VI

It was the eighth of November, a day which, though she never realised it, altered the whole of Ivy Lexton’s life. And this was the more extraordinary because she was usually quick enough to realise the importance of everything that concerned herself.

But on this day she was feeling secretly excited, anxious, and what to herself she called “nervy,” for her husband’s illness, though it had only lasted just over a week, seemed to her intolerably long-drawn-out.

Jervis Lexton, poor devil, was putting up a grim, instinctive fight for life. Coming of a long line of sporting, out-of-door, country squires and their placid wives, he was magnificently healthy, hard-bitten, and possessed of reserves of physical strength on which he was now drawing daily larger and larger drafts.

On the morning when she had first been told that Jervis had been taken ill in the night, Ivy had gone down to Rushworth’s city office. There, as she put it afterwards when telling the invalid of her interview with Mr. James, the man he called his boss, “red carpets had been put down for her,” and no difficulty at all had been made as to Lexton’s staying away.

As a matter of fact, the young man had very soon been sized up as being, from a business point of view, hopeless. But his pleasant, easy manners, and his inexhaustible fund of small talk and of good stories, amused the boss. Also⁠—and that, naturally, was the one thing that mattered⁠—Jervis Lexton was a pet of Miles Rushworth.

After Mrs. Jervis Lexton’s visit to the office, however, what had seemed a mystery had been at any rate partially explained. What man, so Rushworth’s London agent asked himself smiling, could resist that deliciously pretty and sweet-mannered little woman? No wonder a job had been invented for her husband, who was, after all, a decent chap.

A day was to come when Mr. James would try to remember how Ivy Lexton had impressed him, and when all he would succeed in remembering, very vividly, was how agreeable that impression had been, and how touchingly the lovely lady had revealed her devotion to her husband, fortunate Jervis Lexton.

On the second day Jervis had said he felt so queer that he would like to see their old friend, Dr. Lancaster. And by now, after five days, that genial general practitioner, though utterly unsuspicious of the truth, was nevertheless becoming slightly uneasy at the persistence of the illness.

He had insisted, much against Ivy’s will, on sending in a nurse, a placid, kindly woman named Bradfield, who had often nursed for the doctor before.

Small wonder that the patient’s wife was also becoming just a little fretful, and more than a little anxious. How long, she often asked herself restlessly, was her ordeal going to last?

Yet another fact added to Ivy Lexton’s discomfort during those long days of waiting.

That fact, or rather problem, concerned Roger Gretorex. She found it increasingly difficult to prevent him from coming to the flat. When alone with her he made no secret of his dislike of meeting her husband on “Hail fellow, well met!” terms, and yet he longed to be with her every moment of his scanty leisure.

At times she felt she almost hated him, for by now her whole mind was filled with the thought of Rushworth, and of all that she felt convinced Rushworth was going to mean in her life. But she could not yet afford to break with Gretorex. Afford, indeed, was still the right word, for again he was supplying her with what had always been to Ivy the staff of life⁠—petty cash.

But she came to one great resolution, and that was to go no more to the humble little house in the Westminster slum with which she had now a secret, terrifying association. And so, as her slightest wish was law to Gretorex, the two began meeting now in a picture gallery, or, when it was a fine day, in Kensington Gardens, which was conveniently near the charming flat the Lextons owed to the generous kindness of Miles Rushworth.

So far Ivy had managed to conceal her husband’s illness from Gretorex. With regard to that mysterious illness, it was of her lover, and of her lover alone, that up to now she had felt afraid.

As a matter of fact Roger Gretorex had already completely forgotten that idle talk of theirs concerning the Branksome poisoning mystery. But every word that had been uttered during the evening when she had had supper at Ferry Place, and every moment that she had spent in the surgery, remained uncannily present to Ivy’s mind.

And now, on this eighth of November, she had been out for an hour, looking into the shop windows which line Kensington High Street. She had even gone into one famous emporium and bought a new, and very expensive, black model hat. Though quite unobtrusive in shape, it was at once as simple and as unusual as only a French model hat can be. She had felt that she might have cause to be really very much put out if that perfect little hat were bought, over her head so to speak, during the next few days.

At last, feeling more cheerful, she walked briskly back to the Duke of Kent Mansion. The pleasant-spoken porter⁠—all men, even lift porters, were always pleasant-spoken to Ivy Lexton⁠—took her up in the lift. She let herself in with her latchkey, for she always liked slipping in and out of the flat alone.

