was not in sleep, but in
a dead faint; and the driving goggles were all awry,
the driver's hat had tumbled off, the driver's hair
had broken bounds.
It was a girl's hair, and the girl was Lady Vera
Moyle.


III
A HOPELESS CASE
LFRED CROUCHER had the refreshing at-
A tribute of looking almost as great a ruffian as
he really was. His eyes swelled with a vulgar cun-
ning, his mouth was coarse and pitiless; no pedes-
tal of fine raiment could have corrected so low a
cast of countenance, or enabled its possessor to pass
for a moment as a gentleman or a decent liver.
But he had often looked a worse imitation than on
the morning of his triumphant exit from the jail,
his bullet head diminished in a borrowed cap, his
formidable physique tempered by a Burberry all too
sober for his taste.
Nor was that all the change in Mr. Croucher at
this agreeable crisis of his career. The bulging
eyes were glazed with a wonder which quite eclipsed
77


78 THE CRIME DOCTOR
the light of triumph; and they were fixed, in un-
willing fascination, upon the tall figure to which
the borrowed plumes belonged, whom he had never
beheld before that hour, but at whose heels he
trotted from the bowels of the prison to the motor-
car flashing in the sun beyond the precincts.
“’Alf a mo'!” cried Croucher, making a belated
stand instead of jumping in as he was bid. “I
didn't rightly catch your name inside, let alone wot
you got to do with me an’ my affairs. If you come
from my slic'tor, I should like to know why; if
you're on the religious lay, 'ere's your 'at an’ coat,
and I won't trouble you for a lift.”
“My name is Dollar,” replied the motorist. “My
business is neither legal nor religious, and it need
not necessarily be medical, though I do happen to be
a doctor. I came at the request of a friend of
yours, in that friend's car, to see if there's nothing
we can do to make up to you for all you've been
through.”
“A friend of mine!” ejaculated Croucher, with
engaging incredulity.
The doctor smiled, but dryly, as he had spoken.
“It's one of the many unknown friends you have


8o THE CRIME DOCTOR
might have created them in a more sophisticated
mind. It was an English breakfast fit for a foreign
potentate; there were soles, kidneys, eggs and
bacon, hot rolls, and lashings of such coffee as
made Mr. Croucher forget a previous craving for
alcohol. He thought it funny that so generous a
repast should be served on a black old table with-
out a cloth, and he did not fancy the leathern chairs
with the great big nails, more fit for a museum
than a private gentleman's house. But a subsequent
cigar, in which the private gentleman did not join
him, was up to the visitor's highest standard, and
the subject of a more articulate appreciation than
all that had gone before.
“You shall smoke the box if you care to stay
with me,” said Doctor Dollar, with a warmer smile.
“Stay with you!” exclaimed Croucher, suffering
a return of his worst suspicions. “Why should I
stay with you?”
“Because there are worse places, Croucher, and
one of them has left you a bit of a wreck.”
“A bit of one!” cried the other, in a sudden snarl-
ing whine. “They've just about done me in, doc-
tor, if you want to know. Two munfs' 'ard, that


A HOPELESS CASE 81
I was never ordered, on top of one in the con-
demned cell for what I never done! That's 'ow
they've tret me—somefink crool—wuss than wot
you'd treat lawg wot give you ‘ydrophobia. And
wot 'ad I done? 'Elped meself when the stuff was
under my nose, an’ me starvin', an’ the jooler's
winder ready broke for a cove by them as never
'ad his temptitions. I don't say it was right, mind
you; but that much I did do, and not what they said
I 'ad an' couldn't prove. They couldn't prove it, be-
cause I never done it; they couldn't 'ang me, be-
cause they didn't dare; but they made me sweat
an' shiver just the same. They took ten years off
of me life; they give me such a time as I shan't
forget till my dying day. And as if that wasn't
thick enough, they give me two munfs' 'ard on
their own—no judge or jury for that little lot—an’
turn me out wot you calls a bit of a wreck, but I
calls a creepin’ corpse!” *
And the animated remains wiped a forehead wet
already with the throes of deglutition, and eyes that
were not wet at all, before applying a flickering light
to his neglected Upmann.
“What you say is perfectly fair,” observed the


A HOPELESS CASE 83
thinking of the kidneys especially. “I’m stony-
broke, you see,” he explained with increased bitter-
116 SS.
“Our friend insists on paying the bill,” said the
doctor, grimly.
“And who is our wonderful friend, doctor, when
'e or she's at 'ome?”
Doctor Dollar laughed as he pushed back his
chair. “That's the one thing you mustn't ask me;
but come up and see the room before you make up
your mind against it.”
It was at the top and back of the house, less
lofty than those into which the Home Secretary
had peeped on a previous occasion, but similarly
appointed, and more attractive in the morning light
and that of a fire already crackling in the grate.
By the fireside stood a white wicker chair and a
glass table strewn with the newest and lightest of
monthly and weekly literature; ash-trays and match-
boxes were in comfortable evidence; a bed of vestal
purity was turned down in readiness, and a suit of
gay pajamas airing with a bath-gown on a set of
bright brass pipes.


84 THE CRIME DOCTOR
“The bathroom is next door,” explained the doc-
tor; “you would have it practically to yourself, but
your room would be your castle.”
And he pointed out an efficient bolt upon the door.
“You wouldn't lock me in on the other side?”
suggested Croucher suspiciously.
“Certainly not; you may have the key; but I
should expect you to keep to your own floor, and,
of course, to the house. You would not be a pris-
oner in any sense; but if you went out, Croucher,
I'm afraid you would have to stay out. Otherwise
my treatment would not have a fair chance; what
you require, in the first instance, is absolute rest
and no more truck with the outside world than you
had where you have been.”
“An' good 'olesome grub?” suggested Croucher
with another slant of his goggle eyes.
“And plenty of square meals. Perhaps not so
square as this morning's, because you won't have
any exercise; but that sort of thing.”
“A little drop of anythin' to drink, doctor?”
“With your meals, and in moderation, by all
means; but don't ask me for nightcaps, and don't
try to smuggle anything in.”


A HOPELESS CASE 85
“I wouldn't do such a thing!” exclaimed Crouch-
er, with virtuous decision. “Doctor, I'm your man,
and ready to turn in as soon as ever you like.”
And a shabby waistcoat hung unbuttoned at the
swoop of a horned thumb.
“One moment,” said the doctor. “If you are
really coming to me, and coming to stay, I am to
telephone to my tailor, who will take some little
time getting here.”
“Your tailor!” cried Croucher. “Where the
dooce does 'e come in?” -
“You may well ask!” replied Dollar with involun-
tary candor. “That friend in need, who was the
first to assert your innocence, and to whom you
owe more than you will ever know, is anxious to
give you a fresh start in life, and an entire new out-
fit in which to make it.”
“Well! I call that 'andsome,” declared Alfred
Croucher, for once without reserve. “I won't arst
'oo it is no more, but I shall live in 'opes o' findin’
out an’ sayin' thanky like a man. Not but wot it's
right,” he added after all, “for them as is rich to
'old out an 'elpin' 'and to them as is pore and 'ave
been tret like I’ve been, through no fault o' their


86 THE CRIME DOCTOR
own. But it ain't everybody as sees it like that,
an' it makes you think better o' the world when
you strike them as does.”
“I agree,” said the doctor, in a tone entirely lost
on his expansive patient.
“I’m griteful to 'im,” that worthy went so far as
to assert, “and to you too, sir, if it comes to that.”
Doctor Dollar took the opportunity of being no
less explicit in his turn.
“There's no reason why it should come to that,
Croucher, I assure you. I can not too strongly im-
press on you that anything I do for you is by
business arrangement with the friend who takes
this extraordinary interest in your career.”
In this statement, but especially in its relative
clause, there was a note of sheer resentment which
recalled other notes and other clauses to the reten-
tive memory of Mr. Croucher. In a flash the lot
had fused in his suspicious mind, and so visibly
that Dollar was relieved to find himself the object
of suspicion.
“You talk as if it went against your grain,” said
Croucher, with a growl and a show of growler's
teeth. “I 'ope you don't think I went an' done it
all the time, do yer?”


A HOPELESS CASE 87
“I don't follow you, Croucher.”
“I mean the big job—the first job—the one I
very near swung for l’ muttered the fellow, hoarse
and hot with evident emotion.
“No; indeed I don’t,” responded the doctor, in
an unexpected voice; and he sighed, as though to
think that his sentiments toward his patient should
have been so misunderstood.
Such at least was the patient's final interpreta-
tion of all that was unsatisfactory in the doctor's
manner; and if a doubt still rankled in his mind, it
was but the crumpled petal in what was almost
literally a bed of roses. Bed and room alike were
the most luxurious in which Alfred Croucher had
ever lain; after prison they were as the seventh
heaven after the most excruciating circle of Dante's
Inferno. He stretched his great limbs in peace in-
effable, fell asleep dreaming of the fine flash suits
for which they had been duly measured, and was
never decently awake until the evening.
A substantial tea, when he did wake up, was the
least they could provide after neglecting to rouse a
man for his midday meal; but a distinct grievance
on that score was forgot in the appetite that ac-
crued for dinner, and the infinitely tactful choice


88 THE CRIME DOCTOR
of the eventful viands. Steak and onions was the
strong act of a romantic drama after the very heart
of this transpontine rough. If he had been shown
a bill of fare, Alfred Croucher would have chosen
steak and onions, with Welsh rarebit to follow ;
and Welsh rarebit did follow, as if by magic.
There was rather less to be said for the drink; the
patient could have done with a longer and a stronger
draught. But it was a drop of good stuff, if Mr.
Croucher was any judge; and he decided not to
create a possibly prejudicial impression by com-
plaints of quality or quantity.
“You done me top-'ole,” he murmured, rolling
his bulbs of eyes when the doctor stood over him
once more. “Top-'ole, you 'ave, and no error. I
never struck a nicer bit o' fillet. Saucy glass o' wine
that, too. Not that I was ever much 'and at the
liquor, but there are times w'en it seems to do yer
good.”
“You shall continue to take it, medicinally,” re-
turned Dollar, gravely; “but don't count on the
type of fare you’ve had to-day. Three meals in
future, but rather lighter ones. The first day was
different, I tried to put myself in your place, and


A HOPELESS CASE 89
am glad I seem to have succeeded on the whole.
But remember you are here to lie low, and that
doesn't do on fighting food. Sufficient for the day,
Croucher! Here are some flowers from the friend
who works by stealth, and these are the weeds I
promised you this morning. You might do worse
than judge the givers by their gifts.”
It was perhaps as well that Alfred Croucher did
not pause to puzzle out that saying, for the rare
blooms were as pearls before his kindred of the
sty, but the box of Upmanns as a trough of offal.
One was ignited without delay; yet it was hardly a
matter of hours before the chartered sluggard was
blissfully asleep once more, his door locked and
bolted on principle, and a red fire dying in the
grate.
II
It might have been a falling coal that woke him
up. Such was the innocent Croucher's first impres-
sion. But in that case it was nothing less than a
shower of coals, a gentle but continuous downpour,
and they fell with a curiously crisp and metallic


90 THE CRIME DOCTOR
tinkle. Moreover, the sound was not from the
fire after all, but apparently from the window on
the opposite side of the room.
Croucher lay listening until his quickened senses
could no longer be deceived. Somebody was at his
window, the dormer window that anybody could
get at over the leads, that ought to have been se-
curely barred but wasn't, as he suddenly remem-
bered with aggrieved dismay. He had himself con-
sidered that unprotected window and those con-
ducive leads, in one of his last waking moments, as
a not impossible solution of the whisky problem.
But this was different; this was awful; this was
a case for alarming the house without scruple or
delay. It should have been a great moment for a
bit of an expert, who had once served the humane
equivalent of seven years for an ambitious burglary
of his own; but the defect of character which had
spelled failure on that occasion, when an elderly
householder had held him up with an unloaded re-
volver, reſidered Mr. Croucher incapable of appre-
ciating the present situation as it deserved. He was
far too shaken to think of the former affair, or to


A HOPELESS CASE 9I
feel for a moment like a 'busman on his proverbial
holiday of an actor at the front of the house. He
did feel bitterly indignant that a patient in a nursing
home should be exposed to such terrors by night;
and he had got as far as his elbow toward a dis-
play of spirit (and incipient virtue) when the catch
flew back with as much noise as he might have
made himself. Before more could happen, Mr.
Croucher had relapsed upon his pillow with a sten-
torian snore.
Then a sash went up too slowly, limbs crossed
the sill and felt the floor with excessive caution,
and for a little lifetime Alfred Croucher suffered
more exquisitely than toward the end in the con-
demned cell. The monster was leaning over him,
breathing hotly in his face, all but touching his
frozen skin.
“Alfiel” said a blessed voice, as a tiny light struck
through the compressed eyelids. “Alfie, it's me!”
And once more Alfred Croucher was a man and
a liar. “Shoddy!” he croaked with a sepulchral sob.
“An' me asleep an' dreamin' like a bloomin' babby!
Why, wot the 'ell you doin' 'ere, Shod?”


92 THE CRIME DOCTOR
“Come to see you, old son,” said Shoddy. “But
it's more like me arskin’ what you're up to in a
'ouse like this?”
“’Avin the time o' me life!” whispered the ex-
cited patient. “Livin' like a fightin' cock, on the
fat o' the teemin' land, at some ruddy old josser's
expense!”
And he poured into the still adjacent ear the true
fairy tale of his first day's freedom, from his in-
troduction to Doctor Dollar in the precincts of that
very jail which was to have been his place of exe-
cution and obscene sepulcher.
“I know. I seen you come out with him,” said
Shoddy, “an' drive off in yer car like a hairy lord.
I was there with a taxi meself 22
“There to meet me, Shod?”
“That's it. That's 'ow I tracked you to this 'ere
'ouse. The room took more findin'; but there's an
old pal o' mine a shover in the mews. 'E showed
me the back o' the 'ouse, an’ blowed if I didn't spot
yer at yer winder first go off!”
“That must 've been early on, old man? I bin in


A HOPELESS CASE 93
bed all day. Oh, such a bed, Shoddy! I'm goin’ to
sleep me 'ead into a pulp afore I leave it.”
“You ain’t,” said Shoddy firmly. “You're comin'
along o' me, Alfie. That's why I'm 'ere.”
“Not me,” replied Alfie, with equal firmness. “I
know w'en I'm well off—and it's time I was.”
“I’m wiv yer there!” Shoddy nodded in adroit
sympathy; he had kept his electric lamp burning all
the time; and an extra prominence of eye and cheek-
bone, a looseness of lip and a flickering glance, were
not inarticulate in the chastened countenance of
his friend. “It must 've been 'ell, Alfie, real, old
red-'ot 'ell !”
“And all for wot I never done,” he was reminded
with some stiffness.
“That's it,” the other agreed, with perfunctory
promptitude. “But that's exactly why I'm 'ere,
Alfie. You didn't think I done a job like this for
the sake o’ tikin' 'old o' yer 'and, didger? It's
just because it seems you didn't commit yerself,
Alfie, that I'd got to see yer by 'ook or crook before
the day was out.”


94 THE CRIME DOCTOR
“Where's the fire?” inquired Alfie, idiomatically;
but his professional friend, like other artists in
narration, and all givers of real news, was no
going to surrender the bone of the situation until his
audience sat up and begged for it.
Mr. Croucher literally did sit up, while the exas-
perating Shoddy interrupted himself to make a
stealthy tour of the room, in the course of which
his electric torch illumined the comfortably bolted
door, and the delectable box of Upmanns. To one
of these he helped himself without permission, but
a brace were in blast before he resumed his posi-
tion on the bed.
“The fire?” said he, as though seconds and not
minutes had elapsed since the cryptic question.
“There's no fire anywhere as I know of not to-
night—but there soon may be, that's why I want
you out o' this. If you didn't commit yourself,
Alfie, don't you see as somebody else must 'ave
done?”
“Oh, bring it up!” cried Croucher under his
breath.
“Well, if you didn't stiffen that copper on the
night o' the sufferygite disturbance—an' we know
you didn't—then somebody else did "


A HOPELESS CASE 95
“You don't mean to tell me you know who did?”
There had been a tense though tiny pause; there
was another while Shoddy changed the torch to
his right hand, and blew a cloud over the head of
his now recumbent companion.
“I know what everybody says, Alfie.”
“More than their prayers, I'll bet, like they did
before. Wot do they say?”
“One o’ the sufferygites—”
“Corpsed the copper?”
“That's it, old man.”
“And I never thought of it!”
“It bears some thinkin’ about, don't it?” said
Shoddy. “Why, you're trem’lin' like a blessed
leaf l’’
“I should think I was trem’lin'! So would you
if you'd been through wot I been . . . Shod!”
“Yuss, Alfie?”
“I see the 'ole blessed thing!”
“I thought you would.”
“It was 'er wot broke the jooler's winder for
me!”
“That's wot they say.”
“They? Who?”
“Lots o' people. I 'eard it down some mews:


96 THE CRIME DOCTOR
some o' the pipers 'ave 'inted at it. Topham's
in fair 'ot water all round; they say 'e's 'ushed it
up because she's in serciety.”
“Wot's 'er nime, Shod?”
“Lidy Moyle—Lidy Vera Moyle, I think it is.
And 'ere's another thing, a thing that I was for-
gettin’.”
“Out with it.”
“I see 'er come 'ere this afternoon, whilst I was
watchin' the 'ouse in case you come out.”
“My Gawd, Shoddy! Let me sit up. I can't
breathe lyin' down.”
“She 'ad some flowers wiv 'er,” said Shoddy,
pursuing his reminiscences. “Looks as though
she's got a friend in the 'ome.”
“I’m the friend,” said Mr. Croucher grimly.
“Take and run yer light over that wash-stand; the
guv'nor brought 'em up 'isself wiv these 'ere
smokes.”
“Roses, in the month o' March!” murmured
Shoddy, as a bowl of beauties filled the disk of
light; “’ot'ouse flowers for little Alfie! Why, the
girl's fair struck on you, cully!”
“I’ll strike 'er!” said Alfie, through teeth that


