THE DOCTOR'S PROTÉGÉE.

King Country Chronicle, Volume VI, Issue 495, 28 August 1912, Page 2

THE DOCTOR'S PROTÉGÉE.

(All Rights Reserved.)

By ALBERT LEE,

Author of " The Baronet in Corduroy," " The Key of the Holy House," King Stork of the Netherlands," " The Black Disc," &c. Published By Special Arrangement.

CHAPTER I. THE WOMAN AT THE GATE. My old housekeeper and the maid over whom she loved to tyrannise had gone to bed, having' satisfied themselves that I wanted nothing more for the night. So long as they were moving about the house, and I could Hear the rattle of china and the chink of silver spoons) —the indications of an economy of time when breakfast is laid overnight—in the room close by I contented myself with lounging in the cosiest of chairs, and smoking an old pipe, which the men at the club declared to be a positive digrace to the medical profession. In all probability it* was. But there is a charm in an old pipe which a brand-new one never possesses. You know how to smoke it, how to humour it, and what to expect of it. You take a pleasure in cleaning it, and in coaxing it not to be rebellious if you lay too great a tax upon it, or venture to charge it with a different cut of tobacco from what you ordinarily use. And so the hours of leisure go by. Cross-ed-legged, hands locked behind the head, with the soft, high back of the easy-chair to lean against—it is then that you are in the best of moods to think over your past experience, disinclined to worry about the petty annoyances of life, and prepared to prove to your own satisfaction that the most disagreeable day brings with it compensations.

"I tell you it's number twelve, the next is thirteen. Then fourteen, fifteen, sixteen—count on, man. Then it makes this number twentyseven. Of course it's twenty-seven, if the house next door is twenty-six. You can't get over that! Do you think I'm drunk, and can't count straight?"

Renton was in the best of humours, as he always was; but since the house opposite the lamp was number ten, and not number twelve, and that, as usual, he missed some houses in the counting, he failed to convince the policeman. "I don't say you're drunk, sir. Not I! We'll say you are sleepy, sir, for 'tis late for a gentleman to be out. Twelve o'clock, sir, after a hard day in the City, means tiredness. An as for the number, the empty house is next door, an' that's twenty-one. This is twenty-two. Look here! My bulls-eye on it. There it is, as plain as daylight. A two an' a two don't make twentyseven, no how. Take my arm, sir, an' I'll soon put you right." Presently the door of number twenty-seven was slammed, and the policeman—a shilling ✓ richer, no doubt—tramped on again for the dreary round that was to last till six o'clock in the morning.

It was time to go to bed, and I got out of the chair for the purpose; but my eyes fell on a book which I had brought from the circulating library in the afternoon. It was the talk of the country. The reviewers were raving over it. My friends were asking if I had read it; and to be in the fashion I said I would do so at the first opportunity. But when I came home and found a message waiting which called me out to a patient, I tossed the book on the sofa, and forgot all about it until I saw it there later on.

For a time the house did not i*>dulge in its wonted night sounds when the decent members of the family are supposed to be in bed — the dry creak of a stair-step, for example, which makes you morally certain that someone is stealthily mounting the staircase to haunt or rob the upper rooms; a peculiar movement of the window, as if someone was lifting it, preparatory to crawling in with burglarious intent ; the scramble of a mouse that considers that you have had possession of the floor long enough, and ought now to turn the light out and leave him the free run of the place until daydawn. It was too early for that. But when an hour or more had elapsed since Nancy's bedroom door slammed, and Mrs. Dawney—who is portly, to say the least—no longer stamped across the floor of her room, which .-was directly overhead, and was probably now in the depths of what she called her "beauty sleep," the sounds commenced. The noises outside were fewer, and I was disposed to feel that the city had in it little more' than sleeping men and women. A cab clattered by, and the horse's feet, although they rang on the stones in a frosty air, seemed to fall as if they were tired. There was a long interval before another followed, and after that everything grew silent. Presently came the policeman's slow tramp past tf e garden gate at the front; then a dead silence fell on the square outside, and the only sounds were those of which I have written—the night sounds of the house, and the crackling of the big knob of coal which I had flung on the fire before I charged my pipe again. I twisted my head round a little to listen to the belated wayfarer who came to a standstill outside. He had entered the square leisurely, bi'bulously jovial, and singing a song which was in vogue at the time, and whistled by every errand boy. But he had paused- —as I had known, him pause a hundred times before—to obtain his bearings, and count the gates he had already passed, and how mamy more out of all that were exactly alike he would have to pass before he came to his own, which was numbered "Twentyseven." Mine was c 'Twenty-two," but Rerfton usually lost his reckoning in the early twenties if he ventured to come home from his club alone, instead of chartering a hansom or a four-wheeler. He came alone on that particular night, and, as a consequence, got somewhat mixed. Halting for a moment or two at the garden gate he came up the pathway somewhat unsteadily, and reaching the door, fumbled about with his latchkey. Then he appealed to the policeman, who chanced to be passing again, to find the keyhole for him, since it was not where it used to be.-

I have to thank that book for all the startling experiences which began from that night, for had it not been there I should have been in bed and asleep, and therefore would have been ignorant of what transpired. I took it in hand, sat back in the chair again, and began to read.