As she went through the hall towards her charming bedroom, the door of her husband’s room opened, and Nurse Bradfield came out, looking flustered and worried.

“Mr. Lexton doesn’t seem so well, and as we haven’t seen Dr. Lancaster for two days, I telephoned to say I’d like him to come now. But oh, Mrs. Lexton, such a dreadful thing has happened!”

Under her delicately applied rouge, the colour drifted from Ivy’s face.

“Something dreadful?” she repeated mechanically.

“Yes, indeed, for Dr. Lancaster has gone and broken his leg playing golf! He was staying with his brother-in-law at Seaford, for one night only, but now he’s laid up there, and they don’t know for how long.”

Ivy’s first feeling was one of relief. She had been so dreadfully frightened just now lest “something” should have been found out.

But even so, as the nurse went on speaking, there did come over her a slight feeling of misgiving.

“However, Dr. Berwick, the doctor who works in with Dr. Lancaster, so to speak, is coming round instead!” Nurse Bradfield continued.

“I hope he’s nice,” said Ivy earnestly.

The accident to Dr. Lancaster was real bad luck. He was a dear old thing, and so truly fond of her. When they had been almost penniless, he had attended her twice for nothing.

There came a curious look over the nurse’s face. She hesitated, and then made up her mind to be frank.

“To tell you the truth, Mrs. Lexton, I don’t much like Dr. Berwick! But then I’m prejudiced, for I once had a nasty little scrap with him when I was nursing another case for Dr. Lancaster. I consider that Dr. Berwick was very rude to me.”

“How horrid of him!” exclaimed Ivy sympathetically, although she had not really been attending to what Nurse Bradfield was saying.

But she did listen, with startled attention, when the nurse suddenly added:

“However, he’s said to be very clever, and he’s much more up-to-date than Dr. Lancaster. I shouldn’t be a bit surprised if Dr. Berwick finds out what really is the matter with Mr. Lexton!”

Ivy stared fearfully at the speaker, and again there swept over her a strong feeling of misgiving, if not of fear.

Thus was effected the entrance of Dr. Berwick into the lives of Ivy Lexton and her husband.

In spite of his shrewdness and long professional experience, it took the new doctor some days to become even vaguely puzzled⁠—so true is it that murder is the one chink in the armour of a civilised community⁠—over certain unusual features in his patient’s case.

On the occasion of his first visit to Jervis Lexton, Dr. Berwick had been in a great hurry, and though he had seen his new patient’s wife for a few moments, he had impatiently dismissed her from his mind as a foolish, frivolous little woman. Indeed, considering the manner of man he was, he could hardly have told, after that brief interview in the dimly lighted hall, whether young Mrs. Lexton was pretty, or just ordinary, though he had noticed, with disapproval, that she was very much made up.

Ivy on her side, if feeling slightly surprised by the doctor’s lack of interest in her attractive self, was at the same time reassured by the fact that Dr. Berwick evidently thought her husband only suffering from a temporary, if obstinate ailment, brought on, most probably, by something he had eaten during the evening which had preceded the night he had first been taken ill.

And yet her feeling of misgiving prevailed so far that she deliberately tried to keep out of the new doctor’s way. This was quite easy, for she was out to most meals, and owing to Lexton’s illness she had stopped giving her pleasant little bridge-parties at the flat.

But as the days dragged on, as Jervis Lexton, instead of responding to treatment, grew steadily worse, Dr. Berwick began to feel really puzzled. He made up his mind one day to see Mrs. Lexton. On that day Ivy was going to be motored to Brighton by a new admirer, and she had said she would come in after lunch to fetch her fur coat. So the doctor, believing she would be back soon, waited for her. But the moments became minutes, and the minutes mounted up to close on half an hour.

Feeling very much annoyed, he was just about to leave the flat, when Ivy walked into the drawing-room, looking, as he instantly acknowledged to himself, charmingly pretty and gay.

“I waited to see you, Mrs. Lexton, because I am not satisfied with your husband’s condition. From what the nurse tells me, Dr. Lancaster was puzzled too, though he said nothing of that in the notes he sent me concerning the case.”

Then, almost in spite of himself, he was touched by the look of distress which at once shadowed her lovely face, and it was in a kinder tone that he went on:

“If he does not pick up in the next day or two, I should very much like to have another opinion. Will you try to persuade him to see a specialist?”