98 THE CRIME DOCTOR
/“This’d be a start an’ a finish, Alfie! Besides,
it'd be your revenge; don't you forget wot 'you've
been through,” urged the other. -
“Catch me!” said Croucher, eagerly. “But—
don'cher see? I been through so much that I was
lookin' forward to dossin' down 'ere a bit. I ain't
the man I was. It's wot I need. Where's the fire,
as I said afore? The gal won't run away.”
“That's just wot she will, Alfie; goin’ abroad
any day—an’ might get married any day, a piece
like 'er. Then you might find it more of a job.
There's another 'old we've got, an’ might lose any
old day.”
The other hold appealed with peculiar power to
the character and temperament of Alfred Croucher,
and not less strongly to a certain sagacity which
added more to his equipment. But he had never
been quite so comfortable in his life; comfort had
never been so decidedly his due; and the substance
of present luxury (with a fresh start in the near
future) was not lightly to be exchanged for a gold-
mine, with all a gold-mine's gambling chances, in-
cluding the proverbial optimism of prospectors.
The discussion ended in a compromise and the
withdrawal of Shoddy by the catlike ways and


A HOPELESS CASE 99
means of his arrival. But he did not depart with-
out pointing, through the open window and a forest
of chimney-stacks, to a lighted but uncurtained
square on a lower level. And thither, at certain
appointed hours, the patient might have been caught
peeping, or even in the act of rude and furtive
signals, for several days to come.
Handled as it deserves, the tale of those days
would make a psychological chapter of dual inter-
est, and for reasons that may yet appear. But for
the moment Alfred Croucher holds the stage, and
soliloquies are out of vogue. Yet even his objective
life had points of interest. He slept less than he
had planned to sleep, but read more than he had
ever read in all his life; and his reading, if not a
sign of grace, was at least a straw that showed the
way the wind might have blown but for the intru-
sive Shoddy.
Out of the doctor's little typewritten list, the
patient in the top-floor-back began by choosing For
the Term of His Natural Life. It held him—with
a tortured brow that sometimes glistened. When
the book was finished, he was advised that It Is
Never Too Late to Mend was a better thing of the
same kind: “In spite of its name,” added Dollar,


A HOPELESS CASE IOI
everybody who will pay two pounds, eight shilling,
seven pence for a berth in a sleeper which in Switzer-
land, say, would cost some twenty francs. Most
of those who had committed the extravagance
seemed by way of getting their money's worth;
even the lady traveling alone in the foremost wagon-
lit, though she refrained from dining in the restau-
rant-car, would have struck an acquaintance as in
better spirits than for some months past. And so
she was. But she was still far from being the Lady
Vera Moyle of last year's fogs.
She was going to her mother, who had been seri-
ously ill since Christmas, but was now completing
her recovery in Rome. And yet her illness had
meant less to Lady Armagh than to the wayward
child who had been told (by the rest of the family)
to consider herself its cause; it might indeed have
been a direct dispensation to tie Lady Vera's hands
and tongue; and in the train de lure, perhaps for
the first time, she herself recognized the merci-
ful wisdom of Providence in the matter.
Alfred Croucher was a free man: that was the
great thing. There were moments when it was
an even greater thing than Lady Armagh's conval-
escence. But there was later and greater news yet


IO2 THE CRIME DOCTOR
for Lady Vera to gloat over in the train. Not only
was poor Croucher a free man, but that dear Doc-
tor Dollar had hopes of him at last! He had said
so the day she left for Paris; he had never said
anything of the kind before. Nothing could have
been more pessimistic than the crime doctor's first
report on his latest patient; nothing franker than
the way he had made room for him in the home,
merely and entirely to gratify her whim. Alfred
Croucher was “not his style,” and there had been
an end of him but for the fact that Lady Vera
WaS. -
She belonged to the class that he was pleased to
consider as potentially the most criminal of all.
She was well aware of it, and the knowledge pro-
vided her with a considerable range of feelings as
the train flew on and on. She felt herself the
object of a purely pathological interest; she felt
almost as small as a specimen under a microscope;
she felt lonelier than ever in her life before.
Lonely she was in the way that mattered least.
She was traveling for once without a maid. The
faithful creature (a would-be militant of the blood-
thirstiest, in her day) had been with her dear lady-


A HOPELESS CASE IO3
ship over the Sunday in Paris (hobnobbing with
certain exiles for the Cause); but just as they were
leaving their hotel a telegram had come to summon
her to a bucolic death-bed. Esther would have let
her old father die without her, but her beloved lady-
ship, still quick with her own filial awakenings, had
sent her about her dismal business with a kiss.
The compartment was overheated; they always
are unless you complain in time. Lady Vera had
made her efficient little fuss too late, and the result
was not apparent before the small hours and Mo-
dane. During the long wait there she lay awake,
though she had duly entrusted her keys to the con-
ductor, and the voices of those who had omitted
that precaution caused a welcome change in her
“long, long thoughts.” She put her mind to her
fellow-passengers, and kept it on them with native
resolution.
She was in decent company: a moderately well-
known man and wife in one adjoining com-
partment, a white-haired ecclesiastic in the other.
She wove a romance about the venerable gentle-
man, and speculated on the well-being of the other
pair. In such innocent ways could she amuse her-


IO4 THE CRIME DOCTOR
self when out of muddle-headed mischief in the
name of God knows what. In all else she was
Sweet and sane enough—unless it was just one tiny
matter that annoyed her memory before she fell
asleep to the renewed lullaby of the express. It was
the utterly unimportant matter of a youngish man
in a loud suit, one of a brace of incredibly common
Englishmen, who had nevertheless been staying at
the hotel in Paris, had “passed a remark” to Esther
in the lift, and certainly stared with insolence at
Esther's mistress, not only in Paris but in passing
along the corridor of this very train, before
and after the hour for dinner.
To Vera Moyle there seemed no time at all be-
tween her passing thought of this creature and the
vile glare that woke her up. At first it blinded
her, for she was in the upper berth, within inches
of the excruciating blaze. It came almost as a
relief when a head bobbed between the glare and
her eyes.
Lady Vera blinked her indignation. She was
too sleepy to do more at first, and too old a traveler
to make much fuss about a mere piece of stupidity.
She could not see the man's face, but his head was


A HOPELESS CASE IO5
of the type which occasions the inevitable libel on
the bullet, and its hideousness hardly mitigated by
the Rembrandtesque effect of the electric light be-
hind it. She conceived it to belong to some blun-
dering official, and ordered him out in pretty sharp
French. But the man did not move. And in an-
other short moment Vera Moyle had become aware
of three very horrible things: it was the creature
in the loud suit, and he had shut the door behind
him, and was holding an automatic pistol to her
breast.
“One syl'ble that anybody else can 'ear,” he mut-
tered as her mouth opened, “an' it's yer larst in life!
'Old yer noise an' I won't be 'ard on you—not 'alf
as 'ard as you been on me!”
“It isn't—oh, surely it isn't Croucher?” cried
the girl, with an emotion made up of every element
but fear.
“It is Croucher,” said he in brutal mimicry.
“That bein’ just so, I puts away the barker—see?—
no decepshun!” The pistol dropped into a loud
tweed pocket. “I reckon I can do me own bit o'
barkin’—yuss' an’ bitin', too!” concluded Croucher,
with an appropriate snarl.


106 THE CRIME DOCTOR
“Will you please go out?” said Lady Vera, still
with sorrow in her steady eyes.
“No, I will not please. I'll see you damned
first!” said Croucher, with sudden ferocity—“like
you very near seen me! If we're over'eard, you'll
be thought no better'n you ought to be; but by
Gawd they won't think you as bad as wot you are!"
Lady Vera took no advantage of a studious
pause. The ruffian was making his points with
more than merely ruffianly effect; the whole thing
might have been carefully rehearsed. But to the
girl in the upper berth it was now no more than
she deserved. It was a light enough punishment
for the dreadful deed by her committed—no matter
how unconscious, in how fine a frenzy or how
just a cause—and on him visited with all but the
last dread vengeance of the criminal law. He had
a right to say what he liked to her after that, even
to say it then and there, with all his natural and
acquired brutality. Was it not she who had done
most of all to brutalize him?
“That is, until I tell 'em,” added Croucher, with
crafty significance. His hearer had to recall the
words before the pause; when she had done so, he


IO8 THE CRIME DOCTOR
measure of her eagerness to get rid of him but
Alfred Croucher was far too old in deception to
be himself very easily deceived.
“Then you can keep it, with my love!” said he.
“I’ll trouble you for them rings instead—and the
rest wot you're 'idin' be'ind 'em!”
The girl turned paler in the electric light. She
was sitting up in her suspicious readiness to point
out the jewel-case; the other hand, with most of her
rings on it, had flown instinctively to her throat;
for she was traveling, as ladies will, with her great-
est treasures—her diamond necklace and pendant,
and a string of pearls—on her neck for safety.
“Suppose I refuse and >>
She glanced toward the bell.
“Then I'll say what I know.”
“And what do you know?” Her back was to the
wall.
“What I see that night! What I see an' was
mug enough not to twig till I come out an' 'eard
all the talk! Is that good enough? If not, the
rest'll keep; but it'll put you in the jug all right,
I don't care 'oo's on your side. It's one law for
the rich and one for the pore. "Ang me as never


A HOPELESS CASE Io9
done it, an' 'ush you up, as did | But I've heard
tell that murder will out, an' you'll find that mur-
derers will in-to prison—even when they're titled
lidies with the King on 'is throne be'ind 'em! It'll
ruin you, if it does no more—ruin you an' yours—
an' break all your 'earts!”
It was enough. She stripped her neck, she
stripped her fingers; rings and necklace, pearls and
pendant, all lay in a shimmering heap in his capa-
cious palm, held for a moment's triumph under the
electric light, reflected for that moment in a mirror
which his bulky frame had hidden until now.
It was the mirror on the door of the miniature
dressing-room between every two compartments in
the train de lure; but in the very moment of his
exultation it ceased to reflect either Alfred Croucher
or his ill-gotten spoil. The door had opened; it
framed a sable figure crowned with silvery locks;
lean hands flew out from the black shoulders, and
met round the neck of Croucher with the fell dex-
terity of a professional garroter.
The pair backed together without a word. The
one had murder in his set teeth, the other death in
the bulging eyes and darkening face, with its col-


I IO THE CRIME DOCTOR
lar of interlaced fingers white to the nails with
their own pressure. Lady Vera watched the two
men as the fawn might watch the python struck
to timely death, until the communicating door shut
upon them both, and only her own unearthly form
remained in the mirror. And the train ran on
and on, and the whole coach creaked and trembled,
as coaches will even in a train de lure, only in that
particular compartment it had not been noticeable
for some time.
Presently, as her nerve came back, one or two
further observations of a negative order were grad-
ually made by Vera Moyle. She may be said to
have noticed that she did not notice one or two
things she might have expected to notice by now.
The chief thing was that there was no sound what-
ever from the compartment beyond the looking-
glass door, no fuss or undue traffic in the corridor.
What had happened? Only too soon she knew.
They had stopped at some nameless station be-
tween the tags of the Italian boot. It was a chance
of peeping out, and out peeped the shaken girl
from her window overlooking the line. And there,


A HOPELESS CASE III
skipping on to the next low platform, bag in hand,
went the loud trousers under Alfred Croucher's
equally new and noisy ulster; and there at his elbow
went the venerable ecclesiastic, even holding him
by the sleevel
It was a long road to Rome for Lady Vera
Moyle, but toward the end there came another
stage in which the wagon-lit forgot to swing and
sing like humbler coaches, and the pale Campagna
swam past unseen. It began with a knock behind
the drawn blind of her compartment—now but a
mirrored divan of Utrecht velvet and stamped
leather—as unsuggestive of a good night's rest as
the white face and the bright eyes behind the tiny
table in the corner.
“Entres 1’’ she cried with nervous irritation.
The door opened and shut upon the somber face
and long athletic limbs of John Dollar.
“Doctor Dollar! I had no idea you were in the
train ſ”
Her voice had broken with very joy; her hand
trembled pitifully during its momentary repose in
his.


II 2 THE CRIME DOCTOR
said he.
“I have been in the next compartment all the way
“You have never shown up, you see,’
from Paris.”
“The next compartment on which side?”
He jerked his head at his own reflection in the
looking-glass door.
“But there was a priest in there!” cried the girl.
“There was the high priest of a new religion in
which you'll never believe any more,” said Dollar
with a wry smile. “May he sit down for a min-
ute, Lady Vera?”
She looked at him with cooling eyes. “Certainly,
Doctor Dollar, if it makes an explanation any
easier.”
“I didn't intend to explain at all,” he had the
nerve to tell her. “I meant my ecclesiastical body
to do that for me—but its wig was blown out of
the window on the other side of Genoa. I've been
hanging about all day in the hope of catching you.
I couldn't leave it any longer. I had to give you
these.”
And he placed upon the table between them the
diamond necklace and pendant, the string of pearls.


A HOPELESS CASE II.3
and the handful of rings she had been wearing in
the night.
“You made him give them up!” she cried, in
thankful tears that never fell, but only softened and
sweetened her indescribably.
“Naturally,” he laughed. “It wasn't very diffi-
cult.”
“And I thought you were a confederate when I
saw you crossing the line together!”
“I was putting the fear of a foreign jail upon
him to the last. But he had a confederate in the
train; he was in reserve outside your berth until I
lured him into mine and laid him out. Otherwise
I should have been with you sooner; but in one
way it was better to take our man with your jewels
on him—there was no getting out of it. The two
of them were only too glad to be kicked out at
the first station. And the other fellow was a man
who broke into my house to see Croucher the first
night we had him there.”
“Did they tell you so?”
“No. I knew it at the time. I heard the whole
thing, even to fragments of a conversation from


II.4 THE CRIME DOCTOR
which it was possible to reconstruct the plan they
actually brought off last night. I make it a rule
not to listen at patients' doors, any more than one
would at other people's, but I'm not going to blush
for this particular exception.”
Her soft wet eyes were looking him through
and through.
“Yet you kept him on—for my sake!”
“Not altogether, Lady Vera.” They were an
honest couple. “It put me on my mettle; it gave
me something to prevent. At first—as I'm afraid
you knew—I really didn't want to touch the fellow
with a pole. He was an obvious incurable; he
would have been better hanged—justly or un-
justly.”
“Don’t speak of that—or do!” exclaimed the
girl. “It makes me forgive him everything!”
“Well, my first idea was about right. He was
beyond reclaim. But I never thought he would
give me a definite move to block; that, as you know,
is one's chief job after all, and it put a new com-
plexion on the case. It was as though—as though
one took a man on for cancer and found him plot-
ting to shoot the Chancellor of the Exchequer be-
fore he died 1 I apologize for the analogy, Lady


A HOPELESS CASE I I5
Vera,” said Dollar, making the most of their laugh,
“but the man became a new proposition on the spot.
And the funny thing is that I believe I almost might
have cured him after all—done him some good,
anyhow—but for the very thing that bucked me
up!”
Lady Vera looked out at a flying brake of naked
trees, the color of cigar-ash. He had lost her at-
tention for the moment.
“I was a little fool,” she said at length. “I should
have listened to you, and been content to help in
some other way. I am sorry.”
“I’m not!” replied Doctor Dollar. “It was a very
sporting folly—but everything you ever did was
that l”
She shook her head sadly, as a brown river, girt
with olives, flashed under the train like a child's
skipping-rope.
“I haven't changed my opinions,” she said, just
a trifle aggressively. “But I would give my life
to undo many of my actions—not only that one—
many, many" and she looked him bravely and hum-
bly in the eyes. “So the whole thing has served
me right, and will if it happens all over again.”
“If what does?”


II6 THE CRIME DOCTOR
“This blackmailing of me by that poor man!”
“It won't. I've frightened him.”
“He will think of some subtler way.”
“There's no subtlety in him, no power, no initia-
tive, no anything but mere brute force,” said Dol-
lar, with a touch of that same strength and weak-
ness in his unusually emphatic assertion. “The fel-
low is a deadly tool and nothing more. He knuckled
under to me in a moment.”
Lady Vera shook her head again, but this time
she was looking firmly in his face.
“I feel,” she said, with a stoical conviction, “that
I shall be fair game to him as long as we are both
in the world. And it’s what I deserve.”
Dollar abandoned his attempt at disingenuous
disabuse; the extreme to which he flew instead was
a little startling, but these two knew each other.
“You must marry, Lady Vera,” he was moved
to say. But his manner was eminently uninspired.
He might have been telling her she must hand her
keys to the hotel porter at Rome. That was in
fact the note he meant to take, only he sang it
louder than he knew.
“I can never marry,” she answered calmly. “I
have blood upon my hands."


A HOPELESS CASE 117
“You can marry a man who knows!”
And the unaltered note took on a tremolo of
which he was both aware and ashamed; but still
their eyes were frankly locked.
“I can marry nobody, Doctor Dollar.”
“The man I mean isn't fit to black your boots!
But he'd protect you, he'd help you, and you would
be the making not only of him but of his dream—
y -
and not only his little dream
It was her hand that stopped him. It had taken
his across the little table.
“The man you mean is worth ten million of me!
But I can never marry him or anybody. And you,
and you alone, know why?"
She bent her brave eyes back on the Campagna;
a pale tufted heath was swimming by; gum-trees
hardly heightened the prevailing neutral tint; a
modern corrugated roof, pinned in place by a few
primeval boulders, held her attention on its swift
course across the window-panes; and when she
looked round, Lady Vera was all alone.


IV
THE GOLDEN KEY
66 HELLEY was quite right!” exclaimed the
S young man at the book-shelf, with the prema-
turely bent back turned upon Doctor Dollar at his
old oak desk.
“He was never wrong when he stuck to poetry,”
said the doctor, looking up from an unfinished pre-
scription on which the ink was nevertheless dry.
The other gave a guilty start. He was an im-
maculate young wreck, with the fashionable glut of
hair plastered back from a good enough face, as if
to make the most of its haggard pallor. And he
was in full evening dress, for the crime doctor's
patients came at all hours.
“Did I say anything?” he asked with exaggerated
embarrassment.
“You thought something aloud,” said Dollar,
II8


THE GOLDEN KEY II9
smiling. “Don’t let it worry you; that's not one
of the straws that shows an ill wind. What is it
of Shelley's, Mr. Edenborough?”
“Only a bit of one of his letters,” said the young
man. “I just happened to open them at something
that rather appealed to me.” And the book shot
back into its place.
“Not the bit about the prussic acid, I hope?”
suggested the doctor, for all the world as if in fun.
“What was that?” said Edenborough, with a face
that would not have imposed upon an infant.
“A little commission from Shelley to Trelawny,
for a small quantity of the ‘essential oil of bitter
almonds,’ as he called it, so that he might ‘hold in
his possession that golden key to the chamber of
perpetual peace.’”
“That was it,” said the youth at length. “I may
as well be honest about it. But I don't know how
on earth you knew ſ”
The doctor gave a kindly little laugh.
“Only by knowing the book,” he assured the
patient. “It’s rather a notorious passage—and you
had just been clamoring for at least a silver key
to some chamber of temporary peace!”


