His square face was very stern as he took the cab-whistle from the hall-salver, that was packed with cards and notes, and letters that had come by the last post, and a telegram or two. She moaned as he laid his hand on the knob of the hall-door.
"It wasn't my doings, Doctor… Hi told Bough what you said. Hi did, faithful … an' 'e swore if you wasn't the man to do what 'e wanted, 'e'd be damned but 'e'd find a woman as would! And she come next night – a little, shabby, white-faced, rat-nosed hold thing, shiverin' an' shakin'. Five pounds she 'ad of Bough, shakin' an' shiverin'. An' he wasn't to send no more to the haddress he knew, because she wouldn't be there. Always move hout … she says, after a fresh job! Oh, my Gawd! An' Bough, he hordered me, an' Hi 'ad to give in. An' to-night Hi reckoned Hi was dyin' an' 'e said Hi best harsk you, 'e was about fed up with women an' their blooming sicknesses. So Hi biked 'ere because Hi couldn't walk. An' now!.." She groaned: "Hi ham dyin', aren't Hi?"
Even to an observation less skilled than that of the expert medical practitioner the signs of swift and speedy dissolution were written on the insignificant, once pretty, little face. Dying, the miserable little creature had ridden to Chilworth Street, hastening her own inevitable end by the stupendous act of folly, and ensuring Saxham's. That certainty had pierced him, even as the first horrible convulsion seized her and wrenched her sideways off the bench. He caught her, and shouted for his man, and they carried her into the consulting-room, and laid her on a sofa, and he did what might be done, knowing that his mercy on her involved swift and pitiless retribution upon himself. Mrs. Bough died three hours later, as the grey dawn straggled through the blinds, and the men with the district ambulance waited at the door, and Dr. Owen Saxham went about his work that day with a strange sensation of expecting some heavy blow that was about to fall. It fell upon the day following the Coroner's Inquest. He was sitting down to breakfast when a Superintendent of Police arrested him upon a warrant from Scotland Yard.
His servant, very pale, had announced that the Superintendent wished to see the Doctor. The Superintendent was in the room, courteously saluting Saxham, before the man had fairly got out the words.
"Good-morning, sir. A pleasant day!"
"Unlike the business that brings you here, I think, Mr. Superintendent?" said Saxham, with his square jaw set. His man spilt the coffee and hot milk over the cloth in trying to fill his master's cup. "You are nervous, Tait. You had better go downstairs, I think, unless – " Saxham looked interrogatively at the burly, officially-clad figure of the Law.
"No, sir, thank you. We do not at present require your man, but it is my duty to tell him that he had better not be out of the way, in case his testimony is wanted."
"You hear?" said Saxham; and as white-faced Tait fled, trembling, to the lower regions: "Of course, you are here," he went on, pouring out the coffee himself with a firm hand, and looking steadily at the Superintendent, "with regard to the case of Mrs. Bough? I have expected that a magistrate's inquiry would follow the Inquest. It seemed only natural – "
The Superintendent interrupted, holding up a large hand.
"It is my duty to tell you, Dr. Saxham, that everything you say will be taken down and used against you in evidence."
"Naturally," said Saxham, putting sugar in his coffee. The sugar was used against him. It amused him now to remember that. The Superintendent had never seen a gentleman more cool, he told the magistrate.
"You see, sir, this Case has been fully considered by the authorities, and it has an ugly look; and it has therefore been decided to charge you with causing the death of the woman Bough by an illegal act, performed here, in your consulting-room, on the twentieth instant, when she visited you …"
"For the first time," put in Saxham quietly.
"That may be or may not be," said the Superintendent. "You were often at her husband's place of business, you know, and may have seen her or not seen her."
"As she used to be in Bough's shop, it is possible that a great many of the man's customers besides myself did see her," Saxham went on, eating his breakfast.
"One of my men out there in the hall – I've noticed you looking towards the door – " began the Superintendent.
"Wondering what the shuffling and breathing at the keyhole meant?" said Saxham quietly. "Thank you for explaining."
"One of my men will fetch a cab when you have finished breakfast, and then, sir," said the Superintendent, "I am afraid I must trouble you to come with me to Paddington Police Station."
"Very well," said Saxham, frowning, "unless you object to using my brougham, which will be at the door" – he looked at his silver table-clock, a present from a grateful patient – "in ten minutes' time."
"I don't at all mind that, sir," agreed the obliging Superintendent; "and the men can follow in the cab. Any objection?"
Saxham had winced and flushed scarlet to the hair.
"For God's sake, don't make a procession of it! Let things be kept as quiet as possible for the sake of my – family – and – my friends." He thought with agony of Mildred. They were to be married in July, unless —
The Superintendent coughed behind his glove. "The question of Bail will rest with the magistrate, of course," he said. "But I should expect that it would be admitted, upon responsible persons entering into the customary recognisances."
Saxham rose. He had drunk the coffee, but he could not eat. "Like all the rest of them, in spite of his show of coolness," thought the Superintendent.
"I will ask you for time to telephone to some friends who will, I have no doubt, be willing to give the required undertaking, and arrange for a colleague to visit my patients. You will take a glass of wine while I step into the next room? The telephone is there, on the writing-table."
"And a loaded revolver in the drawer underneath, and poisons of all kinds handy on the shelves of a neat little cabinet," thought the Superintendent. But he said: "With pleasure, sir, only I must trouble you to put up with my company."
A tingling thrill of revulsion ran through Saxham. He set his teeth, and conquered the furious, momentary impulse to knock down this big, burly, smooth-spoken blue-uniformed official.
"Ah, very well. The usual procedure in cases of this kind. Please come this way. But take a glass of wine first. There are glasses on the sideboard there, and claret and port in those decanters."
"To your very good health, Dr. Saxham, sir, and a speedy and favourable ending to – the present – difficulty." The Superintendent emptied a bumper neatly, and with discreet relish, and followed Saxham into the consulting-room, and once more, at the sound of the measured footfall padding behind him over the thick carpet, the suspect's blood surged madly to his temples, and his hands clenched until the nails drove deep into the palms. For from that moment began the long, slow torture of watching and following, and dogging by the suspicious, vigilant, observant Man In Blue.
A Treasury Prosecution succeeded the Police-Court Inquiry, and the accused was formally arrested upon the criminal charge, and committed to Holloway pending the Trial. The Trial took place before Mr. Justice Bodmin in the following July, occupying five days of oppressive heat in the thrashing out of that vexed question, the guilt or innocence of Owen Saxham, M.D., F.R.C.S. who for airless, stifling years of weeks had eaten and drunk and slept and waked in the Valley of the Shadow of Penal Servitude. Who was conveyed from the dock to the cell and from the cell to the dock by warders and policemen, rumbling through back streets and unfrequented ways in a shiny prison-van. Who came at last to look upon the Owen Saxham of this hideous prison nightmare, the man of whom the Counsel for the Crown reared up, day by day, a monstrously-distorted figure, as quite a different person from the other innocent man whom the defending advocate described in flowery, pathetic sentences as a martyr and the victim of an unheard-of combination of adverse circumstances.
Things went badly. The case against the prisoner looked extremely black. That monstrous figure of Owen Saxham, based upon an ingenious hypothesis of guilt, and plastered over with a marvellous mixture of truths and falsities, facts and conjectures, grew uglier and more sinister every day.
The principal witness, the bereaved