“Well, I might give the conventional advice—to maintain a cheerful outlook and avoid worry; but I don’t suppose you would find it very helpful.”
“No,” she answered bitterly; “it is a counsel of perfection. People in our position are not a very cheerful class, I’m afraid; but still they don’t seek out worries from sheer perverseness. The worries come unsought. But, of course, you can’t enter into that.”
“I can’t give any practical help, I fear, though I do sincerely hope that you father’s affairs will straighten themselves out soon.”
She thanked me for my good wishes and accompanied me down to the street door, where, with a bow and a rather stiff handshake, she gave me my congé.
Very ungratefully the noise of Fetter Lane smote on my ears as I came out through the archway, and very squalid and unrestful the little street looked when contrasted with the dignity and monastic quiet of the old garden. As to the surgery, with its oilcloth floor and walls made hideous with gaudy insurance show-cards in sham gilt frames, its aspect was so revolting that I flew to the daybook for distraction, and was still busily entering the morning’s visits when the bottle-boy, Adolphus, entered stealthily to announce lunch.
III
John Thorndyke
That the character of an individual tends to be reflected in his dress is a fact familiar to the least observant. That the observation is equally applicable to aggregates of men is less familiar, but equally true. Do not the members of fighting professions, even to this day, deck themselves in feathers, in gaudy colors and gilded ornaments, after the manner of the African war-chief or the Redskin “brave,” and thereby indicate the place of war in modern civilization? Does not the Church of Rome send her priests to the altar in habiliments that were fashionable before the fall of the Roman Empire, in token of her immovable conservatism? And, lastly, does not the Law, lumbering on in the wake of progress, symbolize its subjection to precedent by headgear reminiscent of the good days of Queen Anne?
I should apologize for intruding upon the reader these somewhat trite reflections; which were set going by the quaint stock-in-trade of the wig-maker’s shop in the cloisters of the Inner Temple, whither I strayed on a sultry afternoon in quest of shade and quiet. I had halted opposite the little shop window, and, with my eyes bent dreamily on the row of wigs, was pursuing the above train of thought when I was startled by a deep voice saying softly in my ear: “I’d have the full-bottomed one if I were you.”
I turned swiftly and rather fiercely, and looked into the face of my old friend and fellow student, Jervis; behind whom, regarding us with a sedate smile, stood my former teacher, Dr. John Thorndyke. Both men greeted me with a warmth that I felt to be very flattering, for Thorndyke was quite a great personage, and even Jervis was several years my academic senior.
“You are coming in to have a cup of tea with us, I hope,” said Thorndyke; and as I assented gladly, he took my arm and led me across the court in the direction of the Treasury.
“But why that hungry gaze at those forensic vanities, Berkeley?” he asked. “Are you thinking of following my example and Jervis’s—deserting the bedside for the Bar?”
“What! Has Jervis gone in for the law?” I exclaimed.
“Bless you, yes!” replied Jervis. “I have become parasitical on Thorndyke! ‘The big fleas have little fleas,’ you know. I am the additional fraction trailing after the whole number in the rear of a decimal point.”
“Don’t you believe him, Berkeley,” interposed Thorndyke. “He is the brains of the firm. I supply the respectability and moral worth. But you haven’t answered my question. What are you doing here on a summer afternoon staring into a wig-maker’s window?”
“I am Barnard’s locum; he is in practise in Fetter Lane.”
“I know,” said Thorndyke; “we meet him occasionally, and very pale and peaky he has been looking of late. Is he taking a holiday?”
“Yes. He has gone for a trip to the Isles of Greece in a currant ship.”
“Then,” said Jervis, “you are actually a local G.P. I thought you were looking beastly respectable.”
“And judging from your leisured manner when we encountered you,” added Thorndyke, “the practise is not a strenuous one. I suppose it is entirely local?”
“Yes,” I replied. “The patients mostly live in the small streets and courts within a half-mile radius of the surgery, and the abodes of some of them are pretty squalid. Oh! and that reminds me of a very strange coincidence. It will interest you, I think.”
“Life is made up of strange coincidences,” said Thorndyke. “Nobody but a reviewer of novels is ever really surprised at a coincidence. But what is yours?”
“It is connected with a case that you mentioned to us at the hospital about two years ago, the case of a man who disappeared under rather mysterious circumstances. Do you remember it? The man’s name was Bellingham.”
“The Egyptologist? Yes, I remember the case quite well. What about it?”
“The brother is a patient of mine. He is living in Nevill’s Court with his daughter, and they seem to be as poor as church mice.”
“Really,” said Thorndyke, “this is quite interesting. They must have come down in the world rather suddenly. If I remember rightly, the brother was living in a house of some pretentions standing in its own grounds.”
“Yes, that is so. I see you recollect all about the case.”
“My dear fellow,” said Jervis, “Thorndyke never forgets a likely case. He is a sort of medico-legal camel. He gulps down the raw facts from the newspapers or elsewhere, and then, in his leisure moments, he calmly regurgitates them and has a quiet chew at them. It is a quaint habit. A case crops up in the papers or in