I2O THE CRIME DOCTOR
“You said you would give me one, Doctor
Dollar.”
“And now I think I won't,” said the doctor,
rising from his aged chair. “No; you shall not go
without hearing my reasons, and what I am going
to propose to you instead. These keys, Mr. Eden-
borough”—and he tore the unfinished prescription
into little bits—“gold or silver, they are not keys
at all, but burglars' jemmies that injure and vitiate
the chambers they break into. It certainly is so
with the night's rest you want at any price; it may
be the same with the perpetual peace that Shelley
took for granted. Yet I happen to have a Chamber
of Peace of sorts here in this house. It's my latest
fad. You've found it a name, and in return I
should like to offer it to you for the night.”
“Do you mean a room that sends you off instead
of drugs?”
Young Edenborough was looking puzzled, but
for the moment taken out of himself. He had
heard of Doctor Dollar as a rather eccentric con-
sultant, but as the very man for him, from no less
an authority than the Home Secretary of England,


THE GOLDEN KEY I2 I
and no further back than that very evening at din-
ner. He had come straight round from Portman
Square, foreseeing miracles and magic potions; but
he had not foreseen John Dollar, or his unprofes-
sional conversation, or the slight cast that actually
added to his magnetic eyes, his cheery yet gentle
confidence, or (least of all) a serious if casual invi-
tation for the night.
“That's exactly what I do mean,” said the au-
thor of these surprises. “It's the most silent room
in London, and there are other little points about
it. I got our friend Topham to give it a trial dur-
ing the bread strike. His verdict was that the Chan-
cellor of the Exchequer would sleep the sleep of
the just there!”
Edenborough had a laugh that turned him back
into a schoolboy; but he checked it sharply, as
though the sound put him to shame and pain.
“I would give anything for one decent night,”
he said. “But you are far too good, sir, especially
to a man you know nothing at all about.”
“I ought to know more in the morning, Mr.
Edenborough, but it will keep very well till then.


I22 THE CRIME DOCTOR
Enough for the night that you're a friend of the
Home Secretary, and at your worst at just the time
when a man wants to be at his best.”
Edenborough smote his brow like a young man
on the stage, but with a piteous spontaneity beyond
all histrionic art.
“It's on Thursday!” he cried, as one in exquisite
dread. “My God, I'm to be married on Thursday,
and this is Sunday night! How can I toe the mark
unless I get some sleep? And how can I sleep—”
“Leave that to me,” said Dollar, cutting a preg-
nant pause as short as possible; “leave everything
to me, and come straight up-stairs. I keep the room
in constant readiness; you shall be fitted with pa-
jamas, and I'll send a special messenger anywhere
you like for whatever you may want in the morn-
ing. Come, my dear man! I am burning to give
my Chamber of Peace a crucial test, because I know
we shall all come out with flying colors!”
There was less confidence in the Doctor Dollar
who ran down-stairs a little later and sat at his
telephone with an urgent face. In another minute
he had left the house, and in another two Mr. Top-


THE GOLDEN KEY I23
ham Vinson was opening the door to him in Port-
man Square.
“I call this too bad of you,” began the doctor,
short of breath and shorter still of patience with
his powerful friend.
“My dear fellow, I couldn't help it,” vowed the
Minister, with disarming meekness. “He would
go straight to you, and just then I couldn't have
rung you up without giving him away at this end.”
“I can stay five minutes,” said Dollar, looking
at his watch, “to hear as much as you can tell me
in the time of what I ought to have known before I
saw your neurotic friend.”
“Hasn't he told you all about himself?”
“Hardly a word worth anything in a case like
this, where the cause matters more than the effect.
Of course I could have insisted, but that might
have finished him off for the night. I gather, how-
ever, that he's one of the First Lord's secretaries,
but a friend of yours, on the brink of being mar-
ried, and in more than the normal state about it,
or something to do with it.”
“I’ll take your points in order,” said Topham


I24 THE CRIME DOCTOR
Vinson, who could be brisker than anybody when
he chose. “George Edenborough is not only one of
Stockton's secretaries, but the most private and
most confidential of the crowd. I don't know about
his being a friend of mine; I’ve been a friend to
him for family reasons, and found him a nice
enough fellow. But the girl he's going to marry
—if they do marry—is one of us.”
“If I’’ cried the doctor. “Do you mean to say
she'd draw back in the last week?”
“She may not be able to help herself,” was the
grave reply. “George Edenborough is under a
cloud that may burst at any moment.”
“A sudden cloud P’’
“Out of the blue for me. I only heard of it from
Stockton on Friday night. But it's no new thing
to him. He might have told me sooner, I think,
seeing it was through me that Edenborough ever
went to him.”
“In some special capacity, I rather gather?”
“Yes; he can draw a bit—in fact, he's not a
secretary at all except in name, but the First Lord's
private draftsman. Stockton's a whale for de-
tails but a dunce at technicalities. What he likes
is the thing on paper, as he sees it with his own


THE GOLDEN KEY 125
eyes; so he makes his inspections with Edenbor-
ough and a sketch-block, illustrated notes are taken
at every turn, and all sorts of impossible improve-
ments worked out in subsequent collaboration. I
had that this evening from the boy himself. It will
show you what chances he has had of giving things
away—or—selling them!”
“Is it as bad as that?”
“Stockton swears it is. To me it's inconceivable.
But he gives chapter and verse of at least one draw-
ing that found its way across the North Sea early
in the year. Edenborough admits that he either
lost it or had it stolen from him. He seems \,
have been more careful—whichever way you look
at it—during the summer. But this autumn the
trouble has begun again. A dockyard sketch-map
has flown the German Ocean, come home to roost
by some means into which we'd better not inquire,
and is pronounced by Stockton a bad imitation of
one made for him by Edenborough six weeks ago.”
“Why a bad imitation, I wonder?”
“The original has been in the First Lord's ar-
chives ever since; he says the copy must have been
made from memory; but he has good reasons why
nobody but Edenborough could have made it.”


126 THE CRIME DOCTOR
“Reasons that are not so good in law, appar-
ently?”
“Exactly; as yet there's no case and there has
been no accusation. But I very much fear that
traps are being set, and I’ve taken it on myself to
put the madman on his guard.”
“To-night?”
“Yes; it was the first chance of getting hold of
him, and that only by having the poor little bride
to dinner as well. Heavy work, Dollar, drinking
their healths and knowing what was in the air!
The only comfort was that Edenborough knew as
well as I did; it was written on his face, if you had
the key, and I hadn't to do much beating about the
bush when I got him to myself. He was wonder-
fully frank, from his point of view. He told me
that the air of suspicion was driving him out of his
mind; he said he hadn't slept for nights and nights.”
“Although no accusation has been made?”
“Although not an open word has been said to
connect him with the bad copy of his own map!”
“That's the worst thing you’ve told me,” said
Dollar quietly. “He protested his innocence, of
course?”


128 THE CRIME DOCTOR
“The very likeliest, but for this world's goods,
and there'll be more of them one day. She has go
enough for two, and they have tastes in common.
I told you he could draw a bit, but she's a little artist,
though you wouldn't think it if you saw her teach-
ing him to skate at Prince's or taking me on at
golf I Lucy Trevellyn's the best type of sports-
woman—just as Vera Moyle is one gone wrong.”
John Dollar was on his feet.
“Well, I've stayed longer than I intended,” said
he abruptly. “I promised to go up within half an
hour to see if he was asleep. And he will be.
But what's a night's rest against such a tragedy
as the whole thing's bound to be!”
“Or such a mystery?” suggested Topham Vinson.
“If you could only get to the bottom of that, Dollar,
we might know how to act.”
“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



THE GOLDEN KEY 129
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 inter-
vals, either deep in such grim reading as the Illustra-
tive 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 pa-
tient's suit-case, woke him up, and watched the ris-
ing tide of memory drown the thanks in his throat.
Now was the doctor's chance of checking Mr. Vin-
son's version of the young man's troubles; but he


130 THE CRIME DOCTOR
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 synop-
sis, but it confirmed more than one impression which
Dollar would have given much to relinquish. The
talk of intolerable suspicions was indeed more con-
sistent with a guilty conscience than anything else,
since it was duly followed by the admission that
nobody 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 re-
luctant 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


THE GOLDEN KEY I31
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 glassy strip an opaque pane on which a little
giant might have been scribbling with a big dia-
mond. The eye swam with pairs rotating as in a
circus—with single practitioners 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 Edenbor-
ough, who came off one leg, with a glistening fore-
head, to find his guest a good place behind the bar-
rier.
“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 ex-
pected. 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 astound-
ing art. Edenborough said that he himself was


THE GOLDEN KEY I33
“He’s an Italian marquis,” returned Edenbor-
ough, 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 him-
self 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


I34. THE CRIME DOCTOR
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 ex-
cept 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 be-
fore he took his leave.
And they had talked about the wedding, and
their presents, and the wedding trip, as though
neither God nor man could interfere!
“Only three days to go!” said Dollar to him-
self. 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 prac-
tise 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 Eden-
borough 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 GOLDEN KEY I35
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 ques-
tion 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


136 THE CRIME DOCTOR
jealous of some independent perplexity on the part
of Dollar.
“I have heard so much!” said the doctor, drop-
ping into a chair. “Better be explicit—and as expe-
ditious as you can, my dear fellow. I have an ap-
pointment 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 P”
“I remember.”
“I meant with my chief—Lord Stockton—see-
ing 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 GOLDEN KEY 137
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 inter-
rupted 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 passion on the spot.
“What the devil do you mean, Doctor Dollar?


138 THE CRIME DOCTOR
I know no more about the matter than—I was go-
ing 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 Edenbor-
ough, 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 pronouncement
of life or death.
There was no outcry of surprise from Edenbor-
ough. He had some pride. But his knees began
to tremble in the firelight, and his unclenched hands
to twitch.
“I don't believe it,” he exclaimed at length.
“You tell me what you know!”
“All that you yourself suspected, and made your-
self ill with suspecting—and couldn't sleep for sus-
pecting—long ago!”
Pitiful tone and tender hand carried a heavier
conviction than the words. And now it was the
patient who had sunk into the chair, the doctor
bending over his bowed and quivering shoulders.


THE GOLDEN KEY I39
“You are not the first man, my dear Edenbor-
ough,” he went on, “who would seem to have been
betrayed in cold blood by a woman—by the woman.
Mark my words closely. I say it seems so. I would
not condemn the greatest malefactor unheard. I
meant to hear Miss Trevellyn first—feeling in my
bones, against all reason, that there may still be
some unimaginable explanation. But, if the worst
be true of her, then the best is true of you; for you
are the first man I have known bear the brunt as
you have borne it, my very dear fellow!”
“What makes you suspect her?” groaned Eden-
borough to the ground.
“It's not a case of suspicion—don't deceive your-
self as to that, Edenborough. I know that Miss
Trevellyn produced—and parted with—those last
two sketches about which there's been all the trou-
ble. I only suspect that she got you to show her
the originals, almost as soon as they were made,
on the plea of her tremendous interest in the Navy.”
“Quite true; she did,” said Edenborough, but as
though he did not appreciate what he was saying,
as though something else had stuck in his mind.
“But it was a tremendous interest!” he exclaimed,
jumping up. “It was her father's interest; his life,


I4O THE CRIME DOCTOR
indeed! Isn't it inconceivable that his daughter—
apart from everything else I've found her—that
she of all people should do a thing like this?”
“I am afraid the inconceivable happens almost
as often as the unexpected,” said Dollar, with a sigh.
“Criminology, indeed, prepares us for little else.
Think of the perfectly good mothers who have
flown to infanticide as the first relief of a mind un-
hinged The inversion of the ruling passions is
one of the sure symptoms of insanity.”
“But of course she's mad,” cried Edenborough,
“if she's guilty at all. But that's what I can't and
won't believe. I can believe it one minute but not
the next, just as I’ve suspected and laughed at my
suspicions all this nightmare time. One look in her
face has always been enough, and would be at this
minute.”
“Well, we shall soon see,” said Dollar, glancing
at the clock. “But I can only warn you that my
evidence is overwhelming.”
“Let’s have it, then; what is your evidence?”
demanded Edenborough, in a fresh fit of stone-
blind defiance.
“My dear fellow, you force my hand!” said Dor


THE GOLDEN KEY I4I
lar. “God knows you have a right—and it can't
make matters worse than they are. My evidence
consists of a full and circumstantial confession by a
scoundrel to whom I took your own dislike at sight,
and whose career I have spent the week investigat-
ing. I needn't tell you I mean the infamous
Rocchi.”
“Rocchi!” whispered Edenborough at the second
attempt, as though his very tongue rejected the ab-
horrent name. Yet now he stood perfectly still,
like a man who sees at last. “Well,” he added in an
ominously rational voice, “I must live long enough
to send him to hell, whatever else I do.”
“You will have to find him first,” said Dollar.
“He has gone back to his paymasters—not his own
countrymen—they kicked him out long ago. I've
taken it on myself to do the same, instead of hand-
ing him over to the police and doing an infinite deal
more harm than good.”
But Edenborough was not listening to a word;
he was talking to himself, and he talked aloud as
soon as he was given a chance.
“Now we know why she was so keen on my
wretched job . . . on the whole Navy? . . . No,


I42 THE CRIME DOCTOR
not a life-long fraud like that . . . And she pre-
tended to dislike that brute as much as I did! I
believe she did, too, but for his waltzing. . . . No,
never jealous of him, and I'm not now . . . but so
much the worse, so much the more damnably cold-
blooded!”
Dying philosopher could not have displayed a
more acute detachment. But the last touch was lost
upon Dollar, whose expectant ear had caught the
ting of an electric bell.
“Edenborough,” he said, in the voice of urgent
conciliation, “the time has come for you to show
what's in you. So far you have kept your head
and played the man; keep it now, and you will
play the hero! I still can't imagine what Miss Tre-
vellyn can have to say for herself—but I implore
you to hear her out, for I believe she is being ad-
mitted at this moment.”
“Lucy—here—and you expected her?”
“I told you I had another appointment. But
you were here first, one thing led to another, and
it may be better as it is. You were bound to have
this out between you—and to-day. If you wish


I44 THE CRIME DOCTOR
has done!” he whimpered through his teeth. “If
there's any explanation, she need never know I
knew; if there's not, good-by!”
And he slipped through the open window, out
upon the iron steps, as Dollar switched on the lights
that turned the outer dusk to darkness; and the
door opened even as the curtain was drawn in
desperation, with a last signal to Edenborough to
stand his ground and at least hear all.
“Good evening, Doctor Dollar,” said Miss Tre-
vellyn, briskly, and with that she stopped in her
sturdy stride. “Is anything the matter?”
“Is it possible you don't know what?”
“Is it anything to do with George? You're his
doctor, aren't you?” These questions quicker, but
with a sensible check on any premature anxiety.
“He has consulted me, but the matter more di-
rectly concerns yourself. It's no use beating about
the bush, Miss Trevellyn !” exclaimed the doctor,
with a sudden irritation at her straight carriage
and straighter look. “I have to speak to you about
the Marchese Rocchi.”
“Have you, indeed!”
Miss Trevellyn had winced at the name, but


THE GOLDEN KEY I45
already her eyes looked brighter and bolder, and
the firm face almost serenely obdurate.
“The Marchese Rocchi,” he continued, “fled the
country yesterday, Miss Trevellyn.”
“I wondered why he was not at Prince's!”
“He fled because of a scandal in which you are
implicated,” said Dollar very sternly. “He has
been trafficking in naval secrets—this country's se-
crets, Miss Trevellyn—and he swears you sold
them to him. Is it true?” -
“One moment,” said the girl, with a first trace
of emotion. “Is all this of your own accord, or
on behalf of Mr. Edenborough?”
“Of my own accord entirely.”
“You’ve been ferreting things out for yourself,
have you?”
“You are entitled to put it so.”
“Detective as well as doctor, it appears?”
“Miss Trevellyn, I implore you to tell me if these
things are true!”
“So that you may tell your patient, I suppose?”
“No. I shall not tell him,” said Dollar, disin-
genuously enough, but with the deeper sorrow.
“Very well! I'll tell you, and you can shout it


146 THE CRIME DOCTOR
from the roof for all I care now. It's perfectly
true!”
Dollar started, not at the thing that had to come,
but at the manner in which it came. It seemed, in-
deed, the last word in wickedness—impenitent, un-
blushing, even vainglorious to eye and ear alike.
His glance flew to the curtained window, but no
sound or movement came from the iron stair out-
side.
“True that you sold those drawings to this man
Rocchi?” he heard himself saying at last, in a tone
so childish that he scarcely wondered at the smile
it drew.
“Perfectly true,” said Miss Trevellyn.
“Drawings made by George Edenborough for the
First Lord of the Admiralty, and shown to you
because you were the stronger character and in-
sisted on seeing them, but only in such confidence as
might almost be justified between future man and
wife?”
“I didn't sell his drawings,” said Miss Trevellyn,
impatiently. “I copied them, more or less from
memory, and sold my own efforts.”
“Of course I know that! It was a slip of the


148 THE CRIME DOCTOR
He could waltz, you see, and so can I,” said Lucy
Trevellyn, with something like a sigh for her be-
reavement on the rink.
“Yet you copied the other two drawings, and
you even admit you sold him the copies?”
“I sold them quite well,” said Miss Trevellyn,
with sparkling eyes—“and you may guess what I
'lid with the money—but it's not fair to call them
copies. I made them as inaccurate as possible with-
out spoiling everything, and indeed I couldn't have
made them very accurate from memory, and they
were only rough sketches to begin with ! Of course
George was wrong to let me see them, but he was
assisting in the best of causes. Rocchi was an ex-
pert professional spy. I soon sized him down as
one. But he was not a naval expert—and I'm that
as well! That's my last boast, Doctor Dollar; but
it's not unjustifiable, if you come to think of George
and me between us keeping a national enemy out
of serious mischief, feeding a friendly Power with
false plans, and giving the money to our own dear
Navy League!”
Dollar surveyed the radiant minx with eyes that
needed rubbing. His only sorrow was that Eden-


