The House of Doctor Edwards E-Book

Francis Beeding

• Herausgeber: Librorium Editions
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

CONSTANCE Sedgwick, M.D., aged twenty-six, was staring at herself critically in the long mirror. As a young doctor of medicine, with a degree for which she had worked hard and long, she prided herself on being objective. She was looking at herself, so she said, as she had been taught to look at a bacteriological culture under the lens, very steadily and without prejudice.
“How you strike a contemporary — that’s what I want to know,” she said, addressing the figure in the glass. “If I saw you in the street, should I turn to look at you again? You appear to be intelligent, and there is clearly no nonsense about you — or not more than is necessary. If I were a woman I think I should dislike you — yes, you are sufficiently attractive for that. If I were a man —”
But here she paused. She had, she assured herself, no very great interest in what she would think of herself if she were a man.

Leseprobe

THE HOUSE OF DOCTOR EDWARDES

Francis Beeding

1927

© 2023 Librorium Editions

ISBN : 9782383838920

Table of Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Epilogue

Prologue

HOTEL IMPERIAL,

ANNECY,

June 22nd, 1926.

DEAREST HELEN ,

How delightful to get your letter, which we found waiting for us at Thonon. I am sorry about Bingo, poor old boy. I’m afraid you’ll miss him dreadfully. But he was getting old, wasn’t he, and after the vet’s opinion I don’t see what else you could have done.

John is an angel, but I shouldn’t care to take a honeymoon with anybody; so don’t be rash, and if ever you feel in the consenting mood, which so often, happens, pull yourself together and think it over. Fortunately, John and I agree about all the most important things. What I mean is that we both like to sleep with the window open.

We are being shamelessly vulgar. I hate trains and we can’t afford a car. So we are doing the Alps in a charabanc. It was John’s idea, and those P.L.M. autocars are wonderful, so comfortable, and it is the other people who get all the dust. We ran from Paris to Dijon. Such a sweet place, famous for eating, and John and I made pigs of ourselves at the Hotel des Cloches.

We were only trying not to be beaten by the natives, but it was no use. John’s handicap (in courses) must be about minus two.

Last night we slept, or rather lay I believe the expression ought to be, at Thonon-les-Bains, near Evian, on the Lake of Geneva. It is a funny, quiet little place with an old eighteenth-century square and a strange, tumble-down church which no one has troubled to finish.

We stopped three hours at Evian, which is very fashionable. We met the Bryces there. She is looking much better and was most charmingly dressed. [Half a page of details is here omitted.] John lost fifty francs at boule, which he says is a rotten game, but we did not try baccarat.

Then we went for a short trip on the Lake, and saw the Dents du Midi and the Rochers de Naye. I’ve never seen so many mountains; and I’m afraid John is going to be difficult. He was hinting the other day at what they call a petite ascension. You wear horrid clothes, and the most dreadful boots, and hang things on your back till you look like a traveling ironmonger. I prefer the charabanc myself.

But this is not what I was going to write about. For we have had an ADVENTURE. It happened on the way from Thonon to Annecy, via the Col des Gêts. We started late in the morning, as it is not a very long run, and we went up the most lovely valley with woods on each side. Sometimes the road went through tunnels. It was most exciting. I suppose it must have been about midday when it happened. We were turning a corner and I saw a big notice stuck out on the cliff with ‘Gorge du Diable’ written on it. The Devil, by the way, is pretty frequent in these parts. He has gorges and rocks and chimneys in every direction. This one was particularly fiendish. On the left there was a precipice which went down for many hundreds of feet to the river which flowed at the bottom. The precipice was covered with enormous trees, and John was saying (you know how witty he is) that the Devil had an obvious liking for shady surroundings, when we took another corner rather sharply, and the next moment I felt a sudden jerk and John’s hand gripping my knee.

The autocar had stopped, and everybody in front began to talk at once. John got out with some of the others to see what was happening, and I followed him. I rather wish I hadn’t, for it was really rather horrible.

There was a car on the side of the road drawn close into the precipice, and one of the back wheels was off. I think they must have had a puncture or something. There were two men by the car— one with a white face, holding a spanner in his hand, dressed in one of those light raincoats and a soft hat, and another lying apparently insensible on the ground. The man with the spanner was breathing hard as I came up, just behind John, and was talking rapidly to our driver. It’s lucky I understand French, because I had to tell John what he was saying.

‘He was mad, quite mad,’ the man kept on repeating, and I realized he was talking about the other man on the ground, who was, I now saw, bleeding from a dreadful cut on the forehead.

