Scudamore Lane, sloping down riverwards from just behind the Monument, lies
at night in the shadow of two black and monstrous walls which loom high above
the glimmer of the scattered gas lamps. The footpaths are narrow, and the
causeway is paved with rounded cobblestones, so that the endless drays roar
along it like breaking waves. A few old-fashioned houses lie scattered among the
business premises, and in one of these, half-way down on the left-hand side, Dr.
Horace Selby conducts his large practice. It is a singular street for so big a
man; but a specialist who has an European reputation can afford to live where he
likes. In his particular branch, too, patients do not always regard seclusion as a disadvantage.
It was only ten o'clock. The dull roar of the traffic which converged all day
upon London Bridge had died away now to a mere confused murmur. It was raining
heavily, and the gas shone dimly through the streaked and dripping glass,
throwing little circles upon the glistening cobblestones. The air was full of
the sounds of the rain, the thin swish of its fall, the heavier drip from the
eaves, and the swirl and gurgle down the two steep gutters and through the sewer
grating. There was only one figure in the whole length of Scudamore Lane. It was
that of a man, and it stood outside the door of Dr. Horace Selby.
He had just rung and was waiting for an answer. The fanlight beat full upon
the gleaming shoulders of his waterproof and upon his upturned features. It was
a wan, sensitive, clear-cut face, with some subtle, nameless peculiarity in its
expression, something of the startled horse in the white-rimmed eye, something
too of the helpless child in the drawn cheek and the weakening of the lower lip.
The man-servant knew the stranger as a patient at a bare glance at those
frightened eyes. Such a look had been seen at that door many times before.
"Is the doctor in?"
The man hesitated.
"He has had a few friends to dinner, sir. He does not like to be disturbed
outside his usual hours, sir."
"Tell him that I MUST see him. Tell him that it is of the very first
importance. Here is my card." He fumbled with his trembling fingers in trying to
draw one from his case. "Sir Francis Norton is the name. Tell him that Sir
Francis Norton, of Deane Park, must see him without delay."
"Yes, sir." The butler closed his fingers upon the card and the
half-sovereign which accompanied it. "Better hang your coat up here in the hall.
It is very wet. Now if you will wait here in the consulting-room, I have no
doubt that I shall be able to send the doctor in to you."
It was a large and lofty room in which the young baronet found himself. The
carpet was so soft and thick that his feet made no sound as he walked across it.
The two gas jets were turned only half-way up, and the dim light with the faint
aromatic smell which filled the air had a vaguely religious suggestion. He sat
down in a shining leather armchair by the smouldering fire and looked gloomily
about him. Two sides of the room were taken up with books, fat and sombre, with
broad gold lettering upon their backs. Beside him was the high, old-fashioned
mantelpiece of white marble—the top of it strewed with cotton wadding and
bandages, graduated measures, and little bottles. There was one with a broad
neck just above him containing bluestone, and another narrower one with what
looked like the ruins of a broken pipestem and "Caustic" outside upon a red
label. Thermometers, hypodermic syringes bistouries and spatulas were scattered
about both on the mantelpiece and on the central table on either side of the
sloping desk. On the same table, to the right, stood copies of the five books
which Dr. Horace Selby had written upon the subject with which his name is
peculiarly associated, while on the left, on the top of a red medical directory,
lay a huge glass model of a human eye the size of a turnip, which opened down
the centre to expose the lens and double chamber within.
Sir Francis Norton had never been remarkable for his powers of observation,
and yet he found himself watching these trifles with the keenest attention. Even
the corrosion of the cork of an acid bottle caught his eye, and he wondered that
the doctor did not use glass stoppers. Tiny scratches where the light glinted
off from the table, little stains upon the leather of the desk, chemical
formulae scribbled upon the labels of the phials—nothing was too slight to
arrest his attention. And his sense of hearing was equally alert. The heavy
ticking of the solemn black clock above the mantelpiece struck quite painfully
upon his ears. Yet in spite of it, and in spite also of the thick, old-fashioned
wooden partition, he could hear voices of men talking in the next room, and
could even catch scraps of their conversation. "Second hand was bound to take
it." "Why, you drew the last of them yourself!"
"How could I play the queen when I knew that the ace was against me?" The
phrases came in little spurts falling back into the dull murmur of conversation.
And then suddenly he heard the creaking of a door and a step in the hall, and
knew with a tingling mixture of impatience and horror that the crisis of his life was at hand.