Before long I found it to be one of.the most absorbing books I had looked into for many a long day; a book that makes you halt in the reading when there is any unwonted sound. Perhaps you know the sensation? You follow the author in breathless suspense, until you are ready for the denoument on the very floor of the room in which you sit. You hear the sounds of the house, and begin to be nervous. You put your finger between the leaves while —for no earthly reason that you can speak of—you look over your shoulder to be assured that the door is shut, and that you are positively alone. An exciting and sensational book like that sets your blood on the boil; makes your twist your chair round so that you may see the door and window straight before you, and thus guard against anyone intruding, and taking you unawares. More than once I had risen to my feet and faced the room, with my back to the fire, while I read on. Then I found myself in the chair again. But I halted in my swift perusal of the pages, and listened intently, my eyes being turned towards the window. For in the midst of the stillness of the night there came the click of the latch of a garden gate —so near that I was sure that it was my own gate. Putting the book face downwards on the table, I went across the floor to the window and, drawing back the heavy curtain, looked through one of the laths of the Venetian blind.

Everything shewed up plainly in the clear moonlight, but what claimed my attention was not the objects with which I was familiar; nor was it the frosted trees, whose slowlymoving branches glinted and sparkled brilliantly. It was a woman, who was in the act of moving away from the gate. She passed along to number twenty-one, the house next door. She put her hand upon the gate, which opened before her steady pressure, and leaving it ajar walked up the garden path with an easy grace. Then she went out of sight, and crane my neck as I would to peer through the narrow slit between the blind laths, I could not see her enter the porch. I had seen her face, for it was unveiled, in spite of the cold, and as the moon fell full upon it it looked supremely beautiful. But there was another thing which attracted my attention. It was not the mere fact that a woman had gone up the path long after midnight, it was that she had gone to an empty house —a house supposed to be in the hands of the estate agent —that she had, as I supposed, knocked for admission, and then, after a brief delay, had been admitted. I thought I heard the door close somewhat stealthily—but that may have been mere imagination. There was something like a real mystery about this. The house next door had been tenantless for a

"What's your number?" asked the officer, clapping his white-gloved hands together, and glad to meet with a diversion on his monotonous beat. I smiled at the question, for he knew as.well as Renton himself. "Twenty-seven." "Then you are wrong, sir. This is twentv-two, and Dr. Carson lives here." "Twenty-two?" exclaimed Renton, incredulously. "My good fellow, you must be drunk. Stand back and count for yourself- You see the lamp? Well, that's number twelve."

was more, it remained so, although it was said to be handsomely furnished, and had been offered to hoped-for tenants at a reasonable rental. It was empty because it was reputed to be haunted, and people in search of a domicile could not screw up their courage to the point of brow-beating any uncomfortable spirits who chose number twenty-one for their ghostly residence.

The thought of a woman having gone into the house next door in the small hours of the morning, held me at the window spellbound for a long time. The fire burnt low, but I did not trouble about it. Indeed, I had completely forgotten it, and continued to peer into the garden, heedless of all but this one thing, until a sound behind me caused me to look round quickly, and with a startled air. Mrs. Dawney was filling up the open doorway, her portly form wrapped about with an ample dressing-gown, and Her feet covered with her smart blue bedsocks.

She saw me at the window, and exclaimed, as if somewhat startled:

"La J Dr. Carson, I thought you were called out, perhaps, to see v patient. I heard a sound, and saw, when I came out on the landing, that your room door was open. Then I found you hadn't gone to bed, so I came down to see if you really had gone out or had tumbled off to sleep. I knocked three times, and you never answered." "I didn't hear you," I said, my hand still holding the blind lath open. "Just come here, Mrs. Dawney." She came to my side, and the pleasant body, always ready to hear or do as I desired, wanted to know what I had to say. "Isn't the house next door empty?" I asked.

"I thought you knew it was," came the housekeeper's answer, in a tone of surprise. "Everybody knows it. Don't you know it? Of course you do! You know all about poor Mrs. Barton "

'"Oh* yes! I remember that," I interrupted, for I had repeatedly heard the story of how the house got its evil name a dozen years before, and Mrs. Dawney had such a way of telling about what she called "that affair next door." She seemed to relish all the horrors, and her pleasure in them increased monthly. "Why I asked the question," 1 went on to say, "was that I saw a lady go up the garden path of the empty house, and thought I heard her knock softly on the door."

"Perhaps she didn't know the house was empty—made a mistake, perhaps?" Mrs. Dawney suggested.

"Not a bit of it!" I answered, decisively. "I feel sure tKat I heard her knock, and that presently I heard the door close quietly. She is in the house now, for I have been standing here for some time, and not a soul has passed down the garden path. See, the gate stands at the angle at which she left it."

I do not think Mrs. Dawney quite believed me. She could not think I had been drinking, for I was next door to a total abstainer—"a semiteetotaler," whatever that may be, they called me at the club. If she had her doubts, and believed that for once I had given way to drink, she kept them to herself; but she did not fail to give me the impression that she thought I had gone queer in my head, or that for once I had been making too free with the whisky bottle.

"It is with reading them trashy novels," I heard her say, when she went to the fire to put some coal on. She came back to the. window and looked through the blind once more into the moonlit garden. "You've baen dreaming, Dr. Carson. What should a. lady want in an empty h*ouse at night—and at this time o' night, when no decent body would think of going out alone, I'd like to know? You'd do well to get to bed, sir." She did not give me time to answer, for she was now at the door, and going out drew it after her with a decisive snap.

CHAPTER II

THE CRY IN THE NIGHT

It was perfectly useless to attempt to read after what had happened. The heroine had lost her hold upon my sympathies, and consequently I tossed by book on the sofa, and lit my pipe. The finest novel going would not compete with this mystery of the lady at the gate, or, as I now supposed, the lady in the haunted house. But the more I thought about her mysterious entry, the more my wonder grew. A man must be very far gone in bewilderment —so I think—if his pipe ceases to be of interest to him. I could not even smoke, and therefore laid the pipe upon the table, and there it stayed while I went to the window again and peered as curiously as ever between the flat green strips of the Venetian blind, to see whether by any chance the lady might be once more in the garden. (To be Continued.) D.P.—l.