‘He suddenly became violent and attacked our driver', continued the man with the spanner. ‘We were, taken completely by surprise, and it all happened before I could lift a finger. He killed the driver, and then I had to defend myself.’

He held up the spanner, and I saw that it was dull red at the end, and there was that other man lying on the ground. It made me feel quite sick.

The man spoke with a funny accent, and I soon realized that he was English, though his French was very good.

After he had examined the man on the ground and put him in an easier position, he began to explain to us in detail what had happened. Of course, he didn’t make a great long speech, as I shall give it here. It was all broken up in little bits of dialogue, which was as good as a play. That, however, is beyond me.

But first you must imagine what a fearful place it was. A great cliff towering up on our right, bare, except for oak scrub, going up for many feet to the sky. And then a narrow road (much too narrow John said), and then the cliff going down hundreds of feet to a river below. Only below the road it was all covered with trees and very lovely. And opposite was another high mountain on the other side of the valley, and last of all you must see this man with the English accent and the spanner and the silent figure at his feet.

‘It’s like this,’ he was saying; ‘I am a doctor, a specialist in mental cases, and I have just been engaged by Doctor Edwardes, whose private asylum is just up there,’ and he pointed to a little track which ran very steeply up the hill to our right till it was lost in the bushes.

‘Dr. Edwardes,’ he continued, ‘has taken me for his assistant, and I am on my way to join him now. Just as I was leaving England, however, he asked me to bring over a patient, a new patient, you understand, also an Englishman, who was coming out from London. That is the man who is lying there. Normally he is quiet and not at all dangerous — mad only on one subject, and we did not expect to have any difficulty, especially as Dr. Edwardes had sent Jules over to help me.

‘Jules is the head keeper of the asylum, an ex-sergeant of the French marine. He came to London and we traveled together by train all the way to Thonon with our patient. Everything went well until this morning, when we reached Thonon, where we were to pick up the car which was to take us to the asylum. Then our troubles began, for the chauffeur was not to be found. Jules picked up the car at the usual garage, but nothing had been seen of the man in charge of it since the night before. So we started out alone — the three of us, Jules, myself and the patient. Jules drove the car, while I sat with my patient at the back. All went well till we got here, but just at this corner the back tire burst and, if Jules had been less handy with the steering, we should have been over the edge. But he pulled up just in time, and then we all got out and I started to help him change the wheel. Our patient also left the car and began to look about him.

‘We had been at work I suppose for five minutes when it happened. My patient, who had been looking over the edge, to where you can just see a thin trickle of the river after it has leapt in a waterfall from that rock which is nearly hidden, sprang up, and his face changed. I shall never forget how his face changed. ‘The gorge of the devil! The gorge of the devil!’ he screamed. ‘Master! Master! The sacrifice!’ And in an instant, before I could stop him, he rushed at Jules who was just unscrewing the spare wheel, and with a single bound leapt at his shoulders and hurled him over the edge.’

The man paused in his story, and there was a gasp from the passengers of the autocar. I know I clutched John’s arm hard. Then, almost mechanically, we all moved forward and looked over the edge. At first I could see nothing. It was all beautifully green, undergrowth and trees and short grass interspersed with patches of bare rock, but it was frightfully steep, almost perpendicular. Then suddenly a fat Frenchman with a thick beard pointed with his finger.

‘Mon Dieu, look!’ he said. And then I saw an arm and a head, all twisted unnaturally, sticking out of a bush. I must have turned white, for John caught me and pulled me back, telling me rather harshly to get into the car.

I am not quite certain what happened next, but I heard the young English doctor explaining that in self-defence he had been obliged to knock the lunatic out with a spanner or he would have attacked him too. It had all happened only a few minutes before we arrived. After that John spoke to the man with a spanner, explaining that he was a doctor too; and they had a short consultation together while the driver got us back into the car. Presently John came up and told me that he would have to go to the asylum with the young Englishman and his patient, who was quite insensible, but, as far as he could see, not badly hurt.

‘I don’t like leaving you,’ he said, ‘but I feel I must help this poor fellow. He is very much shaken by this horrible affair. He is very good, and has offered to send me on to Annecy in the car when I have helped him with his patient.’

Of course, I said that I did not mind, and so it was arranged. I went on in the charabanc, leaving John and the young doctor to take the unconscious lunatic up to the asylum.

We reached Annecy about five that evening, and John joined me at seven. Everything had gone quite all right, he said, and the asylum was a very well-ordered place, though it was miles away from anywhere. It was a big old château belonging originally to one of the Counts of Savoy, but, of course, converted.