Dr. Horace Selby was a large, portly man with an imposing presence. His nose
and chin were bold and pronounced, yet his features were puffy, a combination
which would blend more freely with the wig and cravat of the early Georges than
with the close-cropped hair and black frock-coat of the end of the nineteenth
century. He was clean shaven, for his mouth was too good to cover—large,
flexible, and sensitive, with a kindly human softening at either corner which
with his brown sympathetic eyes had drawn out many a shame-struck sinner's
secret. Two masterful little bushy side-whiskers bristled out from under his
ears spindling away upwards to merge in the thick curves of his brindled hair.
To his patients there was something reassuring in the mere bulk and dignity of
the man. A high and easy bearing in medicine as in war bears with it a hint of
victories in the past, and a promise of others to come. Dr. Horace Selby's face
was a consolation, and so too were the large, white, soothing hands, one of
which he held out to his visitor.
"I am sorry to have kept you waiting. It is a conflict of duties, you
perceive—a host's to his guests and an adviser's to his patient. But now I am
entirely at your disposal, Sir Francis. But dear me, you are very cold."
"Yes, I am cold."
"And you are trembling all over. Tut, tut, this will never do! This miserable
night has chilled you. Perhaps some little stimulant——"
"No, thank you. I would really rather not. And it is not the night which has chilled me. I am frightened, doctor."
The doctor half-turned in his chair, and he patted the arch of the young
man's knee, as he might the neck of a restless horse.
"What then?" he asked, looking over his shoulder at the pale face with the startled eyes.
Twice the young man parted his lips. Then he stooped with a sudden gesture,
and turning up the right leg of his trousers he pulled down his sock and thrust
forward his shin. The doctor made a clicking noise with his tongue as he glanced at it.
"Both legs?"
"No, only one."
"Suddenly?"
"This morning."
"Hum."
The doctor pouted his lips, and drew his finger and thumb down the line of
his chin. "Can you account for it?" he asked briskly.
"No."
A trace of sternness came into the large brown eyes.
"I need not point out to you that unless the most absolute frankness——"
The patient sprang from his chair. "So help me God!" he cried, "I have
nothing in my life with which to reproach myself. Do you think that I would be
such a fool as to come here and tell you lies. Once for all, I have nothing to
regret." He was a pitiful, half-tragic and half-grotesque figure, as he stood
with one trouser leg rolled to the knee, and that ever present horror still
lurking in his eyes. A burst of merriment came from the card-players in the next
room, and the two looked at each other in silence.
"Sit down," said the doctor abruptly, "your assurance is quite sufficient."
He stooped and ran his finger down the line of the young man's shin, raising it
at one point. "Hum, serpiginous," he murmured, shaking his head. "Any other symptoms?"
"My eyes have been a little weak."
"Let me see your teeth." He glanced at them, and again made the gentle,
clicking sound of sympathy and disapprobation.
"Now your eye." He lit a lamp at the patient's elbow, and holding a small
crystal lens to concentrate the light, he threw it obliquely upon the patient's
eye. As he did so a glow of pleasure came over his large expressive face, a
flush of such enthusiasm as the botanist feels when he packs the rare plant into
his tin knapsack, or the astronomer when the long-sought comet first swims into the field of his telescope.
"This is very typical—very typical indeed," he murmured, turning to his desk
and jotting down a few memoranda upon a sheet of paper. "Curiously enough, I am
writing a monograph upon the subject. It is singular that you should have been
able to furnish so well-marked a case." He had so forgotten the patient in his
symptom, that he had assumed an almost congratulatory air towards its possessor.
He reverted to human sympathy again, as his patient asked for particulars.
"My dear sir, there is no occasion for us to go into strictly professional
details together," said he soothingly. "If, for example, I were to say that you
have interstitial keratitis, how would you be the wiser? There are indications
of a strumous diathesis. In broad terms, I may say that you have a constitutional and hereditary taint."
The young baronet sank back in his chair, and his chin fell forwards upon his
chest. The doctor sprang to a side-table and poured out half a glass of liqueur
brandy which he held to his patient's lips. A little fleck of colour came into his cheeks as he drank it down.
"Perhaps I spoke a little abruptly," said the doctor, "but you must have
known the nature of your complaint. Why, otherwise, should you have come to me?"
"God help me, I suspected it; but only today when my leg grew bad. My father had a leg like this."