THE GOLDEN KEY I49
borough did not burst through the curtains with-
out more ado; he must have extraordinary self-
control, when he liked.
“Not that George was a conscious party to the
fraud; he wouldn't have approved of it, he couldn't
possibly, poor George ſ” said George's bride. “But
I shall tell him all about it now; of course I
always meant to tell him—after to-morrow—but
he has had quite enough bothers of his own, and
this was my show. I suppose you don't know
what's been bothering him, Doctor Dollar? He
says it's overwork, and I do think Lord Stockton's
an old slave-driver; do you know, I haven't even
seen George since the day before yesterday at
Prince's P”
“Nor I,” said Dollar, no longer with the least
compunction, “from that hour to this.”
“Of course I know he's all right,” concluded Miss
Trevellyn, as they were parting perfect friends,
“because he has rung me up several times to say
so, and he looked better on Monday than for ever
so long. But I must own I shall be glad when I
get him away for a real good rest.”
She had refused to hear another word from Dol-


I5O THE CRIME DOCTOR
lar in explanation, or of regret, and she made her
departure with all the abruptness of a constitution-
ally decided person. But she had blushed once at
least in the last few minutes. And the doctor ran
back into his den with singing heart, ready to fall
upon his patient's neck in deep thanksgiving and
even more profound congratulation.
No patient was there to meet him even now,
but the curtain swayed a little before the open
window. Dollar reached it at a bound; but there
was nobody outside on the iron steps, and the cur-
tain filled behind him as the inner door banged in
the draft. The horrid little space at the back
of the house, between the high black walls with the
broken-bottle coping, lay empty of all life in the
plentiful light from the back windows—but for
an early cat that fled before Dollar's precipitate
descent into the basement.
“The gentleman's gone,” said Mrs. Barton at
once. “He come through this way some time ago—
said he couldn't wait no longer out there!”
“How long do you suppose he had waited?”
“Not long,” said Mrs. Barton firmly. “Bob here
was at his tea when he had to go up to show the
young lady in; and the young gentleman, it couldn't


THE GOLDEN KEY I51
've been more than three or four minutes before he
was through 'ere as if something had 'appened.”
“I didn't hear him.”
“He was anxious you shouldn't be disturbed,
Sir.”
“Did you show him out, Bobby?”
The master had never been so short with them.
Mrs. Barton felt that something was the matter,
but Bobby quaked.
“Yes, sir!”
“Which way did he go—and how—foot or taxif”
“I—please, sir—I never stopped to see, sir!”
Dollar flew to his telephone; forsook it for a taxi-
cab; drew Edenborough's rooms in vain; inquired as
vainly (as an anonymous wedding guest, uncertain
of the church) at Admiral Trevellyn's; was at the
House of Commons by half past six, and at Scot-
land Yard (armed with written injunctions from
the Secretary of State) before seven.
At that hour and place the matter passed out of
the hands of Doctor John Dollar, who could only
hasten home to Welbeck Street, there to enter
upon the most shattering vigil of his life—the terri-
ble telephone at his elbow—and still more terrible
inquirers on the telephone as the night wore on!


I 52 THE CRIME DOCTOR
But never one word of news.
Toward midnight Topham Vinson arrived with
the elaborate sandwiches and even the champagne
that he had found awaiting him at home. It was
the measure of a born leader; the doctor had not
broken his fast since lunch; and in the small hours
he once dozed for some minutes in his chair.
But the politician had not the temperament to
wait for the telephone to talk to him; he talked
repeatedly into the telephone, set a round dozen of
myrmidons by the ears, and at last was rightly
served by being sent off to Hammersmith to identify
the dead body of a defaulting clerk, just recovered
from the Thames.
“I’m not coming with you,” Dollar had said, even
when the description seemed to tally. “Edenbor-
ough wouldn't drown himself—and this is my
place.”
It was a being ten years older who opened his
own front door again at daybreak. His face was
as gray as the wintry dawn, the whole man bowed
and broken. Topham Vinson stood aghast on the
step.
“It isn't all over, is it?”


I54 THE CRIME DOCTOR
confine their attention to entries made in the poison
books after five o'clock yesterday afternoon. Eden-
borough had signed his name and got the stuff
earlier in the day.”
“Before you told him anything?”
“He had his own suspicions, you must remem-
ber. I had confirmed them—and her first words
left no more to be said, that he could bear to hear!
If only he had waited another minute! If only I
had dragged him back to face it out!” groaned
Dollar, in a bottomless pit of self-reproach. “I call
myself a crime doctor, yet I let my patient creep
into space with a bottle of prussic acid, and commit
the one crime I had to prevent!”
“Why prussic acid, I wonder?”
The idle question was not asked for information,
but it happened to be one that Dollar could answer,
and it brought him to his book-shelves with a certain
alacrity.
“I know,” he said, “though I never thought of
it till this minute! I was trying to write him a pre-
scription on Sunday night, when the poor chap
suddenly remarked that Shelley was right, and I
found him dipping into these Letters, and had the


THE GOLDEN KEY I55
luck to spot the very bit he'd struck. It was this”—
and he read out the passage beginning: “You, of
course, enter into society at Leghorn: should you
meet with any scientific person, capable of prepar-
ing the Prussic Acid, or essential oil of bitter al-
monds, I should regard it as a great kindness if you
could procure me a small quantity”—down to “it
would be a comfort to me to hold in my hands that
golden key to the chamber of perpetual peace.”
Topham Vinson's only comment was to pick up
the book, which had fallen to the floor with the
concluding words. Dollar was swaying where he
stood, glancing in horror toward the door; at that
moment it opened, and Mrs. Barton entered with the
tea-tray.
“Mrs. Barton,” said the doctor, in a voice that
failed him as it had not done all night, “I don't
want to hurt your feelings, but did that boy of yours
speak the truth when he told me he had seen Mr.
Edenborough out?”
“He did not, sir, and his father thrashed him for
it!” cried the good woman. “And that was very
wrong of Barton, because I was as bad as the boy,
in not telling you at the time. So we've all done


156 THE CRIME DOCTOR
wrong together, and we don't deserve to stay, as I
told the both of them l’”
The poor soul was forgiven and consoled, with
an unconscious sympathy not lost on Topham Vin-
son, to whom it was extended a moment later.
“Take a drink of your tea,” said Dollar. “It
will do you good.”
“What about you?”
“I’m going up-stairs first.”
“You’ve thought of something!”
“I have,” replied Dollar in a tragic whisper.
“I’ve thought of my “chamber of perpetual peace.’”
That sanctuary was on the second floor, and it
had triple doors so spaced that each could be shut
in turn before the next was opened. The house
might have been in an uproar, and yet one might
have entered this room without admitting the slight-
est sound by the door. The window was of triple
glass that would have deadened an explosion on
its sill, and the walls were thickly wadded behind an
inner paneling of aromatic pine.
The first sensation on entering was one of ineffa-
ble peace and quiet; next came a subtle, soothing
scent, as of all the spices of Arabia; and lastly a


THE GOLDEN KEY 157
surprising sense of scientific ventilation, as though
the four sound-proof walls were yet not impervious
to the outer air, but as though it were the pungent
air of pine-clad mountains, in miraculous circula-
tion here in the heart of London.
All this would have struck the visitor by degrees;
but to John Dollar, who had devised and superin-
tended every detail, it all came home together and
afresh as he entered softly with the Home Secre-
tary; and a certain composite effect, unforeseen in
the beginning and still unexplained, fell upon him
even now, and with it all the weight of his own
fatigue; so that he could have flung himself on
bed or couch as a doomed wretch sinks into the
snow, but for the light in the room and what the
light revealed.
It was light of a warm, strange, coppery shade,
that he had found for himself by dyeing frosted
electric lamps as children dye Easter eggs; it was
the very softest and yet least sensuous shade that
eyes ever penetrated with perfect ease, and it turned
the room into a little hall of bronze. The simple
curtains might have been golden lace, richly tar-
nished with age; the furniture solid copper; the bed


158 THE CRIME DOCTOR
an Eastern divan, and the form upon the bed a
sleeping Arab.
It was George Edenborough lying there in all his
clothes, a girl's photograph beside him on the cover-
let, and beside the photograph a tiny phial that
caught the light.
“Stay where you are!” whispered Dollar in a
voice that thrilled his companion to the core. And
he stole to the bed, stooped over it for a little life-
time, and so came stealing back.
“How long has he been dead?” said Topham
Vinson, harshly; but in realty his blood was freezing
at an unearthly smile in that unearthly light.
“Dead?” was the doctor's husky echo. “Don’t
you know the smell of bitter almonds, and have
you smelt it yet? Here's the golden bottle he hadn't
opened when he lay down—perhaps for the first
time since he was here on Sunday night—and this
is his wedding morning, and he's only—only fast
asleep!”


twº.
A SCHOOLMASTER ABROAD
T is a small world that flocks to Switzerland for
the Christmas holidays. It is also a world
largely composed of that particular class which real-
ly did provide Doctor Dollar with the majority of
his cases. He was therefore not surprised, on the
night of his arrival at the great Excelsior Hotel,
in Winterwald, to feel a diffident touch on the shoul-
der, and to look round upon the sunburned blushes
of a quite recent patient.
George Edenborough had taken Winterwald on
his wedding trip, and nothing would suit him and
his nut-brown bride but for the doctor to join them
at their table. It was a slightly embarrassing invi-
tation, but there was good reason for not persisting
in a first refusal. And the bride carried the situa-
I59


16o THE CRIME DOCTOR
tion with a breezy vitality, while her groom chose a
wine worthy of the occasion, and the newcomer
explained that he had arrived by the afternoon
train, but had not come straight to the hotel.
“Then you won't have heard of our great ex-
citement,” said Mrs. Edenborough, “and I'm afraid
you won't like it when you do!”
“If you mean the strychnine affair,” returned
Dollar, with a certain deliberation, “I heard one
version before I had been in the place an hour.
I can't say that I did like it. But I should be inter-
ested to know what you both think about it all.”
Edenborough returned the wine-list to the waiter
with sepulchral injunctions.
“Are you telling him about our medical scandal?”
he inquired briskly of the bride. “My dear doctor,
it'll make your professional hair stand on endl
Here's the local practitioner been prescribing strych-
nine pills warranted to kill in twenty minutes!”
“So I hear,” said the crime doctor, dryly.
“The poor brute has been frightfully over-
worked,” continued Edenborough, in deference to
a more phlegmatic front than he had expected of
the British faculty. “They say he was up two


A SCHOOLMASTER ABROAD I61
whole nights last week; he seems to be the only doc-
tor in the place, and the hotels are full of fellows
doing their level best to lay themselves out. We've
had two concussions of the brain and one compli-
cated fracture this very week. Still, to go and give
your patient a hundred times more strychnine than
you intende
x -
And he stopped himself, as though the subject,
which he had taken up with a purely nervous zest,
was rather near home after all.
“But what about his patient?” adroitly inquired
the doctor. “If half that one hears is true, he
wouldn't have been much loss.”
“Not much, I'm afraid,” said Lucy Edenborough,
with the air of a Roman matron turning down her
thumbs.
“He’s a fellow who was at my private school,
just barely twenty-one, and making an absolute fool
of himself,” exclaimed Edenborough, touching his
glass. “It's an awful pity. He used to be such
a nice little chap, Jack Laverick.”
“He was nice enough when he was out here a year
ago,” the bride admitted, “and he's still a sports-
man. He won half the toboggan races last season,


I62 THE CRIME DOCTOR
and took it all delightfully; he's quite another person
now, and gives himself absurd airs on top of every-
thing else. Still, I shall expect Mr. Laverick either
to sweep the board or break his neck. He evidently
wasn't born to be poisoned.”
“Did he come to grief last year, Mrs. Eden-
borough?”
“He only nearly had one of his ears cut off, in
a spill on the ice-run. So they said; but he was
tobogganing again next day.”
“Doctor Alt looked after him all right then, I
hear,” added Edenborough, as the champagne ar-
rived. “But I only wish you could take the fellow
in hand! He really used to be a decent chap, but it
would take even you all your time to make him one
again, Doctor Dollar.”
The crime doctor smiled as he raised his glass and
returned compliments across the bubbles. It was the
smile of a man with bigger fish to fry. Yet it was
he who came back to the subject of young Laverick,
asking if he had not a tutor or somebody to look
after him, and what the man meant by not doing his
job.
In an instant both the Edenboroughs had turned


A SCHOOLMASTER ABROAD 163
upon their friend. Poor Mr. Scarth was not to
blame! Poor Mr. Scarth, it appeared, had been a
master at the preparatory school at which Jack
Laverick and George Edenborough had been boys.
He was a splendid fellow, and very popular in the
hotel, but there was nothing but sympathy with
him in the matter under discussion. His charge was
of age, and in a position to send him off at any
moment, as indeed he was always threatening in
his cups. But there again there was a special diffi-
culty: one cup was more than enough for Jack
Laverick, whose weak head for wine was the only
excuse for him.
“Yet there was nothing of the kind last year,”
said Mrs. Edenborough, in a reversionary voice;
“at least, one never heard of it. And that makes
it all the harder on poor Mr. Scarth.”
Dollar declared that he was burning to meet
the unfortunate gentleman; the couple exchanged
glances, and he was told to wait till after the con-
cert, at which he had better sit with them. Was
there a concert? His face lengthened at the pros-
pect, and the bride's eyes sparkled at his expense.
She would not hear of his shirking it, but went so


164 THE CRIME DOCTOR
far as to cut dinner short in order to obtain good
seats. She was one of those young women who have
both a will and a way with them, and Dollar soon
found himself securely penned in the gallery of
an ambitious ballroom with a stage at the other
end.
The concert came up to his most sardonic expec-
tations, and he resigned himself to a boredom only
intensified by the behavior of some crude humorists
in the rows behind. Indifferent song followed in-
different song, and each earned a more vociferous
encore from those gay young gods. A not unknown
novelist told dialect stories of purely territorial
interest; a lady recited with astounding spirit; an-
other fiddled, no less courageously; but the back
rows of the gallery were quite out of hand when
a black-avised gentleman took the stage, and had
not opened his mouth before those back rows were
rows of Satan's reproving sin and clapping with
unsophisticated gusto. -
“Who's this!” asked Dollar, instantly aware of
the change behind him. But even Lucy Edenbor-
ough would only answer, “Hush, doctor!” as she
bent forward with shining eyes. And certainly a


A SCHOOLMASTER ABROAD 165
hairpin could not have been dropped unheard be-
fore the dark performer relieved the tension by
plunging into a scene from Pickwick.
It was the scene of Mr. Jingle's monologue on
the Rochester coach—and the immortal nonsense
was inimitably given. Yet nobody could have been
less like the emaciated prototype than this tall tanned
man, with the short black mustache, and the flash-
ing teeth that bit off every word with ineffable
snap and point.
“Mother—tall lady, eating sandwiches—forgot
the arch—crash—knock—children look round—
mother's head off—sandwich in her hand—no
mouth to put it in ” and his own grim one only
added to the fun and swelled the roar.
He waited darkly for them to stop, the wilful
absence of any amusement on his side enormously
increasing that of the audience. But when it came
to the episode of Donna Christina and the stomach-
pump, with the culminating discovery of Don Bolaro
Fizzgig in the main pipe of the public fountain,
the guffaws of half the house eventually drew from
the other half the supreme compliment of exas-
perated demands for silence. Mrs. George Eden-


I66 THE CRIME DOCTOR
borough was one of the loudest offenders. George
himself had to wipe his eyes. And the crime doc-
tor had forgot that there was such a thing as crime.
“That chap's a genius!” he exclaimed, when a
double encore had been satisfied by further and
smaller doses of Mr. Jingle, artfully held in re-
serve. “But who is he, Mrs. Edenborough?”
“Poor Mr. Scarth!” crowed the bride, brimming
over with triumphant fun.
But the doctor's mirth was at an end.
“That the fellow who can't manage a bit of a boy,
when he can hold an audience like this in the hollow
of his hand P”
And at first he looked as though he could not be-
lieve it, and then all at once as though he could.
But by this time the Edenboroughs were urging
Scarth's poverty in earnest, and Dollar could only
say that he wanted to meet him more than ever.
The wish was not to be gratified without a further
side-light and a fresh surprise. As George and the
doctor were repairing to the billiard-room, before
the conclusion of the lengthy program, they found
a group of backs upon the threshold, and a
ribald uproar in full swing within. One voice was


17o THE CRIME DOCTOR
“But it was a terrible mistake! Decigrams in-
stead of milligrams, so I heard. Just a hundred
times too much strychnine in each pill.”
“You are quite right,” said John Dollar quietly.
“I have the prescription in my pocket.”
“You have, doctor?”
“Don’t be angry with me, my dear fellow! I
told you I had heard one version of the whole
thing. It was Alt's. He's an old friend—but you
wouldn't have said a word about him if I had told
you that at first—and I still don't want it generally
known.”
“You can trust me, doctor, after all you've done
for me.”
“Well, Alt once did more for me. I want to do
something for him, that's all.”
And his knuckles still ached from the young
man's grip as they rapped smartly at the door of
No. 144.
II.
It was opened a few inches by Mostyn Scarth.
FIis raiment was still at concert pitch, but his face


A SCHOOLMASTER ABROAD 171
even darker than it had been as the crime doctor
saw it last.
“May I ask who you are and what you want?”
he demanded—not at all in the manner of Mr.
Jingle—rather in the voice that most people would
have raised.
“My name's Dollar and I'm a doctor.”
The self-announcement, pat as a polysyllable, had
a foreseen effect only minimized by the precaution-
ary confidence of Doctor Dollar's manner.
“Thanks very much. I've had about enough of
doctors.”
And the door was shutting when the intruder
got in a word like a wedge.
“Exactly!”
Scarth frowned through a chink just wide enough
to show both his eyes. It was the intruder's tone
that held his hand.
“What does that mean?” he demanded with more
control.
“That I want to see you about the other doctor—
this German fellow,” returned Dollar, against the
grain. But the studious phrase admitted him.
“Well, don't raise your voice,” said Scarth, lower-


172 THE CRIME DOCTOR
ing his own as he shut the door softly behind them.
“I believe I saw you down-stairs outside the bar.
So I need only explain that I've just got my bright
young man off to sleep, on the other side of those
folding-doors.”
Dollar could not help wondering whether the
other room was as good as Scarth's, which was
much bigger and better appointed than his own.
But he sat down at the oval table under the electro-
lier, and came abruptly to his point.
“About that prescription,” he began, and straight-
way produced it from his pocket.
“Well, what about it?” the other queried, but
only keenly, as he sat down at the table, too.
“Doctor Alt is a very old friend of mine, Mr.
Scarth.”
Mostyn Scarth exhibited the slight but immediate
change of front due from gentleman to gentleman
on the strength of such a statement. His grim eyes
softened with a certain sympathy; but the accession
left his gravity the more pronounced.
“He is not only a friend,” continued Dollar,
“but the cleverest and best man I know in my
profession. I don't speak from mere loyalty; he


A SCHOOLMASTER ABROAD 173
was my own doctor before he was my friend. Mr.
Scarth, he saved more than my life when every
head in Harley Street had been shaken over my
case. All the baronets gave me up; but chance or
fate brought me here, and this little unknown man
performed the miracle they shirked, and made a
new man of me off his own bat. I wanted him to
come to London and make his fortune; but his
work was here, he wouldn't leave it; and here I
find him under a sorry cloud. Can you wonder
at my wanting to step in and speak up for him,
Mr. Scarth?”
“On the contrary, I know exactly how you must
feel, and am very glad you have spoken,” rejoined
Mostyn Scarth, cordially enough in all the circum-
stances of the case. “But the cloud is none of my
making, Doctor Dollar, though I naturally feel
rather strongly about the matter. But for Schickel,
the chemist, I might be seeing a coffin to England at
this moment! He's the man who found out the mis-
take, and has since made all the mischief.”
“Are you sure it was a mistake, Mr. Scarth?”
asked Dollar quietly.
“What else?” cried the other, in blank astonish.