They got the lunatic, who was still insensible, into bed all right in the old wing, in a room which John says had once been a dungeon, though they had knocked a great hole in one of the walls to make a proper window.

The young English doctor was, of course, terribly shaken, and it seems that his principal. Doctor Edwardes, was away, so he had to take charge of everything the moment he arrived.

John said the place was terribly desolate, but there was a large staff of servants. They were all very much upset by the death of Jules, though John said they did not seem to be particularly surprised, as some of the lunatics there are very violent, and accidents have happened before. It seems rather awful looking after a lot of dangerous lunatics in an old castle in the middle of the mountains, and the young English doctor was so nice — much too nice for such a horrible occupation. I can’t think why he should have chosen it, but men are very peculiar.

Well, that’s the adventure, and I am glad it’s over. Annecy looks lovely. We are to stay here a whole day before going on through Aix-les-Bains to Grenoble. I will write to you again from there, and give you our news.

All the love I can spare (but John is very greedy).

Your affectionate

SUSAN.

1

CONSTANCE Sedgwick, M.D., aged twenty-six, was staring at herself critically in the long mirror. As a young doctor of medicine, with a degree for which she had worked hard and long, she prided herself on being objective. She was looking at herself, so she said, as she had been taught to look at a bacteriological culture under the lens, very steadily and without prejudice.

“How you strike a contemporary — that’s what I want to know,” she said, addressing the figure in the glass. “If I saw you in the street, should I turn to look at you again? You appear to be intelligent, and there is clearly no nonsense about you — or not more than is necessary. If I were a woman I think I should dislike you — yes, you are sufficiently attractive for that. If I were a man —”

But here she paused. She had, she assured herself, no very great interest in what she would think of herself if she were a man.

“The really important question,” she went on, talking still into the mirror, “is what Doctor Edwardes will think of you? You don’t look in the least like a person who is devoting her life to medical science, and you would be a fraud if you did. You failed twice before you even got your degree. You took up medicine because you wanted to be independent, and because it was the only profession in which a woman can hope to do really well for herself. And you look it. The shape of your head is all wrong — no high, or even a middle brow, but just as low as they are made; a good chin, but that only means that you are obstinate, and one sees at once that your manner at the bedside will probably discourage the cheerful patients, and kill the pessimists. Perhaps it’s just as well that they are going to be lunatics.”

And here, again, she paused, for now it was time to decide finally what she intended to do. She turned from the looking- glass, and going to her writing table by the window, read again the two letters which she had received from Doctor Edwardes.

“You have now your medical degree,” he wrote. “Never mind about experience; I can promise you plenty of that at Château Landry. I suggest that you should come to me for six months on probation and then we shall see.”

She owed that, of course, to her father, dead these twenty years. If Doctor Edwardes had not been her father’s friend, he would certainly have hesitated to engage a young person who had only just got through the London school by the skin of her teeth. For this was a unique opportunity, which any one of the dozen brilliant young students of her year would have given their heads to secure. Château Landry, House of Rest for the mentally deficient, was famous in the history of mental disease. Specialists in the treatment of insanity in all its forms came from the ends of Europe to visit it and to sit at the feet of its director. Château Landry was no ordinary asylum. Doctor Edwardes chose his patients with care. They were special cases, and no ordinary lunatic need apply. To obtain admission into Château Landry you must first of all be medically interesting, and secondly, as this was a first-class establishment, you must be rich. Fortunately for Doctor Edwardes, lunacy is not confined to the poorer classes, and he had treated in his time more than one poor gentleman who, if he had not been sitting so comfortably in Château Landry, might have been sitting rather less at his ease, though possibly quite as much at home, in the House of Lords.

So much for the first of the letters which she had received from Doctor Edwardes. No girl in her senses would hesitate to jump at such a chance. The second letter, however, was less inviting. Doctor Edwardes had engaged her; but Doctor Edwardes, by the time she arrived, would not be there. The old man, in his zeal for science, had seriously overtaxed his strength, and he had been obliged — no one better qualified to give advice in such a matter — to order himself a rest.

“If I don’t take a holiday and that immediately,” he wrote, “I shall soon have to consider myself as a suitable patient for my own establishment. I am, therefore, leaving my work for three months. Do not, however, hesitate on that account to come to Château Landry. I have engaged a specialist from England, a Doctor Murchison, in whom I have every confidence. He will be in charge by the time you arrive, and I am leaving him precise instructions as to your duties.”