“Of course I will,” she said quickly. “Though he can’t bear any fuss made over him, poor old boy! He very much objected to our having a nurse; but she’s such a comfort to me.”

Dr. Berwick disliked Nurse Bradfield. He thought her slow and old-fashioned. So now he told himself that, though she might be a comfort to Mrs. Lexton, he would far prefer a different kind of nurse to tend one as ill as he now realised Jervis Lexton to be.

He looked fixedly at his patient’s wife, debating within himself whether he ought to impart to her a suspicion which was beginning, only beginning, to touch his mind. Now and again, during the last two days, he had felt a slight, half-doubting suspicion as to whether certain untoward symptoms could possibly mean that Lexton was absorbing some form of irritant poison. But even to hint or half-imply such possibility is a very serious thing to do from a doctor’s point of view, and so he fell back on what seemed the wiser course of recommending a second opinion.

“Do you think Dr. Lancaster will be away long?” asked Ivy. “He’s such an old friend of mine,” and she smiled, a pretty, disarming little smile. “I know you’re ever so much more clever than he is⁠—”

Dr. Berwick interrupted harshly, “That’s quite untrue! Dr. Lancaster has had ten times the experience I’ve had, and I take my hat off to him every time. But I fear he’s not likely to be back for a long time. You see, he’s no longer a young man, and it is a great chance for him to be invalided away from home, and where he can’t be got at by the kind attentions of friends and⁠—patients.”

The next day an untoward thing happened which, though it seemed at the time of very little account, was yet to prove of considerable moment.

Roger Gretorex ran across a Mrs. Horley, whom he had often met in Ivy’s company in the now faraway days when he would go anywhere, and everywhere, just to see her, and to hold her hand for a moment. Mrs. Horley naturally alluded to Jervis Lexton’s illness, and was evidently much surprised to find that it was all news to him. To everyone but Gretorex, Ivy constantly mentioned her husband’s unfortunate condition, and expressed some measure of anxiety.

Though only half believing Mrs. Horley’s tale, or rather believing that Lexton was suffering from some slight indisposition, Gretorex went off to the flat, only to find that Ivy was out, as usual.

The cook had opened the front door. She knew Gretorex quite well by sight, for in the early days of the Lextons being there, he had been an occasional visitor.

He listened to her wordy account of “the master’s” illness; and then the nurse, hearing voices in the hall, opened her patient’s door.

“Nurse! This is Dr. Gretorex, a great friend of the master and missus,” said cook, retreating down the corridor towards her kitchen.

Nurse Bradfield, who found life very dull just now, was pleased to see the fine-looking young man⁠—a doctor, too.

“Will you ask Mr. Lexton if he would care to see me?” asked Gretorex.

He felt he could do nothing less, as he was there, and Ivy was out.

Poor Jervis eagerly, even joyfully, welcomed the suggestion, and the nurse left the two young men together. They talked of all kinds of things⁠—things that interested Lexton rather than Gretorex.

At last the visitor rose. “I’ll be going now⁠—”

“Must you? I get so bored lying here. I wish, old chap, you could think of something that would make me feel the thing again? I don’t think much of Ivy’s Dr. Lancaster. Besides, he’s just broken his leg!”

Then he went into details of what had become his wretched case, and, after having heard him out, Gretorex produced a paper pad and a fountain pen. Rapidly he began writing out a prescription, and he was so absorbed in what he was doing that he did not hear the bedroom door open.

Dr. Berwick, who was tired, having been up all night over an anxious case, stared with anger, as well as amazement, at his as yet unknown colleague.

“Hallo!” cried Jervis, trying to lift himself up from the pillow, for he had become very weak. “Here’s a lark! An impromptu consultation, eh?”

Then, as even he realised that Dr. Berwick looked like a thundercloud, as he afterwards expressed it to the nurse, he went on, apologetically: “I was joking of course! Gretorex, this is Dr. Berwick, who has taken over Dr. Lancaster’s patients.”

Then, looking at Berwick, he went on: “Dr. Gretorex is a great friend of mine and Ivy’s. He came in just now, and I told him about my poor dry throat and asked him if he could think of something that might give me a little relief. You don’t mind, do you?”

Dr. Berwick waited a moment. Then he said, in far from a pleasant tone:

“Well, to tell you the truth, I do mind. You are my patient, Mr. Lexton, not Dr. Gretorex’s patient.”