174 THE CRIME DOCTOR
ment. “Even Schickel has never suggested that
Doctor Alt was trying to commit a murder!”
“Even Schickel!” repeated Dollar, with a sharp
significance. “Are you suggesting that there's no
love lost between him and Alt?”
“I was not, indeed.” Scarth seemed still aston-
ished. “No. That never occurred to me for a
moment.”
“Yet it's a small place, and you know what small
places are. Would one man be likely to spread a
thing like this against another if there were no
bad blood between them?”
Scarth could not say. The thing happened to be
true, and it made such a justifiable sensation. He
was none the less frankly interested in the sugges-
tion. It was as though he had a tantalizing glimmer
of the crime doctor's meaning. Their heads were
closer together across the end of the table, their
eyes joined in mutual probation.
“Can I trust you with my own idea, Mr. Scarth?”
“That's for you to decide, Doctor Dollar.”
“I shall not breathe it to another soul—not even
to Alt himself—till I am sure.”


176 THE CRIME DOCTOR
him to Doctor Alt myself, and this is the prescrip.
tion they refused to make up. Schickel may have
a spite against Alt, as you suggest, but if he's
a forger I can only say he doesn't look the part.”
py
“The only looks I go by,” said the crime doctor,
“are those of the little document in your hand.”
“It's on Alt's paper.”
“Anybody could get hold of that.”
“But you suggest that Alt and Schickel have
been on bad terms?”
“That's a better point, Mr. Scarth, that's a much
better point,” said Dollar, smiling and then ceasing
to smile as he produced a magnifying-lens. “Allow
me to switch on the electric standard, and do me
the favor of examining that handwriting with this
loop; it's not very strong, but the best I could get
here at the photographer's shop.”
“It’s certainly not strong enough to show any-
thing fishy, to my inexperience,” said Scarth, on a
sufficiently close inspection.
“Now look at this one.”
Dollar had produced a second prescription from
the same pocket as before. At first sight they
seemed identical.


178 THE CRIME DOCTOR
written backward, or ratner they are drawn upside
down. Try to copy writing as writing, and your
own will automatically creep in and spoil it; draw
it upside down and wrong way on, as a mere mean-
ingless scroll, and your own formation of the let-
ters doesn't influence you, because you are not form-
ing letters at all. You are drawing from a copy,
Mr. Scarth.”
“You mean that I’m deriving valuable informa-
tion from a handwriting expert,” cried Scarth, with
another laugh.
“There are no such experts,” returned Dollar,
a little coldly. “It's all a mere matter of observation,
open to everybody with eyes to see. But this hap-
pens to be an old forger's trick; try it for your-
self, as I have, and you'll be surprised to see how
much there is in it.”
“I must,” said Scarth. “But I can't conceive
how you can tell that it has been played in this
case.”
“No P Look at the start, ‘Herr Laverick,’ and
at the finish, “Doctor Alt.’ You would expect to
see plenty of ink in the ‘Herr, wouldn't you? Still
plenty in the ‘Laverick,' I think, but now less and


A SCHOOLMASTER ABROAD 179
less until the pen is filled again. In the correct pre-
scription, written at my request to-day, you will find
that this is so. In the forgery the progression is pre-
cisely the reverse; the t in ‘Alt' is full of ink, but
you will find less and less till the next dip in the
middle of the word ‘Mahlzeit' in the line above.
The forger, of course, dips oftener than the man
with the running pen.”
Scarth bent in silence over the lens, his dark
face screwed awry. Suddenly he pushed back his
chair.
“It's wonderful!” he cried softly. “I see every-
thing you say. Doctor Dollar, you have converted
me completely to your view. I should like you to
allow me to convert the hotel.”
“Not yet,” said Dollar, rising, “if at all as to
the actual facts of the case. It's no use making
bad worse, Mr. Scarth, or taking a dirty trick too
seriously. It isn't as though the forgery had been
committed with a view to murdering your young
Laverick.”
“I never dreamed of thinking that it was!”
“You are quite right, Mr. Scarth. It doesn't
bear thinking about. Of course, any murderer in-


18O THE CRIME DOCTOR
genious enough to concoct such a thing would have
been far too clever to drop out two noughts; he
would have been content to change the milligrams
into centigrams, and risk a recovery. No sane
chemist would have dispensed the pills in decimals.
But we are getting off the facts, and I promised to
meet Doctor Alt on his last round. If I may tell
him, in vague terms, that you at least think there
may have been some mistake, other than the culpa-
ble one that has been laid at his door, I shall go
away less uneasy about my unwarrantable intru-
sion than I can assure you I was in making it.”
It was strange how the balance of personality
had shifted during an interview which Scarth him-
self was now eager to extend. He had no longer
the mesmeric martinet who had tamed an unruly
audience at sight; the last of Mr. Jingle's snap
had long been in abeyance. And yet there was just
one more suggestion of that immortal, in the rather
dilapidated trunk from which the swarthy exquisite
now produced a bottle of whisky, very properly
locked up out of Laverick's reach. And weakness
of will could not be imputed to the young man who
induced John Dollar to cement their acquaintance
with a thimbleful.


A SCHOOLMASTER ABROAD 18r
III
It was early morning in the same week; the
crime doctor lay brooding over the most complicat-
ed case that had yet come his way. More precisely
it was two cases, but so closely related that it took
a strong mind to consider them apart, a stronger
will to confine each to the solitary brain-cell that
it deserved. Yet the case of young Laverick was
not only much the simpler of the two, but infinitely
the more congenial to John Dollar, and not the one
most on his nerves.
It was too simple altogether. A year ago the
boy had been all right, wild only as a tobogganer,
lucky to have got off with a few stitches in his ear.
Dollar heard all about that business from Doctor
Alt, and only too much about Jack Lav-
erick's subsequent record from other inform-
ants. It was worthy of the Welbeck Street con-
fessional. His career at Oxford had come to a
sudden ignominious end. He had forfeited his
motoring license for habitually driving to the public
danger, and on the last occasion had barely escaped
imprisonment for his condition at the wheel. He


A SCHOOLMASTER ABROAD 183
and John Dollar had turned upon the other side, and
was grappling afresh with the other case, when his
door opened violently without a knock, and an
agitated voice spoke his name.
“It's me—Edenborough,” it continued in a hur-
ried whisper. “I want you to get into some clothes
and come up to the ice-run as quick as possible!”
“Why? What has happened?” asked the doctor,
jumping out of bed as Edenborough drew the cur-
tains.
“Nothing yet. I hope nothing will—”
“But something has!” interrupted the doctor.
“What's the matter with your eye?”
“I’ll tell you as you dress, only be as quick as
you can. Did you forget it was the toboggan races
this morning? They're having them at eight instead
of nine, because of the sun, and it's ten to eight
now. Couldn't you get into some knickerbockers
and stick a sweater over all the rest? That's what
I've done—wish I’d come to you first. They'll
want a doctor if we don't make haste!”
“I wish you'd tell me about your eye,” said Dol-
lar, already in his stockings.
“My eye's all right,” returned Edenborough, go-


A SCHOOLMASTER ABROAD 185
of sunlight in the valley, neither smine nor shadow
upon clambering forest or overhanging rocks. Some-
where behind their jagged peaks the sun must have
risen, but as yet no snowy facet winked the news
to Winterwald, and the softer summits lost all
character against a sky only less white than them-
selves.
The village street presented no difficulties to
Edenborough's gouties and the doctor's nails; but
there were other people in it, and voices travel in a
frost over silent snow. On the frozen path between
the snow-fields, beyond the village, nails were not
enough, and the novice depending upon them
stumbled and slid as the elaborated climax of Eden-
borough's experience induced even more speed.
“It was him all right—try the edge, doctor, it's
less slippy. It was that young brute in his domino,
as if he'd never been to bed at all, and me in my
dressing-gown not properly awake. We should have
looked a funny pair in—have my arm, doctor.”
“Thanks, George.”
“But his electric lamp was the only light. He
didn't attempt to put it out. “Just tuning up my
toboggan,' he whispered. ‘Come and have a


186 THE CRIME DOCTOR
look.” I didn't and don't believe it was his own
toboggan; it was probably that Captain Strong's,
he's his most dangerous rival; but, as I tell you,
I was just going to look when the young brute hit
me full in the face without a moment's warning.
I went over like an ox, but I think the back of
my head must have hit something. There was day-
light in the place when I opened the only eye I
could.”
“Had he locked you in?”
“No; he was too fly for that; but I simply
couldn't move till I heard voices coming, and then
I only crawled behind a stack of garden chairs and
things. It was Strong and another fellow—they did
curse to find the whole place open! I nearly showed
up and told my tale, only I wanted to tell you first.”
“I’m glad you have, George.”
“I knew your interest in the fellow—besides, I
thought it was a case for you,” said George Eden-
borough simply. “But it kept me prisoner till the
last of the toboggans had been taken out—I only
hope it hasn't made us too late!”
His next breath was a devout thanksgiving, as
a fold in the glistening slopes showed the top of the


188 THE CRIME DOCTOR
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 dur-
ing the last year; nobody could have shown more
during the slow and excruciating progress to the vil-
lage, on a bobsleigh carried by four stumbling men;
everybody was whispering about it. Everybody
but the crime doctor, who headed the little proces-
sion 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 Christ-
mas-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


A SCHOOLMASTER ABROAD 189
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 hand-
rail 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 any-
thing short of that.”


190 THE CRIME DOCTOR
The two doctors retired for the further consid-
eration 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,” de-
murred the other. “He has not even had concus-
sion, 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 some-
where 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
hesitateſ”
“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,


A SCHOOLMASTER ABROAD I9I
to feel a frosty tickling under the tabernacle of bed-
clothes in which his broken bone was as the Ark,
the sensation was less uncomfortable than he ex-
pected. 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 de-
manded, 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 trou-
ble. 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


192 THE CRIME DOCTOR
not only accepted the situation, but voluntarily con-
slucted the correspondence which kept poor Mrs.
ſlaverick 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 bet-
ter conscience than I had when I left it—with some-


A SCHOOLMASTER AEROAD 193
thing accomplished—something undone that wanted
undoing.”
He smiled at Scarth across the flap of an un-
pretentious 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


I94 THE CRIME DOCTOR
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 for-
get 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 ‘mo-
tivation.’”
“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


A SCHOOLMASTER ABROAD I95
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’ſ—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 doc-
tor, “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 per-
haps just as lucky for him, Scarth, that at least he
could have had nothing to do with the second at-
tempt upon his patient's life.”
“What second attempt?”


196 THE CRIME DOCTOR
“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 tam-
pering with his toboggan.” replied Scarth, impa-
tiently.
“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


A SCHOOLMASTER ABROAD 197
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 shav-
ing 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.


198 THE CRIME DOCTOR
“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 ex-
traordinary 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, revok-
ing yy
“No, you need not!”
cried Mostyn Scarth, turn-
ing 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 Ticotland Yardl”


VI
ONE POSSESSED
IEUTENANT-GENERAL NEVILLE DY-
SONE, R.E., V.C., was the first really eminent
person to consult the crime doctor by regular ap-
pointment 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 heart-
break 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 con-
I99


200 THE CRIME DOCTOR
fidence 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, de-
spising the pert professional optimism that told
almost like a shot. “It is a thing more often mis-
laid 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 em-
phatically. “There was nothing of the kind in our


ONE POSSESSED 2OI
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 Aus-
trian 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


ONE POSSESSED 2O3
pose 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 2x
“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


2O4 THE CRIME DOCTOR
reason or foundation for all this. Has anything
alarming happened since you have been at—Valsu-
gana?”
“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 de-
22
press anybod
“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 l”
The interruption had come with another access
of grim heat and further use of the General's hand-
kerchief. 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 bot-
tom of the blue-black well.
“Was there any rhyme or reason for the suicide?”


2O6 THE CRIME DOCTOR
“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 l 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 interest-
ing 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 Dy-
Sone story had a psychic flavor.


208 THE CRIME DOCTOR
“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 eventu-
ally accepted, and even chosen for himself (with


ONE POSSESSED 2II
It was a corner room with one ivy-darkened
casement overlooking a shadowy lawn, the other
facing a forest of firs and chestnuts on which it
was harder to look without an instinctive qualm.
But the General seemed to have forgot his trage-
dies, and for the moment his blue eyes almost bright-
ened the somber scene on which they dwelt with in-
voluntary pride.
“Now don't you see where Tyrol comes in 2"
said he. “Put a mountain behind those trees—and
there was one the very first time we saw the house!
It was only a thunder-cloud, but for all the world it
might have been the Dolomites. And it took us
back . . . we had no other clouds then!”
' Dollar found himself alone; found his things
laid out and his shirt studded, and a cozy on the
brass hot-water can, with as much satisfaction as
though he had never stayed in a country house be-
fore. Could there be so very much amiss in a
household where they knew just what to do for one,
and just what to leave undone?
And it was the same with all the other creature
comforts; they meant good servants, however
short their service; and good servants do not often


2I2 THE CRIME DOCTOR
mean the mistress or the hostess whom Dollar had
come prepared to meet. He dressed in pleasurable
doubt and enhanced excitement—and those were
his happiest moments at Valsugana.
Mrs. Dysone was a middle-aged woman who
looked almost old, whereas the General was elderly
with all the appearance of early middle age. The
contrast was even more complete in more invidious
particulars; but Dollar took little heed of the poor
lady's face, as a lady's face. Her skin and eyes
were enough for him; both were brown, with that
almost ultra-Indian tinge of so many Anglo-Indians.
He was sensible at once of an Oriental impenetra-
bility.
With her conversation he could not quarrel; what
there was of it was crisp, unstudied, understanding.
And the little dinner did her the kind of credit
for which he was now prepared; but she only once
took charge of the talk, and that was rather sharply
to change a subject into which she had been the
first to enter.
How it had cropped up, Dollar could never think,
especially as his former profession and rank duly
obtained throughout his visit. He had even warned


ONE POSSESSED 213
his chauffeur that he was not the doctor there; it
could not have been he himself who started it, but
somebody did, as somebody always does when there
is one topic to avoid. It was probably the nice
young nephew who made the first well-meaning re-
mark upon the general want of originality, with
reference to something or other under criticism at
the moment; but it was neither he nor Dollar who
laid it down that monkeys were the most arrant
imitators in nature—except criminals; and it cer-
tainly was the General who said that nothing would
surprise him less than if another fellow went and
hanged himself in their wood. Then it was that
Mrs. Dysone put her foot down—and Dollar never
forgot her look.
Almost for the first time it made him think of
her revolver. It was out of sight; and full as her
long sleeves were, it was difficult to believe that one
of them could conceal the smallest firearm made;
but a tiny gold padlock did dangle when she raised
her glass of water; and at the end of dinner there
was a second little scene, this time without words,
which went far to dispel any doubt arising in his
mind.


2I4 THE CRIME DOCTOR
He was holding the door open for Mrs. Dysone,
and she stood a moment on the threshold, peering
into the far corners of the room. He saw what it
was she had forgot—saw it come back to her as she
turned away, with another look worth remembering.
Either the General missed that, or the anxieties of
the husband were now deliberately sunk in the duties
of the host. He had got up some Jubilee port in the
doctor's honor; they sat over it together till it was
nearly time for bed. Dollar took little, but the other
grew a shade more rubicund, and it was good to
hear him chat without restraint or an apparent care.
Yet it was strange as well; again he drifted into
criminology, and his own after-dinner defect of
sensibility only made his hearer the more uncom-
fortable.
Of course, he felt, it was partly out of compli-
ment to himself as crime doctor; but the ugly sub-
ject had evidently an unhealthy fascination of its
own for the fine full-blooded man. Not that it
seemed an inveterate foible; the expert observer
thought it rather the reflex attraction of the strong-
est possible horror and repulsion, and took it the
more seriously on that Account. Of two evils


ONE POSSESSED 215
it seemed to him the less to allow himself to be
pumped on professional generalities. It was dis-
tinctly better than encouraging the General to ran-
sack his long experience for memories of decent
people who had done dreadful deeds. Best of all
to assure him that even those unfortunates might
have outlived their infamy under the scientific treat-
ment of a more enlightened day.
If they must talk crime, let it be the Cure of
Crime! So the doctor had his heart-felt say; and
the General listened even more terribly than he had
talked; asking questions in whispers, and waiting
breathless for the considered reply. It was the last
of these that took most answering.
“And which, doctor, for God's sake, which
would you have most hope of curing: a man or a
woman?”
But Dollar would only say: “I shouldn't despair
of anybody, who had done anything, if there was
still an intelligence to work upon; but the more of
that the better.”
And the General said hardly another word, ex-
cept “God bless you!” outside the spare-room door.
Iis wife had been seen no more.