"It was from him, then——?"
"No, from my grandfather. You have heard of Sir Rupert Norton, the great Corinthian?"
The doctor was a man of wide reading with a retentive, memory. The name
brought back instantly to him the remembrance of the sinister reputation of its
owner—a notorious buck of the thirties—who had gambled and duelled and steeped
himself in drink and debauchery, until even the vile set with whom he consorted
had shrunk away from him in horror, and left him to a sinister old age with the
barmaid wife whom he had married in some drunken frolic. As he looked at the
young man still leaning back in the leather chair, there seemed for the instant
to flicker up behind him some vague presentiment of that foul old dandy with his
dangling seals, many-wreathed scarf, and dark satyric face. What was he now? An
armful of bones in a mouldy box. But his deeds— they were living and rotting the
blood in the veins of an innocent man.
"I see that you have heard of him," said the young baronet. "He died
horribly, I have been told; but not more horribly than he had lived. My father
was his only son. He was a studious man, fond of books and canaries and the
country; but his innocent life did not save him."
"His symptoms were cutaneous, I understand."
"He wore gloves in the house. That was the first thing I can remember. And
then it was his throat. And then his legs. He used to ask me so often about my
own health, and I thought him so fussy, for how could I tell what the meaning of
it was. He was always watching me—always with a sidelong eye fixed upon me. Now,
at last, I know what he was watching for."
"Had you brothers or sisters?"
"None, thank God."
"Well, well, it is a sad case, and very typical of many which come in my way.
You are no lonely sufferer, Sir Francis. There are many thousands who bear the
same cross as you do."
"But where is the justice of it, doctor?" cried the young man, springing from
his chair and pacing up and down the consulting-room. "If I were heir to my
grandfather's sins as well as to their results, I could understand it, but I am
of my father's type. I love all that is gentle and beautiful—music and poetry
and art. The coarse and animal is abhorrent to me. Ask any of my friends and
they would tell you that. And now that this vile, loathsome thing—ach, I am
polluted to the marrow, soaked in abomination! And why? Haven't I a right to ask
why? Did I do it? Was it my fault? Could I help being born? And look at me now,
blighted and blasted, just as life was at its sweetest. Talk about the sins of
the father—how about the sins of the Creator?" He shook his two clinched hands
in the air—the poor impotent atom with his pin-point of brain caught in the
whirl of the infinite.
The doctor rose and placing his hands upon his shoulders he pressed him back
into his chair once more. "There, there, my dear lad," said he; "you must not
excite yourself. You are trembling all over. Your nerves cannot stand it. We
must take these great questions upon trust. What are we, after all? Half-evolved
creatures in a transition stage, nearer perhaps to the Medusa on the one side
than to perfected humanity on the other. With half a complete brain we can't
expect to understand the whole of a complete fact, can we, now? It is all very
dim and dark, no doubt; but I think that Pope's famous couplet sums up the whole
matter, and from my heart, after fifty years of varied experience, I can say——"
But the young baronet gave a cry of impatience and disgust. "Words, words,
words! You can sit comfortably there in your chair and say them—and think them
too, no doubt. You've had your life, but I've never had mine. You've healthy
blood in your veins; mine is putrid. And yet I am as innocent as you. What would
words do for you if you were in this chair and I in that? Ah, it's such a
mockery and a make-believe! Don't think me rude, though, doctor. I don't mean to
be that. I only say that it is impossible for you or any other man to realise
it. But I've a question to ask you, doctor. It's one on which my whole life must
depend." He writhed his fingers together in an agony of apprehension.
"Speak out, my dear sir. I have every sympathy with you."
"Do you think—do you think the poison has spent itself on me? Do you think
that if I had children they would suffer?"
"I can only give one answer to that. 'The third and fourth generation,' says
the trite old text. You may in time eliminate it from your system, but many
years must pass before you can think of marriage."
"I am to be married on Tuesday," whispered the patient.
It was the doctor's turn to be thrilled with horror. There were not many
situations which would yield such a sensation to his seasoned nerves. He sat in
silence while the babble of the card-table broke in upon them again. "We had a
double ruff if you had returned a heart." "I was bound to clear the trumps."
They were hot and angry about it.
"How could you?" cried the doctor severely. "It was criminal."
"You forget that I have only learned how I stand to-day." He put his two
hands to his temples and pressed them convulsively. "You are a man of the world,
Dr. Selby. You have seen or heard of such things before. Give me some advice.