Gretorex rose from the chair on which he had been sitting close to the sick man’s bed. The colour rushed up all over his dark face. He said stiffly, cursing Lexton for a fool the while:

“Mr. Lexton had just told me that Dr. Lancaster has broken his leg. I had no idea that someone else had already taken over the case⁠—”

There followed an awkward silence between the two men. Dr. Berwick was waiting for the formal apology which the other did not consider it necessary to tender to him.

At last Gretorex took the piece of paper on which he had written out a prescription for a soothing mixture and tore it in two.

“Well, Lexton,” he exclaimed, “I’ll be off now, leaving you, I’m sure, in excellent hands! Tell Mrs. Lexton I came in. I’ve been so awfully busy this last fortnight that I haven’t had a minute to myself. I’ve taken over for a friend a practice in Westminster for a bit. It’s in a slum, and means a lot of work⁠—”

“And precious little pay, eh?” said Lexton.

Roger Gretorex smiled grimly, “But it’s all experience.”

Then he went out of the room, with just a cool nod to the other doctor.

It was a very different Dr. Berwick who at eight that same evening finished eating his well-cooked, daintily-served dinner. Janey Berwick was what her husband’s old friends called, with truth, a thoroughly nice woman. After their early marriage she and her husband had had a bitter struggle, but that had only made them come the closer to one another, and now that he was beginning to be really successful, she was determined to make him, so far as lay in her power, comfortable.

She wore tonight her prettiest evening frock, and anyone, seeing them sitting there side by side in front of their cheerful fire in their pleasant sitting-room, would have thought them a pair of engaged lovers, rather than a couple who had been wedded for close on twelve years.

Janey Berwick still looked a young woman, for she had been only nineteen when she had given up a comfortable, even luxurious, home, to throw in her lot with the young man who till two or three months before their wedding had been still a medical student.

He bore more signs than did his wife of the struggle they had gone through. However, that struggle was now a thing of the past, or, at least, so they both had good reason to think.

An intelligent doctor either shares everything or nothing with his wife. Berwick shared everything and now he was engaged in telling her about Jervis Lexton, and how puzzled he was fast becoming over Lexton’s curious condition. He also told her how surprised, not to say indignant, he had been to discover, when he had gone to see his patient today, another doctor there, actually prescribing for Lexton⁠—true, only as a friend, but acting, even so, in a most irregular fashion!

“I think I made him feel what I thought of such conduct,” he said with satisfaction.

Then suddenly he asked her a question.

“D’you remember that your people took a shooting in Sussex many years ago, when I first knew you, from a man call Gretorex?”

“Of course I do, darling! Anchorford was the name of the place.”

She was puzzled at the sudden change in the conversation.

“Well, this young chap I found prescribing for Lexton is Roger Gretorex! I had a sort of feeling I’d seen him before.”

“But what an extraordinary thing⁠—I mean, that he should be a doctor.”

“I don’t see why. Only the old house and that bit of shooting belonged to them, even then. D’you remember Mrs. Gretorex? She was very much the grande dame⁠—”

“Yes, she was in a way, but so really kind. She took a great fancy to me,” said Janey Berwick slowly.

“I don’t think she approved of me. She thought you ought to do better.”

Berwick’s wife smiled. It was true that Mrs. Gretorex hadn’t much cared for the dour, silent, medical student who was obviously in love with her attractive young friend.

“It all comes back to me. They were fearfully poor; but Mrs. Gretorex was keeping up all her charities in the village just as if she had still been the rich lady of the manor. I thought it splendid of her. What is Roger Gretorex like now? He was such a handsome boy,” she concluded, with some curiosity.

Her husband waited a moment, then he answered: “He’s still good-looking; I can tell you that much. But I didn’t like the look of him. He said that he’d taken over a slum practice, somewhere in Westminster.”

“Is he a great friend of Mr. Lexton?”

“He seemed to be, though they’re as different as chalk from cheese. The one’s a born idler, the other I should say a born worker; though, mind you, Squire Gretorex was a bad man. D’you remember the sort of things we were told about him, Janey? How he had come in for thirty thousand a year when he was twenty-one, and how by the time he was fifty he had run through the whole of his fortune on the turf?”

“I expect Dr. Gretorex takes after his mother,” she said with a smile.

