“Been for a swim,” I replied; fell asleep and dreamed horribly.”
Dr. Petrie shook his head and knocked ash from his cigarette into the soil in the wine jar.
“Blackwater fever plays hell even with a constitution like yours,” he replied gravely. “Really, Sterling, you mustn’t take liberties for a while.”
In pursuit of my profession, that of an orchid hunter, I had been knocked out by a severe attack of blackwater on the Upper Amazon. My native boys left me where I lay, and I owed my life to a German prospector who, guided by kindly Providence, found me and brought me down to Manaos.
“Liberties be damned, doctor,” I growled, standing up to mix him a drink. “If ever a man took liberties with his health, that man is yourself! You’re worked to death!”
“Listen,” he said, checking me. “Forget me and my health. I’m getting seriously worried.”
“Not another case?”
He nodded.
“Admitted early this morning.”
“Who is it this time?”
“Another open-air worker. Sterling, a jobbing gardener. He was working in a villa, leased by some Americans, as a matter of fact, on the slope just this side of Ste Claire de la Roche——”
“Ste Claire de la Roche?” I echoed.
“Yes—the place you are so keen to explore.”
“D’you think you can save him?”
He frowned doubtfully.
“Cartier and the other French doctors are getting in a perfect panic,” he replied. “If the truth leaks out, the Riviera will be deserted. And they know it! I’m rather pessimistic myself. I lost another patient to-day.”
“What!”
Petrie ran his fingers through his hair.
“You see,” he went on, “diagnosis is so tremendously difficult. I found
“Why a miracle? It’s the accepted treatment, isn’t it?”
He stared at me, and I thought how haggard he looked.
“It’s one of ‘em,” he replied—”for sleeping sickness. But this was
“What!
“Hence the miracle. You see, I made cultures; and under the microscope they gave me a shock. I discovered that these parasites didn’t really conform to any species so far classified. They were members of the sleeping sickness family, but
“Overworking!”
“Forget it.” He was carried away by his subject. “D’you know what I found, Sterling? I found
“Plague!”
“Good God!”
“But—here’s the big point: the
“You’ve swamped me, doctor,” I confessed. “But I have a hazy idea that there’s something tremendous behind this.”
“Tremendous? There’s something
This, from Dr. Petrie, gave me something to think about.
My father had been invited to lecture at Edinburgh—his old university—during Petrie’s first year, and a close friendship had sprung up between the keen student and the visit-—ing lecturer. They had corresponded ever since.
During my own Edinburgh days the doctor was established in practice in Cairo; but I spent part of one vacation as his guest in London. And another fast friendship resulted. He had returned from Egypt on that occasion to receive the medal of the Royal Society for his researches in tropical medicine. I remember how disappointed I had been to leam that his wife, of whose charm I had heard many rumours, was not accompanying him on this flying journey.
His present visit—also intended to be a brief one—had been prolonged at the urgent request of the French authorities. Petrie’s reputation had grown greater with the passage of years, and learning that he was in London, they had begged him to look into this strange epidemic which threatened southern France, placing the Villa Jasmin at his disposal....
Three weeks later I was invalided home from Brazil. Petrie, who had had the news from my father, met the ship at Lisbon and carried me off to the Villa Jasmin to recuperate under his own watchful eye.
I fear I had proved to be a refractory patient.
“You didn’t see the other case, did you?” Petrie asked suddenly.
“No.”
“Well.” He set down his glass. “I wish you would come along to the hospital with me. You must have met with some queer diseases on the Amazon, and you know the Uganda sleeping sickness. There’s this awful grin— proof of some sort of final paroxysm—and particularly what Cartier calls the Hack stigmata.’ Your bulb hunting has taken you into a few unwholesome places; have you ever come across anything like it?”
I began to fill by pipe. “Never, doctor,” I replied.
The sound of a distant gun boomed through the hot silence. A French battleship was entering Villefranche Harbour....
chapter third
THE BLOODSTAINED LEAVES
“Good God! it’s ghastly! Cover him up again, doctor. I shall dream of that face.”
I found myself wondering why Providence, though apparently beneficent, should permit such horrors to visit poor humanity. The man in the little mortuary—he had been engaged in a local vineyard—had not yet reached middle age when this new and dreadful pestilence had cut him off.
“This,” said Petrie, “is the really singular feature.”
He touched the dead man’s forehead. It was of a dark purple colour from the scalp to the brows. The sun- browned face was set in a grin of dreadful malignancy and the eyes were rolled upward so that only their whites showed.
“What I have come to recognize as the characteristic sign,” Petrie added. “Subcutaneous haemorrhage but strangely localised. It’s like a purple shadow, isn’t it? And when it reaches the eyes—finish.”
“What a ghastly face! I have seen nothing like it anywhere!”
We came out.
“Nor have I!” Petrie confessed. “The earlier symptoms are closely allied with those of sleeping sickness but extraordinarily rapid in their stages. Glandular swellings always in the armpit. This final stage—the black stigmata, the purple shadow, which I have managed to avert in some of the other cases, is quite beyond my experience. That’s where plague comes in.
“But now for the most mysterious thing of all—in which I am hoping you can really help me....”
If anyone had invited me to name Dr. Petrie’s outstanding characteristic, I should have said “modesty.”
Having run the car into its garage, Petrie led the way down the steep rocky path to a shed a hundred yards from the villa, which he had fitted up as a laboratory.