This letter put rather a different complexion on the whole affair, and her friends had not been backward in discouragement. She would be going now to a strange house, a very strange house, if all she had heard of it was true, in the charge of a person unknown, and, though her chin was firm, she felt not perhaps anything quite so definite as hesitation, but certainly a tendency to waver. She had qualms. Yes, that was the word. Qualms. She had them now as, for the last time, she weighed the position all over again.

On the one side were these qualms. On the other was a salary of £150 a year all found, and the beginning of a promising career. There were also the protests of her friends who said that she must on no account set forth upon an adventure so rash and so unmaidenly; observations which made her all the more eager to go.

The struggle was short and decisive. This was a chance which really could not be neglected by any one who felt in the least capable of looking after herself. She had her living to get. She was twenty-six. She was qualified. She was Constance Sedgwick, M.D., and this was her first job. She would sit at the feet of the master (as soon as he returned). Meanwhile, she would show this Doctor Murchison that she merited all the kind things which Doctor Edwardes had doubtless said in her favor.

And now, having made up her mind, she gave free play to her imagination. Her dissections might be lacking in neatness and precision; there were gaps in her knowledge of the pharmacopeia, and she knew nothing at all of mental science. But she intended to do well in her profession, and the chances were all in her favor. She was to assist Doctor Edwardes in his investigations, only a secretary perhaps, but what an opportunity! And what a setting for that awful riddle by which her young intelligence was already intrigued — the riddle of human minds, ruined or deformed, in which, nevertheless, a personality, or soul, call it what you please, must somewhere remain intact, and by some means accessible. She had formed already a picture of Château Landry; it was, she knew, a castle, in fact as well as in name, which had weathered the Middle Ages, and survived even the destructive zeal of Richelieu.

She saw it as described by Doctor Edwardes, high up among the rocks and pines of Savoy, secluded at the end of a secret valley, with one small village about two miles away, a small collection of châlets, with half a dozen stone houses and a single inn.

There, behind the impenetrable walls, in rooms formerly strewn with rushes and hung with tapestry, she would find, incongruously, every modern comfort and device— modern science in possession of an ancient stronghold.

Modern science, perhaps, dauntless, inquisitive, throwing its feeble ray into the heart of darkness. But where was its victory? Central heating and electric light, a little reasonable care of sick bodies, a little insight into the mechanism of a brain diseased — were these the sum of its achievement in face of the enigma with which it was confronted in that House of Rest?

IT WAS A BAD crossing, whatever the offensive young man next behind her when she crossed the gangway might maintain. His remark, “Nothing like a good breath of sea air; freshens your face up so,” delivered in the tone of one who was a good sailor, or a hearty Christian, or a crashing bore, irritated her almost to the point of comment. Why not, at least, be accurate? Sea air was not good for the complexion, and the rolling of the channel steamer was worse, even though you did not happen to be really ill.

Luckily, however, the ordeal was brief, and soon she was struggling forward to the firm land of France, tightly wedged in the crowd, trying not to be parted from her handbag, despatch case, passport and landing ticket — murmuring below her breath, as though it were of mystical significance, the number 179 stamped in greasy brass on the cap of the Calais porter who had possessed himself of her suitcase while he had gestured with some one else’s towards the douanes. Thrust eventually past a shabby French official, redolent of garlic, sweat and sour wine, who glanced at her passport upside down, she found herself, bewildered by the noise and squalor of her surroundings, trying hard to overcome her conviction that the English were a superior people. The neat officials of Dover, its clean customs house, the dignified figure of the English stationmaster in his dark blue uniform, — these were behind her, symbols of the law, order and familiar standards of the land for which she was already homesick. In their place was a seething rabble, unwashed and insolent, yet oh so eager for the hundred sous with which its services must be rewarded.

“Must pull myself together,” thought Constance, some minutes later, when she had successfully passed through the customs house without having had to open her bag, “or I shall develop a francophobe complex.”

She found her registered luggage, which was opened and very perfunctorily searched. But there again she happened to be unfortunate, for the official fumbling among her silk underclothes shot a glance at her capable of only one interpretation. “Filthy beasts,” was her comment, aimed, to be fair, less at the man in front of her than at the sex in general.

Constance had viewed with mingled dislike and pity such young men as had attempted any sentimental advances towards her, but anything in the nature of the purely animal instinct disgusted her. Men were like that, children in the open expression of their impulses, curiously unable to hide their primitive emotions.