ONE POSSESSED 217
enter was out of the doctor's mouth. But he shut it
very softly, trod like a burglar, and excused himself
with bated breath: “You are the first person who
has stayed with us since I've been here, Captain
Dollar!” And his wry young smile was as sad as
anything in the sad house.
“You amaze me!” cried Dollar. Indeed, it was
the flank attack of a new kind of amazement. “I
should have thought—” and his glance made
a lightning tour of the luxurious room.
“I know,” said Paley, nodding. “I think they
must have laid themselves out for visitors at the
start. But none come now. I wish they did It's
a house that wants them.”
“You are rather a small party, aren't you?”
“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 ordi-
nary home life.”
Dollar made no remark; the young fellow offered


ONE POSSESSED 219
“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 sup-
pose you heard about poor Dingle, the last gar-
dener?”
“Only just.”
“He was the last man you would ever have sus-
pected 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.”


22O THE CRIME DOCTOR
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 rak-
ing 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 after-
noon, 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 in-
sists 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?”


ONE POSSESSED 22I
“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?”
44
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


224 THE CRIME DOCTOR
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


ONE POSSESSED 225
blots of ink on old parchment, were no longer
trained on the offender, who missed yet another
look that might have helped him.
“My husband's study is rather holy ground,”
was the lady's last word. “I only came in myself
because I thought he was here.”
Mercifully, days do not always go on as badly
as they begin; more strangely, this one developed
into the dullest and most conventional of country-
house Sundays.
General Dysone was himself not only dull, but
even a little stiff, as became a good Briton who had
said too much to too great a stranger overnight.
His natural courtesy had become conspicuous; he
played punctilious host all day; and Dollar was
allowed to feel that, if he had come down as a
doctor, he was staying on as an ordinary guest, and
in a house where guests were expected to observe
the Sabbath. So they all marched off together to
the village church, where the General trumpeted
the tune in his own octave, read the lessons, and kept
waking up during the sermon. There were the
regulation amenities with other devout gentry of the
neighborhood; there was the national Sunday sir-


226 THE CRIME DOCTOR
loin at the midday meal, and no more untoward
topics to make the host's forehead glisten or the
hostess gleam and lower. In the afternoon the
whole party inspected every animal and vegetable on
the premises; and after tea the visitor's car came
round.
Originally there had been much talk of his staying
till the Monday; the General went through the form
of pressing him once more, but was not backed up
by his wife, who had shadowed them suspiciously
all day. Nor did he comment on this by so much as
a sidelong glance at Dollar, or contrive to get an-
other word with him alone. And the crime doctor,
instead of making any excuse to remain and pene-
trate these new mysteries, showed a sensitive alac-
rity to leave. -
Of the nephew, who looked terribly depressed at
his departure, he had seen something more, and had
even asked two private favors. One, that he would
keep out of that haunted garden for the next few
nights, and try going to bed earlier; the other an
odd request for an almost middle-aged man about
town, but rather flattering to the young fellow. It
was for the loan of his Panama, so that Dollar's


ONE POSSESSED 227
hatter might see if he could not get him as good a
one. Paley's was the kind that might be carried up
a sleeve, like the modern handkerchief; he explained
that the old General had given it him.
Dollar tried it on almost as soon as the car was
out of sight of Valsugana—while his young chauf-
feur was still wondering what he had done to make
the governor sit behind. It was funny of him, just
when a chap might have been telling him a thing or
two that he had heard down there at the coachman's
place. But it was all the more interesting when they
got back to town at seven in the evening, and he
was ordered to fill up with petrol and be back at
nine, to make the same trip over again.
“I needn't ask you,” the doctor added, “to hold
your tongue about anything you may have heard at
General Dysone's. I know you will, Albert.”
And almost by lighting-up time they were should-
er to shoulder on the road once more.
But at Valsugana it was another dark night, and
none too easy to find one's way about the place on
the strength of a midsummer day's acquaintance.
And for the first time Dollar was glad the dog of
the house was dead, as he finished a circuitous ap-


ONE POSSESSED 229
to the last pitch of sensitive acknowledgment; a fly
on the drooping Panama-brim would not have failed
to “scratch the brain's coat of curd.” . . . How
much less the swift and furtive footfall that came
kissing the wet lawn at last!
It was more than a footfall; there was a fol-
lowing swish of some long garment trailing through
the wet. It all came near; it all stopped dead. Dol-
lar had nodded heavily as if in sleep; had jerked his
head up higher; seemed to be dropping off again in
greater comfort.
The footfalls and the swish came on like thunder
now. But now his eyelids were only drooping like
the brim above them; in the broad light of their
abnormal preceptivity, it was as if his own eyes
threw a dreadful halo round the figure they beheld.
It was a swaddled figure, creeping into monstrosity,
crouching early for its spring. It had draped arms
extended, with some cloth or band that looped and
tightened at each stride: on the rounded shoulders
bobbed the craning head and darkened face of Gen-
eral Dysone.
In his last stride he swerved, as if to get as
much behind the chair as its position under the tree


230 THE CRIME DOCTOR
permitted. The cloth clapped as it came taut over
Dollar's head, but was not actually round his neck
when he ducked and turned, and hit out and up
with all his might. He felt the rasp of a fifteen-
hours' beard, heard the click of teeth; the lawn
quaked, and white robes settled upon a senseless
heap, as the plumage on a murdered pigeon.
Dollar knelt over him and felt his pulse, held an
electric lamp to eyes that opened, and quickly some-
thing else to the dilated nostrils.
“O Jim l’ shuddered a voice close at hand. It
was shrill yet broken, a cry of horror, but like no
voice he knew.
He jumped up to face the General's wife.
“It’s not Jim, Mrs. Dysone. It's I–Dollar.
He'll soon be all right!”
“Captain—Dollar?”
“No-doctor, nowadays—he called me down as
one himself. And now I've come back on my own
responsibility, and—put him under chloroform; but
I haven't given him much; for God's sake let us
speak plainly while we can!”
She was on her knees, proving his words without
uttering one. , Still kneeling speechless, she leaned


ONE POSSESSED - 231
back while he continued: “You know what he is aS
well as I do, Mrs. Dysone; you may thank God a
doctor has found him out before the police! Mono-
mania is not their business—but neither are you the
one to cope with it. You have shielded your hus-
band as only a woman will shield a man; now you
must let him come to me.”
His confidence was taking some effect; but she
ignored the hands that would have helped her to her
feet; and her own were locked in front of her, but
not in supplication.
“And what can any of you do for him,” she cried
fiercely—“except take him away from me?”
“I will only answer for myself. I would con-
trol him as you can not, and I would teach him to
control himself if man under God can do it. I am
a criminal alienist, Mrs. Dysone, as your husband
knew before he came to consult me on elaborate
pretenses into which we needn't go. He trusted me
enough to ask me down here; in my opinion, he
was feeling his way to greater trust, in the teeth
of his terrible obsession, but last night he said
more than he meant to say, so to-day he wouldn't
say a word. I only guessed his secret this morning


234 THE CRIME DOCTOR
slipped out of the sky, the birds began, and the
same cynic shouted “Pretty, pretty, pretty!” at the
top of its strong contralto. At long last there came
that other sound for which Dollar had never ceased
listening. And he turned back into the haunted
wood with Jim Paley.
The poor nephew—still stunned calm—was as
painfully articulate as a young bereaved husband.
He spoke of General Dysone as of a man already
dead, in the gentlest of past tenses. He was dead
enough to the boy. There had been an appalling
confession—made as coolly, it appeared, as Paley
repeated it.
“He thought I knocked him down, and I had to
let him think so! Aunt Essie insisted; she is a
wonder, after all! It made him tell me things I
simply can't believe. . . . Yet he showed me a
rope just like it—meant for me!”
“Do you mean just like the one that—hanged the
gardener?”
“Yes. He did it, so he swears . . . afterward.
He'll tell you himself—he wants to tell you. He
says he first . . . I can't put my tongue to it!”
The lapse into the present tense had made him
human.


ONE POSSESSED 235
“Like the Thugs?” -
“Yes—like that sect of fiendish fanatics who
went about strangling everybody they met! They
were what his book was about. How did you
know P”
“That's Bhowanee, their goddess, on top of his
bureau, and he has Sleeman and all the other awful
literature locked up underneath. As a study for a
life of sudden idleness, in the depths of the country,
it was enough to bring on temporary insanity. And
the strong man gone wrong goes and does what the
rest of us only get on our nerves!”
Dollar felt his biceps clutched and clawed, and
the two stood still under more irony in a gay con-
tralto.
“Temporary, did you say? Only temporary?”
the boy was faltering.
“I hope so, honestly. You see, it was just on
that one point . . . and even there . . . I be-
lieve he did want his wife out of the way, and for
her own sake, too!” said Dollar, with a sympathetic
tremor of his own.
“But do you know what he's saying? He means
to tell the whole world now, and let them hang him,
and serve him right—he says! And he's as sane


236 THE CRIME DOCTOR
as we are now—only he might have been through a
Turkish bath!” -
“More signs" cried Dollar, looking up at the
brightening sky. “But we won't allow that. It would
undo nothing and he has made all the reparation.
. Come, Paley ! I want to take him back with
me in the car. It's broad daylight.”


VII
THE Doctor's Assistant
HE doctor was coping with his Sunday meal
T when the telephone went off in the next room.
On his ears the imperious summons never fell with-
out a thrill; in his sight, the tulip-shaped receiver be-
came a live thing trumpeting for help; and he would
answer the call himself, at any hour of the day or
night. It was necessary at night, with the Bartons
asleep in the basement like a family in a vault, but
it was just the same when they were all on duty,
as at the present moment. Back went the Crom-
wellian chair, at the head of the bare and solitary
trestle table. An excited personage, who might
have been just outside the window, was expedi-
tiously appeased in monosyllables. And Dollar re-
turned with an appetite to what had been set before
him.
“Send Bobby round to the garage, Barton, to
237


238 THE CRIME DOCTOR
order the car at once. He can tell Albert I shall be
ready as soon as he is, but to take his headlights and
fill up with petrol.” This was repeated with
paternal severity in the wings. “Now, Barton, my
little red road-book, and see if you can find Pax
Monktons in the wilds of Surrey. It can't be more
than a hamlet. Try the Cobham country if it's
not in the index.” *
This took longer—took a survey map and two
pairs of eyes before Pax Monktons Chase was dis-
covered in microscopic print, and the light green
peppered with dots signifying timber three hundred
feet above sea-level.
“Never heard of it in my life before,” said
Dollar, as he laced brown shoes before his coffee.
“Or of the man either, or his double-barreled name
for that matter. You might see if there's a Dale-
Bulmer in Who’s Who.”
But again Barton was unsuccessful; and here his
services ended, though through no fault of his own,
or failure of unselfish zeal for one of those more
than probable adventures which made him hate the
chauffeur who was always in them, and curse the
duties that kept other people out.
“Will you take your flask, sir?”


24O THE CRIME DOCTOR
an hour; clear as crystal within rifle-shot, and de-
liciously hazy in the distance; the bronze upon the
trees seldom warming to a premature red, often
lapsing into the liquid greens of midsummer; but
all the way an autumnal smear of silver in the sun-
light. Dollar divided his mind between a sensuous
savoring of the heavenly country, and more or less
romantic speculations on the case in store. Some
people's notions of a crime doctor's functions were
so much wider even than his own; ten months out
of the twelve, he could not have afforded to come so
far afield without a distastefully definite foreword
about fees.
This afternoon he was prepared to do almost
anything for next to nothing: and after twenty
sedentary miles he was on his legs as often as not in
the next two or three, asking his way at likely
lodges, or from strolling bands of shaven yokels, all
Sunday collars and cigarettes.
“Pax Monktons Chase?” at last said one who
seemed to have heard the name before. “Straight
as ever you can go, and the first lodge on the left.
But there's no one there.”


THE DOCTOR'S ASSISTANT 24I
“No one there!” echoed Dollar. “Do you mean
the place is empty?”
“I believe there's workmen there on week-days,
but you won't find anybody now, unless the chap
that's bought it's motored over.”
“Isn't he living there, then?”
“Not yet; there's alterations being made; and I
don't know where he does live, or anything at all
about him, except that he motors over sometimes on
a Sunday.”
Dollar felt dashed until he remembered to ap-
preciate one of the few possibilities for which he
had not come quite prepared. There was some prom-
ise in a surprise thus early and so complete. But it
made Pax Monktons Chase fall a little flat when
found. It robbed the dreary lodge of all its value
as an eye-opener; it made the chase itself look vast
and desolate for nothing, and a noble pile of sea-
soned stone fling but drab turrets and ineffective
battlements against a silver sky, which the sun had
ceased to polish in the last tortuous mile.
It was all the pleasanter to find a ruddy, genial,
bearded face, mounted on a spotted tie that went


242 THE CRIME DOCTOR
twice round a nineteen-inch neck, smiling a welcome
under the entrance arch. The man introduced him-
self as Dale-Bulmer, bolting a mouthful made for
\ rolling on the tongue. Dollar was much taken with
the humor and simplicity of his address and bear-
ing. A smart chauffeur waited with a plutocratic
car in the sweep of the drive. And there was no
third sign of life about the place.
“Awfully good of you to come,” said Dale-
Bulmer, with apologetic warmth. “I thought you
might, from what I'd heard of you, and you seemed
to jump at it when I rang you up. I haven't known
anybody take so kindly to a trip since I left the
bush.”
“An Australian?” asked the doctor, with all a
doctor's readiness to make talk; but he was more
curious than ever to learn the secret of his sum-
In OnS. -
“Yes! I come from that enlightened land, where
Labor runs the show and Women have the Vote.
In fact,” the big man added, with the fat chuckle
heard over the telephone, “that's precisely why I
have come from Australia—as I was fool enough to
say the other night at a meeting in these parts. But


THE DOCTOR'S ASSISTANT 243
I seem to have jumped out of the frying-pan into
the fire.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” observed Dollar, with
polite forbearance.
“Well, not quite into the fire, as it happens,” said
Dale-Bulmer, chuckling again in his noble neck.
“Come inside, and you'll see.” He led the way into
a broad central corridor, choked with ladders and
builders' tools, pipes and tubing, curtain-rods, and
a stack of boards; but a model of order compared
with the chaos visible through an open door at
which he paused. Here were more bare joists than
navigable floor, and a forest of scaffolding there-
from to the crisscrossed plaster ceiling. “Look
you here!” said the man from Australia, and
pointed to a heap of shavings on a remnant of the
floor.
“The British workman's such a careless dog,”
sighed Dollar, shaking a sententious head, for a box
of vestas had been spilt about the place.
“British workman be hanged" cried the other
bluntly. “The British workman's got a job here
that will keep him in beer and betting-money till
Christmas, and as much longer as he can spin it


244 THE CRIME DOCTOR
out. This is the little game of another sporting
type—the British lady burning for the vote!”
“So that's it! But are you sure?” asked Dollar,
though he wanted to ask if that was all.
“Certain. I met a flaming brace of 'em on
bicycles, just outside my boundary. This is what
I was to get for speaking out about them the other
night.”
“I don't see their literature, and I can't smell
their paraffin.”
“It’s in that bottle on the mantelpiece. Some-
thing must have scared them at the last moment—
all but one sportswoman.”
“What about her?”
“I’ve got her,” said Dale-Bulmer, with sepulchral
excitement.
“Got her prisoner?”
“I should hope so! Why, I caught her on the
very point of setting fire to that very heap of shav-
ings—and me without a hose-pipe in the house!
Those are her matches on the floor; she wasn't
going to turn tail till she'd done her job—and didn't
till I nearly trod on it! You could hardly expect
me to bow her out of the front door after that!”