I'm in your hands. It is all very sudden and horrible, and I don't think I am strong enough to bear it."
The doctor's heavy brows thickened into two straight lines, and he bit his nails in perplexity.
"The marriage must not take place."
"Then what am I to do?"
"At all costs it must not take place."
"And I must give her up?"
"There can be no question about that."
The young man took out a pocketbook and drew from it a small photograph,
holding it out towards the doctor. The firm face softened as he looked at it.
"It is very hard on you, no doubt. I can appreciate it more now that I have
seen that. But there is no alternative at all. You must give up all thought of it."
"But this is madness, doctor—madness, I tell you. No, I won't raise my voice.
I forgot myself. But realise it, man. I am to be married on Tuesday. This coming
Tuesday, you understand. And all the world knows it. How can I put such a public
affront upon her. It would be monstrous."
"None the less it must be done. My dear lad, there is no way out of it."
"You would have me simply write brutally and break the engagement at the last
moment without a reason. I tell you I couldn't do it."
"I had a patient once who found himself in a somewhat similar situation some
years ago," said the doctor thoughtfully. "His device was a singular one. He
deliberately committed a penal offence, and so compelled the young lady's people
to withdraw their consent to the marriage."
The young baronet shook his head. "My personal honour is as yet unstained,"
said he. "I have little else left, but that, at least, I will preserve."
"Well, well, it is a nice dilemma, and the choice lies with you."
"Have you no other suggestion?"
"You don't happen to have property in Australia?"
"None."
"But you have capital?"
"Yes."
"Then you could buy some. To-morrow morning would do. A thousand mining
shares would be enough. Then you might write to say that urgent business affairs
have compelled you to start at an hour's notice to inspect your property. That
would give you six months, at any rate."
"Well, that would be possible. Yes, certainly, it would be possible. But
think of her position. The house full of wedding presents—guests coming from a
distance. It is awful. And you say that there is no alternative."
The doctor shrugged his shoulders.
"Well, then, I might write it now, and start to-morrow—eh? Perhaps you would
let me use your desk. Thank you. I am so sorry to keep you from your guests so
long. But I won't be a moment now."
He wrote an abrupt note of a few lines. Then with a sudden impulse he tore it
to shreds and flung it into the fireplace.
"No, I can't sit down and tell her a lie, doctor," he said rising. "We must
find some other way out of this. I will think it over and let you know my
decision. You must allow me to double your fee as I have taken such an
unconscionable time. Now good-bye, and thank you a thousand times for your sympathy and advice."
"Why, dear me, you haven't even got your prescription yet. This is the
mixture, and I should recommend one of these powders every morning, and the
chemist will put all directions upon the ointment box. You are placed in a cruel
situation, but I trust that these may be but passing clouds. When may I hope to hear from you again?"
"To-morrow morning."
"Very good. How the rain is splashing in the street! You have your waterproof
there. You will need it. Good-bye, then, until to-morrow."
He opened the door. A gust of cold, damp air swept into the hall. And yet the
doctor stood for a minute or more watching the lonely figure which passed slowly
through the yellow splotches of the gas lamps, and into the broad bars of
darkness between. It was but his own shadow which trailed up the wall as he
passed the lights, and yet it looked to the doctor's eye as though some huge and
sombre figure walked by a manikin's side and led him silently up the lonely street.
Dr. Horace Selby heard again of his patient next morning, and rather earlier
than he had expected. A paragraph in the Daily News caused him to push away his
breakfast untasted, and turned him sick and faint while he read it. "A
Deplorable Accident," it was headed, and it ran in this way:
"A fatal accident of a peculiarly painful character is reported from King
William Street. About eleven o'clock last night a young man was observed while
endeavouring to get out of the way of a hansom to slip and fall under the wheels
of a heavy, two-horse dray. On being picked up his injuries were found to be of
the most shocking character, and he expired while being conveyed to the
hospital. An examination of his pocketbook and cardcase shows beyond any
question that the deceased is none other than Sir Francis Norton, of Deane Park,
who has only within the last year come into the baronetcy. The accident is made
the more deplorable as the deceased, who was only just of age, was on the eve of
being married to a young lady belonging to one of the oldest families in the
South. With his wealth and his talents the ball of fortune was at his feet, and
his many friends will be deeply grieved to know that his promising career has
been cut short in so sudden and tragic a fashion."