The train for a wonder arrived punctually at the Gare du Nord, and at a quarter to seven Constance found herself at the little hotel on the Quai Voltaire where she had stayed on a previous occasion when she had found herself in Paris. Her windows overlooked the Seine, and, as she brushed her hair and got herself ready to dine in one of the little restaurants of the quartier before going to the play, she watched the barges drifting slowly down the Seine between the zinc cases of the second-hand bookstalls and the classic outline of the Louvre on the farther bank. The evening sky to the west was a golden haze, and the city lay like Danaë beneath the shower. The floating dust was of gold, and that golden light on the river was filtered through the thin veils of the poplars beside the water. Through the open window came the noisy riot of Paris, so different from the dull roar of London or the staccato rattle of New York. Each noise was individual, and swiftly identified. The sharp querulous hoot of taxis, the rumbling of a great autobus over the cobbles, with its rear platform packed with humanity like the overgrown garrison of a mediæval castle as depicted in the margins of illuminated MSS, the slow click-clock of hoofs with the crack and rattle of a cart carrying empty bottles and siphons, and every now and again the beat of waves against the stone parapets as some river steamer bustled on its way to Auteuil.

She dined in a little restaurant in the Rue Jacob where, calling for an evening paper, she saw that a new play of H. R. Lenormand was being performed at the Odéon, near at hand. She was not particularly “up” in the French theater, but she had heard of Lenormand from one of her medical friends in London, who had taken up psycho-analysis.

“Pretty useful point of view,” he had told her. “He dramatizes the subconscious, you know. It’s like a lot of complexes walking about; very chatty they are, too, and most informing.”

She bought a fauteuil and was soon watching a performance of “La Dent Rouge.” Now and then she wondered at the chance that had brought her to that particular place on that particular evening. For it seemed curiously to fit in with her present adventure. It might even be taken for a gipsy’s warning. Was she not on her way to wrestle with just those powers of evil which all through the play were militant and in the end victorious? There too, on the stage, was just that mountain village which lay at the gates of Château Landry. That girl on the stage might be the shadow of herself.

She watched the progress of the play with a curious, intimate excitement. That girl had come back to her native village. She had, in the ordinary sense, been educated. She had outgrown the primitive superstitions which still linger in the remoter Alpine valleys. And that young peasant had married her, drawn towards beauty and freedom, defying the ignorance and cruelty of his kind. Would they not together be able to defeat the suggestions of the credulous folk who through the long winter went softly in fear of the demons of the mountain? But no; inexorably as the winter closed down on them, bringing with it the terrible, intimate seclusion of a primitive community cut off from every form of intelligent life, the demons of the mountain recovered their dominion even over the souls of those who had seemed to elude it. And now the young peasant, for all his proud defiance, was dead, and the girl a sorceress who had slain him with an evil thought.

Constance, that night, slept badly. Most of the time, indeed, she was in a state between waking and dreaming. Pictures and phrases came and went in her tired brain, and she allowed them to pass, occasionally trying to give them form and coherence. Was she dreaming now, or was she really lying under the rafters in an Alpine valley? The old man had died, and, because it was winter, and the ground frozen to the hardness of steel, they were unable to bury him in the earth. Besides, they would not bury him in any case, though she had begged them to do so. It was his right to lie up there, out on the roof, just above her head, rigid and brittle, staring up at the sky. Did they defraud the old man of his right, he would wander in a cold wrath for ever among the mountains, or come down among the hamlets, pressing his haunted face against the pane. So he must lie up there till the earth was soft enough to bed him. And now she was explaining all this to Doctor Edwardes, who smiled and pointed to the roof of Château Landry, where, neatly, in long rows, they lay side by side, smiling stiffly up at the stars. “Every modern convenience,” he was saying. But she had thought it was only a dormitory.

And there was Doctor Murchison. She looked quickly at his left foot, but it was really human, and he seemed to be quite a pleasant young man, and she asked him whether it might not be insanitary. “No,” he said at once, “not till the spring sets in, and then, of course, we shall be obliged to put them in the ground.” And suddenly it was spring, and there was a huge fellow who came down from the forest with a gigantic pick slung over his shoulder. He attacked the ground with heavy blows — knocking — knocking.

It was the chambermaid who entered, with coffee and rolls.

SHE traveled all that day, with the exception of an hour spent in the restaurant car, with two American tourists and a French officer on leave. The chatter of the tourists got on her nerves, and she answered abruptly the few questions which they put to her, mostly about the country through which they were passing. The French officer paid no attention to any one, but sat reading a book whose title stared at her almost pointedly: “Sous le Soleil de Satan.”

