The windows of Parker Steel’s consulting-room looked out on the garden at the back of the house, where Lent lilies were already swinging their golden heads over borders of crocuses, purple, yellow, and white. The lower part of the window was screened by a wire gauze blind, and the red serge curtains were looped back close to the shutters.
However drab and dismal it may be, a physician’s consulting-room has much of the mystery that shadows the confessional of the priest. The uninitiated enter with a pleasurable sense of awe. Wisdom seems to admonish them from her temple of text-books piled up solemnly in the professional bookcase. There is an air of suave confidence and quiet reserve about the room. Even the usual Turkey carpet suggests comfortable sympathy and the touch of the healing hand.
Even as it is unnatural to suspect a priest of the sins he rebukes in others, so to the lay mind the physician appears as a being above the diseases that he treats. There is always something illogical in a doctor needing his own physic. And yet of all men he is the last that can boast of the bliss of ignorance. He knows the curses that afflict man in the flesh, how grim and inevitable his own end may be. He is too well aware of the malignant significance of symptoms, and a month of dyspepsia may reduce him to a state of morbid and half hypocondriacal self-introspection. It is told of a great surgeon how he lay awake all through one night imagining that he had discovered an aneurism of his aorta. It is dangerous to know too little, but on occasions it may be desperately unpleasant to know too much.
It was a serious and rather worried figure that moved to and fro in the lofty room, as the March day drew towards a dreary close. The house was silent, a depressing silence, suggestive of stagnation and cynical melancholy. A fitful wind set the tops of the cypress-trees swaying and jerking in the garden. The only living thing visible from Dr. Steel’s window was a black cat stalking birds under the shadow of a bank of laurels.
Parker Steel had taken off his coat and folded it carefully over the back of a chair. He stood by the window, fumbling at his cuff-links, a preoccupied frown pinching up the skin of his forehead above the thin, acquisitive nose. After turning up his shirt-sleeves, he picked up a pocket-lens from the table and focused the light upon the forefinger of his right hand.
The hand that held the lense trembled very perceptibly. On the right forefinger, immediately above the base of the nail, a dull red papule stood out upon the skin. It was clearly circumscribed in outline, and hard to the touch. Parker Steel noticed all these details with the strained air of a man scrutinizing an unpleasant statement of accounts.
Presently he laid the lens down on the flap of the bureau by the window, and, unbuttoning his waistcoat, passed his left hand under his shirt and vest. The deft fingers half buried themselves in the hollow of his right armpit. Parker Steel’s eyes had a peculiar, hard, staring look, the expression seen in the eyes of the expert whose whole intelligence is concentrated for the moment in the sense of touch. His lower lip fell away slightly from his teeth. Sharp lines of strain were visible upon his forehead.
“Good Lord!”
The words escaped from him involuntarily as he drew his hand out from under his shirt. The smooth face had grown suddenly haggard and sallow, and there was a glint of ugly fear in the eyes. Parker Steel stood staring at his hand, his mouth open, the lips softening as the lips of a coward soften when his manhood melts before some physical ordeal. The dapper figure has lost its alertness, its neat and confident symmetry, and had become the loose and slouching figure of a man suffering from shock.
Parker Steel roused himself at last, forced back his shoulders, and walked slowly towards the door. He turned the key in the lock, and stood listening a moment before picking up a hand-mirror from among the multifarious books and papers on the table. Returning to the window, he peered at the reflection of his own face, furtively, as though dreading what he might discover. The sallow skin was blemishless as yet. Not a spot or blur showed from the line of the hair to the clean curve of the well-shaven chin.
In another minute Parker Steel was turning over the leaves of his journal with impetuous fingers. He worked back page by page, running a finger down each column of names, stopping ever and again to recollect and reconsider. It was on a page dated “February 12th” that he discovered an entry that gave him the final pause.
“Mrs. Rattan, 10 Ford Street. Partus, 5 A.M.”
A foot-note had been added at the bottom of the page, a foot-note whose details were sign............