"No. I think I am right in saying that." But something was worrying him.
"Perhaps it is also right," he continued, with the engaging candor of an
overthrown reserve, "and only fair--since I take it you are coming--to
tell you that there was a fellow with us who thought he saw things. But
it was all the most utter moonshine. He saw brown devils in flowing
robes, but what he'd taken before he saw them I can't tell you! He
didn't stay with me long enough for us to get to know each other. But he
wasn't just a servant, and it was before the poor gardener's affair.
Like so many old soldiers on the shelf, Doctor Dollar, I am writing a
book, and I run a secretary of sorts; now it's Jim Paley, a nephew of
ours; and thank God he has more sense."
"Yet even he gets depressed?"
"He has had cause. If our own kith and kin behaved like one
possessed----" He stopped himself yet again; this time his hand found
Dollar's with a vibrant grip. "You will come, won't you? I can meet any
train on Saturday, or any other day that suits you better. I--for her
own sake, doctor--I sometimes feel it might be better if she went away
for a time. But you will come and see her for yourself?"
Before he left it was a promise; a harder heart than John Dollar's would
have ended by making it, and putting the new case before all others when
the Saturday came. But it was not only his prospective patient whom the
crime doctor was now really anxious to see; he felt fascinated in
advance by the scene and every person of an indubitable drama, of which
at least one tragic act was already over.
There was no question of meeting him at any station; the wealthy mother
of a still recent patient had insisted on presenting Doctor Dollar with
a fifteen-horse-power Talboys, which he had eventually accepted, and
even chosen for himself (with certain expert assistance), as an
incalculable contribution to the Cause. Already the car had vastly
enlarged his theater of work; and on every errand his heart was
lightened and his faith fortified by the wonderful case of the young
chauffeur who sat so upright at the wheel beside him. In the beginning
he had slouched there like the worst of his kind; it was neither precept
nor reprimand which had straightened his back and his look and all about
him. He was what John Dollar had always wanted--the unconscious patient
whose history none knew--who himself little dreamed that it was all
known to the man who treated him almost like a brother.
The boy had been in prison for dishonesty; he was being sedulously
trusted, and so taught to trust himself. He had come in March, a sulky
and suspicious clod; and now in June he could talk cricket and sixpenny
editions from the Hounslow tram-lines to the wide white gate opening
into a drive through a Berkshire wood, with a house lurking behind it in
a mask of ivy, out of the sun.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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