THE DOCTOR'S ASSISTANT 249
“Did you dog me down here, or did you not?”
“Not consciously. Do I look as if I had?”
“You look as if you'd seen a ghost,” she told him,
with a sudden twinkle of the big blue drops.
“So I have ſ” he cried in passionate earnest.
“I’ve seen the ghost of everything I held most 2 p.
“Thank you,” she said quietly, when he had
checked himself on her model. “I know what you
must think—what you really have a special right to
think—after two years ago. Do be generous and
don't say it! This isn't altogether fun for me, you
know, much less after being buried alive for
hours!” She just turned her head toward the
broken window-seat, and his eyes devoured the light
upon her profile. “What's going to happen to me?
Is my natural enemy a friend of yours? Has he
sent for the police?”
“No-for me instead.”
“Did he know who it was at sight?”
“He didn't, and he doesn't, and he never shall
unless you tell him!” exclaimed Dollar vehemently.
“O Vera, when I was longing to see you, to warn
you against your enemies, that you should go the


THE DOCTOR'S ASSISTANT 251
latest incarnation. Dollar's feelings flew back into
his face; she read them with a smile that made him
wince, by its cynical resemblance to one or two that
still enriched his dreams.
“You think I'm as bad as any of them,” she
divined aloud.
“I think the crime of arson is worse than most
crimes,” he made sturdy answer, standing up to the
little body with the strangest difficulty, as though
he were the culprit and she the man. “It’s a thing
absolutely nothing on earth can possibly excuse.
I think you'd have died rather than descend to it—
two years ago!”
He had heard a step behind him, and lowered his
voice; but Lady Vera raised hers as a burly form
halted shyly on the threshold; and her tone was
like none that she had taken hitherto.
“Two years ago,” she declaimed, “women had
not been treated quite so shabbily as they have been
since. Then this miserable Government—”
“Look you here!” blustered Dale-Bulmer, strid-
ing out of his shyness into the center of the stage.
“Two years ago,” she reiterated for his benefit,
w


252 THE CRIME DOCTOR
“it wasn't war to the handle of the knife! Now it
would be fire and sword, if we were any good with
the sword; as we are not, it's simply fire!”
“You really think you can burn your way to
political power?” cried the man of extremes, with
ungovernable indignation.
“Political existence is all we ask.”
“As a first instalment! I know you! I come
from a country where you started just like that!”
“As you told your audience the other night, if
you are Mr. Dale-Bulmer,” said Lady Vera, with
an explosive little sigh.
“I am; and for that I'm to have a house like this
burned to the ground; and you ladies think that's
the way to advance your cause, to prove your value
to the Stateſ Well, I suppose you know your own
business best. It's no use reasoning with you; but
it really is enough to set one off, after what I caught
you doing down-stairs.”
“I wish to goodness you hadn't caught me,” cried
Lady Vera, with quite extraordinary simplicity.
But neither of them took her up; the doctor could
only shake his head in professional despair, while
the injured householder recovered his composure,
and the little criminal looked as if she were


254 THE CRIME DOCTOR
“Myself, Mr. Dale-Bulmer? In-handcuffs?”
And it was not her worst smile that was subdued
in deference to the full glow of his shamefaced
magnanimity.
“Don’t talk nonsense!” said he gruffly. “Your
car is ready waiting for you at the door.”
“Not really?”
“Of course. I buried you alive, didn't I?” His
eyes came from the wrecked window-seat. “Won't
that meet the immediate case for martyrdom?” And
he managed another twinkle after all.
It was a last amenity. He had been thanked, but
without the smile which had been ready enough
when it was out of place; now that she had cause
to smile, the perversity of these women came out,
as of course it would ! Not that this one took
everything quite for granted; on the contrary, she
caused an explosion by offering to pay for the dam-
age to the window-seat. The militant party would
have wished him to secure ample compensation from
his insurance people, she asserted, if the place had
been burned down. “Then I might have built the
kind of house I really want, instead of trying to
make a silk purse out of a sow's ear!” he had re-


THE DOCTOR'S ASSISTANT 255
torted in his better manner, as though he had been
a fool to interfere.
But it was not his best manner; it was almost as
unrepresentative as the calm self-centered way in
which the released prisoner spent the last minutes
looking for her gloves, and, when she failed to find
them, held out her bare hand with a brazen air of
innocence, and no more thanks than would have be-
come a parting guest.
Even John Dollar felt a new pang of disappoint-
ment as the two-seater shrank panting out of sight
and ear-shot, beneath the bronzed timber of the
disappearing drive, and Dale-Bulmer turned on his
heel under the arch.
“Doesn't that take the cake?” he cried, when he
had swallowed his pique with a chastened chuckle.
“A real well-bred 'un-if ever there was one—play-
ing the very devil, and carrying it off like a little
angel of light! That's what did me—the way she
carried it off! I wanted to give her a fatherly
word, to tell her not to go on making such a wicked
little fool of herself. But she simply wouldn't look
the part, would she? I hadn't even the cheek to
ask her name—had you?”


256 THE CRIME DOCTOR
“No I don't know why you let her off,” said
Dollar, irritably; but at the moment he hated Dale-
Bulmer for extorting his common gratitude at the
expense of his sacred flame.
“Why?” cried that cavalier. “Didn't you guess
how I found out about her car?”
“How P”
“Reported to me by the police!”
“The police? Were there any about?”
Dollar felt as cold down the back as though his
sacred flame had never flickered behind iron bars.
“Two blighters,” said Dale-Bulmer. “I caught
sight of 'em just after I had left you to have it out
with her. That's what they had to say for them-
selves when I went out to let off steam; swore they
were from Scotland Yard, and trumped up the two-
seater when I pretended not to believe them. Nor
did I till I'd run them down to the lodge and seen it
for myself.”
“And then?”
“I swore it belonged to a friend, of course, and
sent them both to the devil.”
“And—and you were man enough not to say a
word about it to—to her?” It was as much as


THE DOCTOR'S ASSISTANT 259
put on my cap and coat and goggles, and to drive
away in my car, so that anybody looking would
think they had seen the last of me.”
“But who should be looking? Surely not that
little—”
“God forbid! But perhaps somebody on her
side—or perhaps only somebody on her tracks.
Curious about those two detectives; but the whole
business bristles with curiosities, which I long to
investigate in peace, unknown to the whole outside
world. This is the only way it can be done; and
this, my dear Mr. Dale-Bulmer, is the one and only
thing that you can do for me!”
The boy with the beard gave way by inches. As
long as there was a dog's chance of any further
excitement, he did not see why he should be out of
it, much less in his own house, and after the hum-
drum life he had led since Labor and the Ladies
had driven him home from Australia. But the
man with the stronger will seemed perfectly sincere
in his further asservations that there were features
in the case which he wanted to study for his own
private and professional ends; that he honestly be-
lieved they had no more to fear from their friends


26o THE CRIME DOCTOR
the enemy, but that somebody ought to remain on
guard, that he was the obvious man. All this rang
true enough; and but for Dollar's strange anxiety in
the matter, and Dale-Bulmer's sudden discovery
that he squinted, the plan might have gained earlier
acceptance than it did. It was settled, however, by
a timely telephone call from the Australian's fur-
nished house at Esher, to ask if anything had hap-
pened to him, and was he never going to tear him-
self away from Pax Monktons Chase?
Thus it was nearly five o'clock before the crime
doctor was alone at last, with certain plain quarters
and plainer fare at his disposal, but with every nook
and cranny of a country mansion to himself until
next morning. The situation had the intrinsic
charm of all lonely vigils; even if nothing was likely
to come of this one, it would at least afford that
continuous possibility of a thrill which becomes
more thrilling than the thrill itself. And the whole
business was supremely after John Dollar's heart;
nothing could have been more congenial to him; and
yet, though he did look forward to the night, and
whatever the night might still bring forth, it was
not for the night's sake that he had maneuvered to


THE DOCTOR'S ASSISTANT 261
remain in the empty house. It was for the residue
of daylight, and the systematic investigations it
would enable him to make.
On these he started, with the precaution of a sea-
man marooned on a desolate island, not indubitably
uninhabited, as soon as the front door shut upon
Dale-Bulmer and the two chauffeurs, with the gaunt
caretaker his muffled image in his own car. And
these motorists were not followed out of sight or
hearing, from the fading pile that looked so empty
in the drooping eye of heaven. But it very soon
seemed to the man within as if the whole house were
a-hum with its own abysmal silence, and his light-
est breath a stertorous disturbance of its ponderous
peace.
He began by searching the unfurnished room in
which the fire would have originated. There could
be no doubt about the fell attempt so nearly made.
It would have been diabolically certain of success.
The scaffolding, like sticks in a gigantic grate; the
draft through the joists, where the floor had
been taken up; the natural flue formed by the ad-
joining well, so lofty that an ordinary ladder was
too short to reach the landing—all these were as bel-


THE DOCTOR'S ASSISTANT 263
still to make, and that he was the man to make it;
that one of these walls had a word to say to him,
and to him alone.
But it was none of the new bricks and mortar,
wanting even their first coat of plaster; it was noth-
ing under the lofty rafters of a quiet baronial hall
where the builder had not been turned loose, nor
any intruder left a trace; it was not in the round
room, filled with a first instalment of the Dale-Bul-
mer furniture, nor yet anywhere else down-stairs,
in spite of the shrill tale told by the scullery win-
dow. There the Amazons had entered, after break-
ing a pane like journeymen burglars. They had fled
incontinently by the door. But what else had they
done, and where else had they been, within those
sardonically silent walls?
Had they been up-stairs before Vera Moyle ran
up the ladder? Dollar returned to that speaking
spot, and climbed up gingerly, in an agony of
enthusiasm for her misused pluck. The gap be-
tween the top rung and the new landing was un-
pleasant even for him, and he was at least a foot
taller than the little fool. The little fool! A pretty
way to think of her, even now; but there was a


264 THE CRIME DOCTOR
worse way; and still there was a better, vaguely
haunting him all the time, but almost ceasing to be
vague in the room where he had found her in the
flesh. He could see her there again. She had not
faced him like a little fool, but a little heroine, God
forgive her! Not so much as a pout about her hor-
rible imprisonment under the window-seat! Not a
moment's loss of dignity, even after that; not a
moment's loss of temper. Head up, and eyes shin-
ing in the shadow of her wicked little hat!
Here, to an inch, he had caught her gazing out
of that window, out and down into the chase—roll-
ing right up to the house on this side—beating
against a breakwater of a sunk fence just under-
neath, and dotted with leafy sail. Deer in the dis-
tance, and swallows darting across and across the
window, like shuttles weaving the scene in silk,
brought the picture back to good dry land. But the
wide sky was still rather like a sea-sky; and it had
lightened again with the approach of evening; there
were silver rims to the clouds, as John Dollar tore
himself from the enchanted scene.
It was nearly dark when he returned unsteadily,
with a face like a cheer—with a face that would


THE DOCTOR'S ASSISTANT 265
have lighted up a tomb. In his hands he clasped
a pair of innocent little gloves, that anybody might
have found, and somebody traced to their beloved
little owner. But that was not all. A wall had
spoken, in certain handwriting hastily rubbed out,
and a whole bathroom had told a yet more eloquent
tale!
Hours later they were speaking still, wafting
sweet music through the corridors, filling the hon-
ored room with strains of joy for the enchanted
man on the broken window-seat, all in the dark at
dead of night. There might have been a moon; he
did not know. There might have been a stealthy
advance, in very open order—a taking of cover be-
hind trees wide apart—a joining of forces down
there in the dark, that was not so dark if one was
used to it. But Dollar had been for hours gazing
into his own heart, and that was still so dazzlingly
alight that he might not have seen anything if he
had looked out; it still sang so loud that he heard
nothing down-stairs until there was noise enough
to wake a deeper dreamer out of actual sleep.
Even then he scarcely knew what had brought him
so suddenly to feet grown numb, but not more


THE DOCTOR'S ASSISTANT 267
not the heart to make sure. He had nothing like
the heart to confront and shame her first—at her
worst a passive party to the crime—when her
guiltier companions were even then at their vile
work lower down. The ladder was the thing! Then
he could scare those others first, and she and he
need never meet at all. Better never again than
at this hideous juncture! And as for him, better
death itself than such a death to such a dream!
It was a sheer stampede the man made now, back
along the landing with great heavy strides, even
shouting as he went to put the she-devils to flight.
It was what he called them as he ran; had they not
dragged an angel into this. And they heard him,
and he heard them—scuttling and clucking in head-
long flight.
This time they could afford to fly; their second
attempt was no failure like the first. The little new
landing was like a gridiron over a flickering glare
from the well beneath. Dollar flung his full length
on the brink—hung dangling from the armpits—
hung lashing out for the ladder like a boy on a
horizontal bar with a mattress just underneath.
The top rung took some finding in his reckless


THE DOCTOR'S ASSISTANT 271
“If what will?”
And now it was she who held his hands the faster
—only across a gulf of darkness like a solid wall—
only with a kindness that reminded him it was
nothing else—only with a glow more dear than an
embrace.
“If it makes you the very least bit happier,” she
whispered, “why, of course it was only just your
own game, doctor, that I was trying to play!”


VIII
THE SECOND MURDERER
T was yet another Lady Vera who brought her
own sunshine out of the weeping dusk of that
October morning. To veil embarrassment on either
side, Dollar had switched off the light by which he
had just read the line scribbled on her card; but there
was no sanction for his nervous sensibility in the
little picture he beheld next moment. An audacious
study in Venetian red—a tripping fashion-plate with
a practical waist—it was only Vera by virtue of the
radiant face between the donkey-eared togue and
the modish modicum of fur. And though the radi-
ance was lovely as ever in his eyes, and lovelier still
as a surprise, this frivolous modernity was pain and
puzzledom to Dollar until their hands met, and the
one in the tight glove trembled.
272


274 THE CRIME DOCTOR
a'
next to break his neck by tampering with his to-
boggan.”
“In Switzerland, when you were there?”
“I was sent for after the first effort; the second
was made under my nose.”
“And yet you did nothing?”
Lady Vera's indignation was not confined to the
absent miscreant; her demigod came in for his
share.
“There was not much to be done,” he protested
humbly. “We were in a foreign country; the evi-
dence wouldn't have been overwhelming under our
own law. I let Scarth know that I had found him
out, got the boy out of his clutches—pulled him
together all right—and laid the whole case before
Topham Vinson when I came home. He consulted
his law officers; they thought I had so little to go
upon that our man wasn't even marked down for
surveillance by the police. I had to keep my own
eye on him when he turned up in town again.
Scarth made that easy by immediately getting on
my tracks, and discovering in Mr. Croucher another
old friend who had his knife in me. They tried
between them to pervert my chauffeur; then I lost


THE SECOND MURDERER 275
sight of them; and it was then I wanted to put you
on your guard, but you were never in, and my let-
ters seemed to miscarry.”
“They didn't,” said Lady Vera, with frank con-
trition. “I am ashamed to tell you why I never
answered them; but I will in a minute. So it was
Mr. Scarth you meant when you told me the other
day that poor Croucher had fallen into such bad
hands?”
“Poor Croucher! Yes, it was; and there really
is no comparison between them. One was born in
the scarlet, so to speak, but the other's the only
really educated and quite cold-blooded villain I have
ever met.”
Vera Moyle sat forward in the patient's chair,
in the very attitude of two years before, with the
same firelight illumining the same steadfast look
of moral and intellectual honesty; and the fuller
health upon her cheek, the deeper wisdom in her
eyes, made no more difference to Dollar than her
superfluous smartness now. She was the same ut-
terly candid creature, about to tell him the whole
truth about some fresh trouble, and extenuate
nothing that concerned herself.


276 THE CRIME DOCTOR
“I don't want to waste many words on Mr.
Scarth,” she began, in the least vindictive of human
voices; “but I ought to tell you that I quite liked
him until the other day. I met him first at a coun-
try house where he was supposed to be tutoring the
boys, but was really the life and soul of the whole
party. It was extraordinary how he ran everything
and everybody for those people; we were all de-
voted to him, and he says I asked him to come and
see us in town, but he certainly never came until near
the end of this last season. Then he made up for
lost time; he's capital company, as you know, and
we had him to dinner, and my eldest brother asked
him down to stay in August when I was there. That
was when we saw most of each other, and Mr.
Scarth asked me to marry him • *.
“Good God!”
“Of course I didn't like him well enough for
that, though he had put me against you!”
“How?” said Dollar grimly. She was still peer-
ing into the fire; but he flattered himself there was
more than firelight in the flush that almost rivaled
the Venetian red still nearer to the bars.
“He knows what I did two years ago.”


THE SECOND MURDERER 279
taken to dogging me all over the place, to see if I
don't commit another crime! He was one of the
alleged detectives at Pax Monktons Chase!”
“Never!” cried Dollar, taken fairly by surprise.
He had forgot almost every feature of the affair
in question, except how magnificently Vera Moyle
had come out of it. The episode remained in his
mind only as the one great dream of his that had
come true as yet; the details had disappeared like
those of any other dream.
“I happen to know it,” said Lady Vera, with
some little embarrassment. “I had it from—the
other detective.”
“Not—” and Dollar stopped to frown—“not
Croucher himself?” .
“Yes.”
“He has dared to speak to you!”
“For the very first time since that night in the
train; now do listen, and be fair to the poor fellow.
He never was as bad as you thought him; you say
yourself that he's a saint compared with Mr.
Scarth.” Dollar was too savage to smile at this free
version of what he had said. “Well, they have
fallen out, and Croucher's in a bad way altogether;


28o THE CRIME DOCTOR
and he has turned to me for a helping hand—not
for money or anything of that kind.”
“Not the least little hint of blackmail?”
“Not a word or a sign of anything of the sort,
except that he asked me to forgive him for the
other time, and of course I did.”
“Of course you would, though he actually robbed
you under arms!” cried Dollar, as sardonically as he
felt he must.
But he was let off with the caution of a frown
that would have escaped attention on a face less
consistently serene than Lady Vera Moyle's.
“You forget what he had been through first,” said
she, gently. “Within forty-eight hours of execu-
tion, for something he had never done! Thinking
what he thought, and I neither denied nor ad-
mitted, then or at any time, the wonder is not that
he behaved as badly as he did that night, but as well
as he has ever since. However much you fright-
ened him at the time, he might have gone on black-
mailing me without your knowledge, and that’s the
last thing he's trying to do now. But I want to do
something for him! You say yourself that he has
fallen into the worst of hands—well, I want to get


THE SECOND MURDERER 28I.
him out of them. You once told me that, when
you had him here before, you found yourself trying
to make a decent being of him, and beginning to
feel that you might almost succeed. Doctor, I want
you to try again, for my sake! He is frightfully
sorry for what he did before, and he has been very
badly used by Mostyn Scarth. He looks ill. I
want you to save his life, and more than his life!
He has told me with tears in his eyes that he was
never so happy as when you had him here before.
Dear man, do take him in again, and give him one
more chance, to please me!”
Her voice had broken, and for once her eyes had
played her false as well, and Dollar had waited
grimly while she recovered her voice or dried her
eyes. But he could not answer grimly when in her
turn she waited for him to speak. In her frivolous
little blazing skirt, in the togue that he liked even
less; over-dressy as he dared to think her in his sim-
ple heart of hearts, she appealed to him the more
profoundly for those very vanities, so far from
vanity were the letter and the spirit of her interces-
sion.
“So you really came to see me about Alfred


282 THE CRIME DOCTOR
Croucher?” said Dollar, but very gently, without
the faintest accent of reproach.
“It was about both of them, but chiefly about
him,” she admitted. “Of course I wanted to check
his account of Mr. Scarth. If you had given him a
good character, that would have been the end; but
you gave him a much worse one than I expected.
Croucher seems almost immaculate by comparison;
honestly, I shouldn't wonder if he were less lost to
decency through his very association with a man so
much worse than himself.”
“Did he tell you so?”
“He said it had brought him up with a round
turn.”
“It's possible,” said Dollar, not more dryly than
he could help. “The psychology is all right.” He
was smiling and nodding now. “And where is
Mr. Croucher at the moment?”
“Walking up and down outside.”
“Until we call him in P”
“If only you will let me!”
She was on her feet, to take him at his word as
soon as spoken; but he said that was Barton's job,
and, wondering aloud how Barton would like it,


THE SECOND MURDERER 285
be a bad man, too, might Mr. Croucher, but he
wasn't as bad as Mostyn Scarth. And in that mod-
est claim, at least, there was a bitter sincerity which
received its due in a nod of keen acknowledgment.
“I never did think you were more than a second
murderer, Croucher!”
“Wot's that?”
The whites of those quick, furtive eyes were
showing quite horribly in a moment.
“Only a technical expression, Croucher, mean-
ing the minor malefactor.”
And he returned rather slowly into the eager
presence of Lady Vera Moyle.
“I suppose I mustn't fawn, either,” she said, in
the softened tone of one of her rare rebukes. “But
—do you think you can make anything of him—this
time?”
“I hope so; but I shall be very glad to have him
back, even if I fail again.”
“Why?"
The crime doctor gave her another of his oblique
smiles.
“I shall be all the better able to watch Scarth's
latest move,” he said.


