Mysterious Mr. SabinOppenheim, E. Phillips (Edward Phillips)
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Mysterious Mr. Sabin
Oppenheim, E. Phillips (Edward Phillips)
Detective and mystery stories; Fiction
She nodded, and fetched them from her own room. The water was fresh and
cold, and the towel was of fine linen daintily hemmed, and fragrant with
the perfume of violets. Yet neither of these things, nor the soft warmth
of her breathing upon his cheek, seemed to revive him in the least. He
lay quite still in the same heavy stupor. Mr. Sabin stood upright and
looked at him thoughtfully. His face had grown almost haggard.
"We had better send for a doctor," she whispered fiercely. "I shall
fetch one myself if you do not!"
Mr. Sabin gently dissented.
"I know quite as much as any doctor," he said; "the man is not dead, or
dying, or likely to die. I wonder if we could move him on to that sofa!"
Together they managed it somehow. Mr. Sabin, in the course of his
movements to and fro about the room, was attracted by the sight of the
dogcart still waiting outside. He frowned, and stood for a moment
looking thoughtfully at it. Then he went outside.
"Are you waiting for Lord Wolfenden?" he asked the groom.
The man looked up in surprise.
"Yes, sir. I set him down here nearly an hour ago. I had no orders to go
home."
"Lord Wolfenden has evidently forgotten all about you," Mr. Sabin said.
"He left by the back way for the golf course, and I am going to join him
there directly. He is not coming back here at all. You had better go
home, I should think."
The man touched his hat.
"Very good, sir."
There was a little trampling up of the gravel, and Wolfenden's dogcart
rapidly disappeared in the distance. Mr. Sabin, with set face and a hard
glitter in his eyes went back into the morning room. Helène was still on
her knees by Wolfenden's prostrate figure when he entered. She spoke to
him without looking up.
"He is a little better, I think; he opened his eyes just now."
"He is not seriously hurt," Mr. Sabin said; "there may be some slight
concussion, nothing more. The question is, first, what to do with him,
and secondly, how to make the best use of the time which must elapse
before he will be well enough to go home."
She looked at him now in horror. He was always like this, unappalled by
anything which might happen, eager only to turn every trick of fortune
to his own ends. Surely his nerves were of steel and his heart of iron.
"I think," she said, "that I should first make sure that he is likely to
recover at all."
Mr. Sabin answered mechanically, his thoughts seemed far away.
"His recovery is a thing already assured," he said. "His skull was too
hard to crack; he will be laid up for an hour or two. What I have to
decide is how to use that hour or two to the best possible advantage."
She looked away from him and shuddered. This passionate absorption of
all his energies into one channel had made a fiend of the man. Her
slowly growing purpose took to itself root and branch, as she knelt by
the side of the young Englishman, who only a few moments ago had seemed
the very embodiment of all manly vigour.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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