She arrived at about four in the afternoon at Thonon, having been fortunate enough to catch the connection at Bellegarde.

And now she was on the threshold, and she gazed about her with interest. Beyond the steep-built town shimmered the Lake of Geneva, a trap for all the rays of the sun; embracing it were the gracious lines of the Jura, while, far away, across the water, the light, striking the windows in houses at Ouchy and Lausanne, signaled meaninglessly across the air. She went into the station courtyard, dusty and surrounded by shabby houses. There appeared to be no one to meet her, but as she stood, uncertain what to do, a dusty Citroen, with the hood up to protect the driver from the glare of the summer day, came to a stand beside her with a grinding of brakes.

“Pour le Château Landry?” said the man at the wheel, who in his linen coat with blue cuffs and flat cap presented a very tolerable imitation of a smart chauffeur.

Constance assented, and the man, taking her luggage, which he stowed at the back of the car, opened the door and invited her to enter. Constance, however, elected to sit beside him, considering the wind screen would protect her from the dust.

They drove off, and the chauffeur apologized for not having brought the big Voisin, which he said, was under repair.

The car turned to the right and began to run up a river (the Dranse, so the chauffeur informed her) through a narrow valley into the hills. The lake was behind her, and the pleasant plain with its villages and vines and orchards. In front was the climbing road, overawed by limestone crags. The road ran on beside the stream, alternately to the right and to the left, through rough-hewn tunnels, and they passed great rocks whose feet were set in foam. Soon the road began to climb more steeply, and, leaving the river, they reached the narrowest part of the valley, which was here only some two hundred yards broad.

“Encore dix minutes,” said the chauffeur, and he pointed vaguely ahead.

Here the mountain side rose abruptly on her right, covered with undergrowth and scrub, with bare patches of grass and rock and straggling pines, while on the left the river was lost amid a tangle of rocks and trees. They swept round a bend, and came upon a notice board painted in red and clamped to the naked rock: “Gorge du Diable,” and an arrow pointed to the left down the mountain side which now dropped sheer from the road. Constance glanced over the edge of the car. The gorges, whatever they were, were below her, hidden in the woods, but above the distress of the little Citroen she could hear the sound of water, remote and terrible, crying through the leaves of the wood beneath her, whose giant trees seemed from that height to be no more than shrubs and whose leaves held no bird or any living thing.

The place was terrible in its desolation, yet kindly in the sunlight, for it was green with the late grass of a mountain summer, and the trees bore their full panoply of foliage. Then, suddenly, a new sound broke on her ears. Thin and shrill it rose in the afternoon air, a queer note of desperate hope and a sadness which would never be appeased. The car swept round a bend of the road and abruptly stopped.

Before her moved a strange company. First came an old man in a faded livery of scarlet and black, bearing a rusty halberd fringed with frayed crimson cord, and an old rapier at his side. There followed after him a mountain lad with red cheeks and the eyes of an ox, his great boots roughly cleaned and the frayed ends of his corduroy trousers showing beneath a black cassock, too short by a foot, over which he wore a white surplice. He bore in his hands a black pole surmounted by a silver crucifix, the polished figure of the dying Christ flashing in the afternoon sun. At his side walked two small boys, out of step, one carrying a censer which he swung noisily from side to side, and which glowed red, and the other a pewter basin holding a wet draggled brush at the end of a brass handle. Next came six peasants in their Sunday black, their heads bare and glistening with the heat. They walked in step, very slowly, bearing upon their shoulders a pine coffin, very new, with a brass plate on the lid and two ornate handles. Then came three children, carrying wreaths of immortelles, the waxen flowers twined fantastically about with black wire. There followed three or four women, dressed in black, one of whom was weeping, and finally the priest, in a crumpled alb, dusty and bedraggled at the edges, trimmed with soiled lace, a great black cope edged with silver askew across his shoulders. He held a book whose greasy pages were covered with unfamiliar black notes and hieroglyphics, and as he passed the car his voice rose, thin and out of tune, crying out the melody Inparadisum perducant te angeli. But his voice cracked on the final word. The crowd, before and after him, tried to follow the chant, fumbling with the books they held, clasped in fat fingers with broken nails.

The chauffeur, as the coffin passed him, took off his hat and crossed himself. Constance bowed her head, but quickly raised it again, gazing with wide curious eyes on the pageant.

It was then that she perceived, following apart, a tall young man, with a black frock coat and a bared head. His silk hat glistened in his hand, and he looked what he evidently was, the smart young medical practitioner, as strange an apparition among the dusty villagers as could well be imagined.