286 THE CRIME DOCTOR
IT
Over against the back windows of a nice new
street of tall red houses, beyond the high red wall
enclosing their common strip of shrubs and gravel,
runs a humbler row of windows in connection with
a mews. In one you may still catch a coachman
shaving for the box, but more likely a chauffeur's
lady engrossed in her novelette; and on the next
sill are pots of geraniums, while the next but one
keeps the evening's kippers nice and fresh. Most
of the windows have muslin curtains, and in some
the lights are on all night. Last October there was
only one without any kind of covering, except a
newspaper stuck across a broken pane.
It was the scandal of the row; a battered billycock
lay rotting on the roof above; strange fragments of
song were always liable to burst from within, as of
a gentleman roistering in his sleep, and at times a
bristly countenance would roll red eyes over the
backs of the red houses, beginning and ending with
the flats at the bottom of the street. If a dark
handsome face appeared simultaneously at a top
flat window, the chances were that both would van-


288 THE CRIME DOCTOR
can stick them in the post; three or four would be
safer, and at least a couple of his envelopes, in case
of accidents. Now tell me everything that hap-
pened; and perhaps you shall have a drink before
you go.”
There was no light that night in the window with
the broken pane pasted over with newspaper; next
day it was mended properly, and the sodden billy-
cock removed from the roof before Alfred Crouch-
er awoke from his innocent and protracted slum-
bers in the crime doctor's patent chamber of per-
petual peace.
His first impression was that some mysterious
miracle had been performed expressly for his be-
hoof. He must have been drunk to have slept so
sound, and yet he had none of the disagreeable sen-
sations which a long experience associated with the
ordinary orgy. He felt profoundly rested and re-
freshed; never had he lain in so luxurious a bed;
and the air was faintly scented, subtly soothing, and
there was plenty of it, yet not a sound except the
gentle stirring of his own breathing body between
the sheets. His palate was clean and cool beyond
belief. He opened his eyes, and saw a plain room


290 THE CRIME DOCTOR
The man haunted him; it was better to have him
there in the flesh, than to see him as Croucher con-
tinually saw him when he was not there at all.
Better, again, to talk of some things than to
dwell on them night and day, especially when those
subjects seemed to possess an equally awful fascina-
tion for the crime doctor. Of course, they were in
his line; that accounted for the doctor's morbid
taste, and the patient's most terrible experience was
quite enough to account for his. There was nothing
unnatural in their talks. They had the thing in com-
mon, only from opposite poles of experience, which
enormously enhanced the mutual interest. If there
was one subject they were bound to have discussed,
with no false delicacy on either side, each being
what he was, it was the subject of the sixth com-
mandment.
“Of course you think about it,” said Dollar, dis-
missing an incoherent excuse on the second day.
“It must haunt you; it's only natural that it should.
All I should like you to do, since you never com-
mitted one, and are the last man in the world to
commit one now, is to take a rather lighter view of
that particular misdeed.”


THE SECOND MURDERER 29 I
“A lighter view!” repeated Croucher, goggling;
and he added with a shuddering inconsequence:
“The lor o' the land don't make light of it!”
“Literature has been known to,” rejoined the
doctor, with as little apparent point. “But you are
not the reader you were last year; otherwise there's
a little thing, On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts, that I should like to lend you.”
“One o' the 'ow much?” said Mr. Croucher, un-
certain whether to grin or frown, and meanwhile
glaring more than he supposed.
Dollar went for the book, and read a few extracts
aloud. They appeared to afford him extraordinary
enjoyment; they were altogether over the bullet
head on the pillow. Croucher could only gather
that some people seemed to imagine it was good
sport to commit a murder. Funny fools! Let
them try a fortnight in the condemned cell, for one
they never did commit, and see how they took to
that!
But he could understand them that knew nothing
about it writing a lot of rot like this; what beat
him was that the crime doctor, of all people, and
with all his uncanny knowledge of the subject, that
F-


296 THE CRIME DOCTOR
and yet there wasn't a spot of blood on his gar-
ments. How do you suppose he managed that?
It's a messy operation, Croucher; you or I would
have made a walking shambles of ourselves ſ”
“How did he manage it?” asked Croucher, in a
shaky growl.
“By taking off every stitch before he did the
trick. How about that for a tip?”
Croucher made no reply. His teeth were clenched
like those of a man bearing physical pain. They
were nearly out of town, and Dollar had discoursed
upon autumn tints and the nip in the air before
being abruptly interrogated as to the “fair swine's”
fate.
“Need you ask?” said he. “The poor devil was
too clever by half, and made a big mistake for each
of his strokes of genius. He was taken, tried, con-
demned, and all the rest of it! And a greater
writer than the gentleman who kept you awake last
night wrote the best description of-all the rest of
it—in existence. But don't you ask me to lend you
that l”
“They always seem to forget somefink,” said
Alfred Croucher, another long mile out of town.


THE SECOND MURDERER 297
“The first thing being that the best murders
oughtn't to look like murders,” the criminologist
agreed. “They ought to look like accidents, or
suicides at the most. But it takes a Mostyn Scarth
to cut as deep as that.”
“Wot the 'ell mikes yer fink of 'im?” cried
Croucher, in a fury at the very name.
“Well, among other things, the fact that he saw
us off in the car just now. Do you mean to say you
didn't see through the false beard of the gentleman
who was picking up his umbrella as we turned into
Wigmore Street?”
III
Never again did Alfred Croucher venture out
alone, even as far as the pillar-box; not another
letter had he to post, though he received one,
wrapped round a stone, once when his window was
open, and literally devoured every word. He did
go out, but only with the crime doctor in his car,
for an hour or two in the afternoon.
More than once they got out at Richmond Park,
sent the car across to one of the other gates, and


298 THE CRIME DOCTOR
followed at a brisk walk, shoulder to shoulder, with
Croucher often peeping over his, but Dollar never.
The walk was sometimes broken for as long as it
took Croucher to smoke a pipe in one or another of
the beautiful wooded enclosures which are the inner
glory of the most glorious of all public parks.
There, under red canopies of dying leaves, their
feet upon a russet carpet of the dead, the smoker
would rest in a restless silence, because the one
subject which had made him eloquent was now
tabooed. Even in the Chamber of Peace there was
no peace for Alfred Croucher, and but little sleep,
although the doctor had walked him off his legs and
would sit beside him till all hours. So the literary
and conversational treatment had been altered once
for all; and now the patient would hardly read or
speak a word.
Late one night, in the second half of the month,
the crime doctor, seated like a waxwork in a chair
that never creaked, had just made sure that his
man was asleep at last. He decided to steal out
and write some letters, and take them to the post
himself before locking up; and was getting by
inches to his catlike feet, when some sense held


THE SECOND MURDERER 299
him bent like a bow. It could hardly have been
his hearing, in his own sound-proof sanctuary be-
tween double windows and triple doors. Yet sud-
denly he was all on edge, listening with nerves laid
bare by forced vigils in that slumberous room,
brown as an Arab in its weird lighting; the silver
patch in his hair changed from a florin to a new pen-
ny, the whites of his eyes like broad gold rings; their
one flaw augmented by an infinite fatigue, their one
care the human wreckage on the bed—shattered
utterly by him, to be by him built up afresh, but not
in the midst of excursions and alarms. And here
was the inmost door opening, so softly, so slowly,
at deadliest dead of night!
It was a woman who entered like a ghost, and
he knew her step, though he could not hear it even
now. And though her cloak and head-dress were
those of a trained nurse, he knew, rather than saw,
that the wearer was Lady Vera Moyle.
“Hush!” she was the first to whsiper, and very
softly closed the last door, through which he would
have hurried her out again. Already her sound-
less movements, her air of vast precaution, puzzled
him even more than her presence or her dress; but
he still had anxieties on this side of the door.


3OO THE CRIME DOCTOR
“Just asleep,” he whispered, pointing to the bed.
“Bad time I've given him, poor brute, but a better
one coming, I do believe. Did you come to see how
he was doing?” Even in the stained light she
looked so beaming now, so frankly triumphant, he
made sure that was it. “I'd have written, but
thought you were away. Who let you in 7"
“This!”
And she held up a new Yale key.
“Where did you get it?”
“Specially Cut for me.” Every line in his red
man's face was a note of blank interrogation.
“Mostyn Scarth has another—cut specially for him
I’ve had him watched.”
“Vera !”
“I was watching for him—from the nursing home
opposite—suffrage friends of mine.”
“Why didn't you tell me?”
“You had enough to do.”
He shook his head. “Well?”
“He’s somewhere in the house.”
“This house?”
“Why didn't you tell me?”
She nodded. “Hiding—in your room, I think."
“I’ll soon have him out !”


THE SECOND MURDERER 3OI
“Wait!” She had eyes for the amber bed at last.
“Are you sure he's asleep?”
Dollar stole across and back. The great frame
was breathing gently and evenly as a child. “But
he's a terribly light sleeper; we mustn't disturb him,
if we can help it.”
“Disturb him l’” She clutched his hand for the
first time. “I wish to God I had never brought him
to you! There's a plot between them, doctor—I
know there's some plot!”
“There was, of course,” he said, smiling, but
wincing at his own “of course” that instant. “I’m
delighted you brought him,” he reassured her. “I’ve
taken some of the plot out of him—and now for
Mr. Scarth!”
He reached past her to open the door. In a
flash she put something in his hand. It was a
showy little revolver, the handle mother-of-pearl,
the barrel golden in that light.
“Thanks,” he said briefly—but there was a whole
novel in his look. “Now will you do something
more for me?”
“No!” she said flatly, and was at his elbow when
he opened his own door across the landing.
It was such a plain little room that there was


3O4 THE CRIME DOCTOR
your way you might please see if all three doors are
shut in the room opposite; then, perhaps—no! I
should leave this one open after all, I think.” Three
seconds had sufficed to close the triple doors, one
more quickly than another, behind them.
“I should, if I were you,” said Scarth. “And I
should think a good many times before carrying
out your other instructions—if I were the lady at
the bottom of one of the few mysteries that still
puzzle Scotland Yard.”
There was a pause, in which Dollar heard only
a sharp intake of breath on the threshold just be-
hind him; but that was enough.
“I believe I shall have to shoot you, after all,”
said he, and the hammer of the mother-of-pearl
revolver clicked to full cock.
“Won't that rather spoil your game?” said Scarth,
blandly.
“Mine is not the game that matters at the mo-
ment—yours is. As, however, you have been fool
enough to have a key cut expressly to fit my front-
door lock, and have been discovered in my room at
midnight 39
“In the most distinguished company! Go on,


THE SECOND MURDERER 305
Dollar. Nothing extenuate—bang the field-piece
—twang the lyre!” -
His teeth were showing as they had shown on
the platform at Winterwald nine months before;
the tag from his famous impersonation had slipped
out with all the snap and gusto which had capti-
vated an unruly audience then; and it was not with-
out a slight mesmeric effect on the man who had
him at his mercy. If Scarth in turn had not held
Vera Moyle at his mercy, and if John Dollar had
not known him to be utterly devoid of that quality,
he could have admired the cool daredevil, swagger-
ing at bay.
“Remember the concert at Winterwald, doctor,”
he went on, “and our talk afterward, and the last
talk we ever had there? He thought I had two
tries to kill a fellow, Lady Vera—two bites at such
a green young nut! Better to finish 'em off at one
fell blow, isn't it? Not such fun for the widow, or
the poor innocent devil who nearly swings for the
job, but great work for the militant Millies and
their lady leader! Splendid for you all until the
truth comes out—as it will the minute a policeman
shows his nose!”


THE SECOND MURDERER 307
was merely urged as an argument for Dollar's
private ear. But the Mostyn Scarths are expert
listeners; not a syllable was lost upon the con-
summate chieftain of that foul family; and he
grinned gaily through as much of the open door as
he could see frºm this point.
"So you admit that you administered his coup de
grace to the late lamented Sergeant Simpkins?” .
But the heavy shaft was not winged by one of
Mostyn Scarth's feathered glances. His grinning
gaze still sped past them to the landing.
“I have never denied it in my life.”
“Hear that, Croucher?” cried Scarth. “‘Full
confession by Lady Vera Moyle—extry spechul.’”
The pair stood closer as one of them looked
round; and there, indeed, on the threshold, bulked
Alfred Croucher, larger than life in a white bath-
gown that sat better on him than his loudest clothes.
And his unwholesome face looked only a shade less
white than all the rest of him, but for the little red
sleepless eyes fixed on Mostyn Scarth, who still
enjoyed the crime doctor's undivided attention.
“'Ow the 'ell did you get 'ere?” said Croucher
huskilv.


308 THE CRIME DOCTOR
“I’m obliged to you for asking. Our virtuous
friends are so ready to take a felony for granted,
that it seems never to have occurred to them that I
walked in at the door—partly to see you—chiefly to
bowl them out.” Lady Vera could not help smiling
at that which seemed never to have occurred to her:
nothing else left any mark, save upon John Dollar,
on whom Scarth now trained his ivory grin. “The
worst of a Yale lock, doctor,” he went on, “is that
all the keys are numbered; the worst of a Turkish
bath is that your enemy may do that thing, and have
a look at your latch-key if you will leave it in your
pocket on its chain. Northumberland Avenue may
be a good place after a bad night, but that's where
I really found my way into your house. You didn't
see me because I had the bad taste to prefer the cave
of electricity to the public hot-rooms and your cap-
ital company.”
The note of insolence had been forced for
Croucher's benefit, the libretto elaborated to im-
press that elemental mind, and it was to Croucher
that Scarth turned for applause. It might have
been more articulate; there was little merriment in
the guttural laugh; and it was not in open mockery,


31o THE CRIME DOCTOR
“Who says I haven't?”
“Doctor Dollar. Didn't you hear him?”
“If he does, he's a >>
“Croucher! Croucher!” said the doctor. “AIl I
want you to do is to hand me the razor case from
the dressing-table. In fact you needn't do all that;
just arm yourself with the weapon you ought to
find there. Then somebody will be more of a match
for me. And Mr. Scarth isn't raising any further
objection, you will notice.”
What Croucher noticed, as the red eyes came up
at last, was that Mostyn Scarth had suddenly lost
a little of his usual healthy tan; but the bedroom
slippers remained planted where they were.
And then without a word Lady Vera stepped
from the doctor's side, took the razor-case in both
her hands, pulled it in two and exhibited the empty
halves.
“Which of you has borrowed my razor?” said
John Dollar.
“Not me!” cried Croucher with tremendous em-
phasis. But his right hand was still in his far
pocket, as only Mostyn Scarth could see; and the


THE SECOND MURDERER 3 II
sight restored a little of that healthy tan which so
becomes dark faces.
“Not you, Croucher?”
“No, not me, by Gawd!”
“Yet I believe your original mission in this house
was to possess yourself of that razor—and—use
it?”
Dollar did not finish the sentence without feeling
for a little hand with his left; that little hand met it
half-way, and was the first to give a reassuring
Squeeze.
“You were to do something to me with it, I be-
lieve, and to leave it in my hand to show I'd done
it myself?”
And then, under another sidelong flash, that
steadied down into a will-destroying gleam, Crouch-
er came out with a dreadful phrase.
“To guide yer 'and' said he, hoarsely.
“To guide my handl Exactly! But it was not
exactly your idea?”
“No. It was—”
But here his eyes rolled into Mostyn Scarth's,
and dropped once more.


3 I2 THE CRIME DOCTOR
“Exactly!” repeated Dollar. “But you didn't
quite feel like doing it, so at last your master had
to come in to do it for you?”
“He ain't my master now, blast 'im!”
“Steady, Croucher. May I ask what that is in
your hand?”
It was a letter. Only a letter out of that far
pocket, after all! Scarth's eyes started, and he
found his tongue once more.
“You—give—that—to me, Croucher!”
Croucher wavered at his voice; it was terribly
threatening, each subtle tone a poisoned barb.
“What if I don’t P”
“You know what!”
“The game deepens,” said the crime doctor; and
he did not know that his left hand had dropped the
hand of hands for him.
“Your game's up if you show that letter!” cried
Scarth to Croucher, who only showed him the broad
of his back.
“Can you be tried twice for the same thing, doc-
tor?” he began—but in the same breath he desper-
ately added: “I don't care whether you can or
you can't! You read that, whether or no!"


3I4 THE CRIME DOCTOR
of the bullet head—“one night in me cups; an' fust
'e starts squeezin' 'er to marry 'im, an’ then
squeezin' me to do yer in before yer forbids is
banns! Oh, 'e's a nut, I tell yer—though we’ve
been the nuts an’’im the cracker!”
Lady Vera looked like a little ghost, still unable
to believe her ears, still staring into space as if the
trouble were rather with those great Irish eyes of
hers.
But the doctor was the doctor an instant longer.
His left hand went out to his patient first.
“You’ll sleep to-night! I'll give you the other
when it's free,” he said, still covering the man with
his hands in his pockets, the curtains on each side of
him, and a back window just behind.
Then two things happened in quick succession;
but the first brought the lover back to life with such
a throb that the second was not even seen.
Just saying, “I’m afraid I'm going to make a fool
of myself,” all that he loved on earth collapsed at
his feet. The doctor was down on his knees be-
side her, getting the girl into his arms. And even
Mr. Croucher did not see the curtains close, or hear
anything happen behind them; for he, too, was on