Suddenly there came the postman’s loud knock, and Berwick, jumping up, went out into the hall.

He came back with only one rather bulky letter, addressed to himself, in a woman’s sloping handwriting as yet unknown to him.

He opened the large, square, pale-mauve envelope slowly, deliberately. It contained a note folded in two, and also an enclosure, an envelope on which was written “Prescriptions.”

He glanced over the note:

Dear Dr. Berwick,

You asked me to send you Dr. Lancaster’s prescriptions. I found them just after you left. Jervis is feeling better this afternoon, and the nurse says that if you’re busy she doesn’t think you need come tomorrow.

He looked across at his wife. “It’s from Mrs. Lexton. She says her husband’s better, and that I need not go there tomorrow. That’s a comfort!”

Idly he took out what that other envelope contained. Dr. Lancaster’s prescriptions might give him a clue as to what the old fellow really thought of Lexton’s mysterious condition.

“Hallo!” he exclaimed in a tone of extreme surprise, for what was written on a wide sheet of thin, common paper, folded in eight, ran:

Friday night.

My own precious love (for that you are and always will be)⁠—

Of course I quite see your point of view. Indeed I absolutely agree in a sense with every word that you have written to me. We have done wrong in allowing ourselves to love one another, and when I say “we” I really mean I Roger Gretorex, not you, Ivy Lexton. You were, you are, the purest and best woman I have ever known.

I can swear before God that, had you been even moderately happy, I would have killed myself rather than have disturbed your peace. My only excuse, not for having loved you⁠—of that I am not at all ashamed⁠—but for having let you know that I loved you, is that when we first met you had begun to find how bitter a loveless life can be.

You say you feel you ought never to come again to Ferry Place. I bow to your decision, dearest, and I will say that you are right in having come to that decision, even though it causes me agony. Thank you for saying I may still write to you, and that you will sometimes telephone to me.

Berwick read the letter right through. Then he handed it to his wife.

“Janey? I want you to tell me what you think of this! Both of the writer, I mean, and of the woman to whom this letter was written?”

Slowly, with her husband closely watching her, and feeling, it must be admitted, ashamed of what she was doing, Janey Berwick read Roger Gretorex’s letter to Ivy Lexton right through.

Then she looked across at her husband, and her face bore an expression that a little surprised him. He had expected it to be filled with the wrath and disgust he felt himself.

“This is written with a man’s heart’s blood,” she said at last. “There must be more in this little Mrs. Lexton than you think, Angus. Surely this letter cannot be in answer to one sent by a silly, frivolous woman?”

“I wonder,” he said gloomily, “what their real relations have been. This letter might, of course, mean one of two things.”

She was reading the letter once more, slowly and carefully. At last she looked up. “I am inclined to think⁠—” then she stopped and exclaimed, “I don’t know what to think, Angus!”

“What were you going to say just now?” he asked quickly.

“I was going to say that I’m inclined to think that their friendship has not been innocent. That was what I was going to say; but even in these last few moments I’ve turned right round! Now I would say in all sincerity, my dear, that I think it very probable that there’s been nothing but passionate love on his side, and I suppose grateful affection on hers. She evidently doesn’t care for her husband; so much is quite clear.”

“No one would ever think so, from her way of speaking of him. The only time I’ve ever seen them together they seemed on the most affectionate terms. He was calling her ‘darling’ all the time, and she called him ‘dear old boy,’ and seemed genuinely very much worried about him.”

“At any rate she’s now made up her mind to do the right thing,” said Janey Berwick gravely. “One can’t but honour her for that, when one remembers⁠—”

She smiled, a curious little smile.

“Yes, my dear? Out with it!”

“After all, it is very delightful to be loved,” she said softly, “and this poor young chap evidently adores her.”

“Now comes a difficult question: what am I to do with this letter? I wonder if I ought to send it back to her⁠—”

“If I were you, I wouldn’t send it back to her. If she’s the sort of woman you’ve described her to be, it’s quite likely she’ll never discover that she sent it you by mistake.”

“Ought I to put it in the fire?”

“I don’t think you ought to do that. It doesn’t belong to you. You’ve no right to destroy it. Wait a day or two, dearest, and see what happens. She may ask you if you have got the letter? Then you can give it back to her. I’ll keep it if you like, Angus. We’ll put it in an envelope and I’ll address it to myself. If I keep it in the secret drawer of my old desk over there, only you and I will know where it is.”