As he passed the car he turned his head, and his eyes met for an instant those of Constance.

He smiled and made a little motion of his hands, and she noticed that above his right eye was a big strip of plaster. Then he passed on with the procession, among the dust and the singing.

“That is the new doctor,” said the chauffeur in a low voice “He is following my murdered colleague to his grave.”

2

FOR A MOMENT she hesitated. Already the chauffeur had left the car and had joined the procession with the villagers. She did not wish to intrude upon a ceremony in which she had no real call to participate; but, equally, on the other hand, she felt she must avoid remaining too conspicuously aloof.

Finally, she descended from the car and unobtrusively followed the crowd; and, very soon, she began to lose her sense of being an interloper, and to be affected along with the rest.

The procession plodded forward in the dust, away from the village, and up the hillside, where the grass was a vivid green, until presently they turned a corner and found themselves entering a little cemetery. It was surrounded by a white wall of stuccoed stone and contained a series of graves, most of them hung or overlaid with the wire skeletons of decaying wreaths, and shabby immortelles. Here she waited for some moments, gazing at the great shoulder of the mountain behind, the blue sky without a cloud, and far away a hawk or an eagle, she did not know which, swaying on spread pinions, balanced in the easy air.

It was not like an English funeral, she reflected. People were not silent with grief. Rather they were disposed to comment, without reserve, and, when the hymn was done, the chatter became quite general as the bearers lowered the coffin on to a framework of low trestles by the open grave. The young man with the cross stood now at the head, and the old priest, clearing his throat and spitting to the side of the path, began the prayers which consign the body to its native earth.

She could not follow the mumbled Latin, or understand the practiced, mechanical gestures of the priest as he sprinkled with water the wooden shell, and presently motioned with his hand to the bearers to lower it into the grave.

The young doctor stood bareheaded, a little apart, while the villagers filed one by one before the open grave, casting into it handfuls of earth which rattled dryly on the coffin lid below.

She noticed after a time that the villagers eyed him curiously, and not, she fancied, without hostility. One woman, indeed, wearing the customary black of the Savoy peasant, pulled her child, a small boy of eight or nine, sideways as they passed him by.

The young doctor appeared to take no notice of this, but gazed with absorption at the priest and at the acolytes, who, now that the ceremony was over, were preparing to depart with a callous disregard of the solemnity due to the occasion. The acolyte bearing the cross slung it across his shoulder, as though it were a vine pole or a pitchfork, and pushed quickly towards the gate of the cemetery, cuffing automatically one of the smaller boys who got in his way. The cross which he was carrying cast an edged shadow on the white wall of the cemetery, and his sudden movement disturbed the balance of the pole, so that the shadow flickered and then ran swiftly up the body of the young doctor from his feet to his head, to become still and clear-cut again as the acolyte paused to settle the pole more firmly on his shoulders. The young doctor started nervously, almost as though it had been the heavy metal cross itself and not the shadow which had struck him.

AT THAT instant he caught sight of Constance. For just an instant he paused, and she was aware of his eyes looking deeply for a moment into her own. Then he held out his hand.

“I am sorry,” he said simply. “This is hardly a good beginning.”

“You are Doctor Murchison, of course,” she answered.

“And you are Doctor Sedgwick,” he replied.

He fell into step by her side, and they began to descend the hill together.

“I am glad you have come,” he went on. “I may hope now to share my responsibility.”

It was kindly said. She felt grateful to the man who welcomed her, almost on equal terms, as a colleague, and looking at him in the light of his observations, she was disposed to be less critical than usual. Not that she had anything to criticize. The man was good looking, and he carried himself sufficiently well to obliterate the effect of the clothes he wore. She could not say that, even on that mountain side, his frock coat made him ridiculous or definitely out of place. He moved easily, and with a curious precision. The eyes, which she had seen very directly for a moment, were observant, but they were the eyes of a man who, in his time, had visions. His features were very regular, in fact, almost inhumanly faultless; and his hair was dark, with a tendency to curl which apparently he helped it to resist.

He surprised her in the course of her covert inspection just as she was noting again the strip of plaster over his right eye.

“You have had an accident?” she said, as though to justify her interest in his appearance.

“Why, of course,” he answered, in some surprise. “Is it possible you don’t know what has happened?”

“I have only just arrived.”

“But the chauffeur,” he began.

“He was not very talkative.”

“But you passed the place where it happened.”

His eyes which had been looking at her with curiosity suddenly contracted.

“Don’t you remember,” he added, “down there in the Valley — the Gorge du Diable?”

“Yes. I remember the Gorge.”

“I was bringing a patient out from England. He took me by surprise and killed one of the keepers— Jules, poor fellow, who has just been laid to rest this afternoon. I had to handle him at last myself.”

The young doctor appeared to be much moved by his memory of the scene. She saw that he was trembling, and that his hands were tightly shut.

“How perfectly dreadful,” she said, feeling at once that her words were curiously stilted.

“It was all over in a minute,” he assured her.

Then with an effort, as though he were trying hard to recover control of his nerves, and to be normal again, he added almost jauntily:

“I laid him out with a spanner.”

Constance gave a little cry of horror, and Doctor Murchison ran on hastily.

“It was the only thing to do,” he said. “Luckily the man was not severely hurt — just a slight concussion. But I shall have to be specially careful of him in future.”

He looked at her a moment, as though to see how she was taking it.

“I told you it was a bad beginning,” he said.

They were still walking down the hill, and Constance noted that the villagers along the road drew well aside, affecting for the most part not to notice them at all as they passed. “You will understand my distress,” continued the doctor, almost as though he were trying to account for his previous emotion.

“Why, of course,” she replied, feeling now that she had herself been rather callous.

“You see,” he went on eagerly, “this is my first real chance, and I was naturally very anxious that everything should go well from the start. And then this happens.” She felt herself suddenly warm to the young man. He was, it seemed, in the same position as herself. This was also his start in life.

“Anything I can do,” she murmured.

For a while they were silent. They had left the last of the villagers behind them on the road, and Constance felt strangely relieved to be rid of them. No one had saluted them, and their aloofness, obviously not mere indifference, for she was conscious all the while of their furtive interest, had begun to get on her nerves.

She would, however, have made no comment on their behavior, if it had not been for her encounter — for it seemed almost like an encounter, though no word was spoken — with the woman who during the ceremony by the graveside had drawn her child away from contact with the doctor. This woman had preceded them down the hillside and had already reached the door of her house, a wretched structure of wood. As they passed it she raised her head and looked at Constance with something like an appeal in her eyes. Constance met them steadily, but the woman’s eyes did not fall as she had expected. They continued to stare at her. Then, all at once, the poor creature shook her head violently two or three times, as though reproving a naughty child from a distance. Constance passed on, but as she walked down the road, she felt that the appealing eyes still followed her, so that it needed a distinct effort of self-control to prevent her turning round.

“What curious people these are,” she said almost involuntarily. “They seem to be — how shall I put it — hostile.”

“Oh, the villagers,” replied Doctor Murchison, indifferently. “That, after all, is only natural. You must remember that the people in these remote villages are still in the Middle Ages. They believe even now in witchcraft and are full of curious superstitions. They don’t like us, or Doctor Edwardes for that matter. They are afraid of Château Landry and of our patients there, and nothing would induce any one of them to go near it after dark. They are convinced that mad people are possessed by devils. Indeed, Doctor Edwardes told me that when he first began his work here the village priest called on him to offer his services as an exorcist.”

“But that hardly explains their hostility to us,” replied Constance. “You can’t describe them as friendly, can you?” Doctor Murchison smiled.

“No,” he answered. “They are, as you say, hostile, but I find it only natural. They cannot understand the great work Doctor Edwardes is doing in Château Landry. To them it is full of terrors, and we, who live there, are suspected of I don’t know what — commerce with the Evil One at the very least. Then, of course, this last affair has made a very bad impression. The man who was killed was a native of the village— very popular in spite of his being a servant of Doctor Edwardes. I am told that he used to laugh at the misgivings of his friends, who said no good would come of his service at the castle. I suppose they regard his death as a kind of judgment.”

He turned to her with an engaging smile.

“You see we shall have to stand together,” he concluded, “We are not likely to make many friends outside.”

BY THIS TIME they had reached the car in which Constance had traveled from Thonon. They entered it, and, turning to the right just short, of the village, soon found themselves climbing a steep road which ran in a series of zigzags up the mountain side, first through upland meadows of short, unbelievably green grass starred with flowers, and then, as they mounted higher, through the first outposts of the fir trees, which in serried ranks marched up to meet the naked rock at the summit of all. And as they slipped from the afternoon sunlight into the shadow of the forest, Constance felt suddenly an emotion to which she could give no name or cause. It seemed as though she entered into another world, a world of clean air and sweetest fragrance, shut in by mountain tops of stone which she knew (and the knowledge was in itself a pang of swift delight) would soon turn orange and rose till they faded to somber gold and a violet shadow.