MARIE BELLOC LOWNDES - British Murder Mysteries Collection: 17 Books in One Edition. Marie Belloc Lowndes
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Bradfield, who found life very dull just now, was pleased to see the fine-looking young man—a doctor, too.
“Will you ask Mr. Lexton if he would care to see me?” asked Gretorex.
He felt he could do nothing less, as he was there, and Ivy was out.
Poor Jervis eagerly, even joyfully, welcomed the suggestion, and the nurse left the two young men together. They talked of all kinds of things—things that interested Lexton rather than Gretorex.
At last the visitor rose. “I’ll be going now——”
“Must you? I get so bored lying here. I wish, old chap, you could think of something that would make me feel the thing again? I don’t think much of Ivy’s Dr. Lancaster. Besides, he’s just broken his leg!”
Then he went into details of what had become his wretched case, and, after having heard him out, Gretorex produced a paper pad and a fountain pen. Rapidly he began writing out a prescription, and he was so absorbed in what he was doing that he did not hear the bedroom door open.
Dr. Berwick, who was tired, having been up all night over an anxious case, stared with anger, as well as amazement, at his as yet unknown colleague.
“Hallo!” cried Jervis, trying to lift himself up from the pillow, for he had become very weak. “Here’s a lark! An impromptu consultation, eh?”
Then, as even he realised that Dr. Berwick looked like a thundercloud, as he afterwards expressed it to the nurse, he went on, apologetically: “I was joking of course! Gretorex, this is Dr. Berwick, who has taken over Dr. Lancaster’s patients.”
Then, looking at Berwick, he went on: “Dr. Gretorex is a great friend of mine and Ivy’s. He came in just now, and I told him about my poor dry throat and asked him if he could think of something that might give me a little relief. You don’t mind, do you?”
Dr. Berwick waited a moment. Then he said, in far from a pleasant tone:
“Well, to tell you the truth, I do mind. You are my patient, Mr. Lexton, not Dr. Gretorex’s patient.”
Gretorex rose from the chair on which he had been sitting close to the sick man’s bed. The colour rushed up all over his dark face. He said stiffly, cursing Lexton for a fool the while:
“Mr. Lexton had just told me that Dr. Lancaster has broken his leg. I had no idea that someone else had already taken over the case——”
There followed an awkward silence between the two men. Dr. Berwick was waiting for the formal apology which the other did not consider it necessary to tender to him.
At last Gretorex took the piece of paper on which he had written out a prescription for a soothing mixture and tore it in two.
“Well, Lexton,” he exclaimed, “I’ll be off now, leaving you, I’m sure, in excellent hands! Tell Mrs. Lexton I came in. I’ve been so awfully busy this last fortnight that I haven’t had a minute to myself. I’ve taken over for a friend a practice in Westminster for a bit. It’s in a slum, and means a lot of work——”
“And precious little pay, eh?” said Lexton.
Roger Gretorex smiled grimly, “But it’s all experience.”
Then he went out of the room, with just a cool nod to the other doctor.
It was a very different Dr. Berwick who at eight that same evening finished eating his well-cooked, daintily-served dinner. Janey Berwick was what her husband’s old friends called, with truth, a thoroughly nice woman. After their early marriage she and her husband had had a bitter struggle, but that had only made them come the closer to one another, and now that he was beginning to be really successful, she was determined to make him, so far as lay in her power, comfortable.
She wore to-night her prettiest evening frock, and anyone, seeing them sitting there side by side in front of their cheerful fire in their pleasant sitting-room, would have thought them a pair of engaged lovers, rather than a couple who had been wedded for close on twelve years.
Janey Berwick still looked a young woman, for she had been only nineteen when she had given up a comfortable, even luxurious, home, to throw in her lot with the young man who till two or three months before their wedding had been still a medical student.
He bore more signs than did his wife of the struggle they had gone through. However, that struggle was now a thing of the past, or, at least, so they both had good reason to think.
An intelligent doctor either shares everything or nothing with his wife. Berwick shared everything and now he was engaged in telling her about Jervis Lexton, and how puzzled he was fast becoming over Lexton’s curious condition. He also told her how surprised, not to say indignant, he had been to discover, when he had gone to see his patient today, another doctor there, actually prescribing for Lexton—true, only as a friend, but acting, even so, in a most irregular fashion!
“I think I made him feel what I thought of such conduct,” he said with satisfaction.
Then suddenly he asked her a question.
“D’you remember that your people took a shooting in Sussex many years ago, when I first knew you, from a man call Gretorex?”
“Of course I do, darling! Anchorford was the name of the place.”
She was puzzled at the sudden change in the conversation.
“Well, this young chap I found prescribing for Lexton is Roger Gretorex! I had a sort of feeling I’d seen him before.”
“But what an extraordinary thing—I mean, that he should be a doctor.”
“I don’t see why. Only the old house and that bit of shooting belonged to them, even then. D’you remember Mrs. Gretorex? She was very much the grande dame——”
“Yes, she was in a way, but so really kind. She took a great fancy to me,” said Janey Berwick slowly.
“I don’t think she approved of me. She thought you ought to do better.”
Berwick’s wife smiled. It was true that Mrs. Gretorex hadn’t much cared for the dour, silent, medical student who was obviously in love with her attractive young friend.
“It all comes back to me. They were fearfully poor; but Mrs. Gretorex was keeping up all her charities in the village just as if she had still been the rich lady of the manor. I thought it splendid of her. What is Roger Gretorex like now? He was such a handsome boy,” she concluded, with some curiosity.
Her husband waited a moment, then he answered: “He’s still good-looking; I can tell you that much. But I didn’t like the look of him. He said that he’d taken over a slum practice, somewhere in Westminster.”
“Is he a great friend of Mr. Lexton?”
“He seemed to be, though they’re as different as chalk from cheese. The one’s a born idler, the other I should say a born worker; though, mind you, Squire Gretorex was a bad man. D’you remember the sort of things we were told about him, Janey? How he had come in for thirty thousand a year when he was twenty-one, and how by the time he was fifty he had run through the whole of his fortune on the turf?”
“I expect Dr. Gretorex takes after his mother,” she said with a smile.
Suddenly there came the postman’s loud knock, and Berwick, jumping up, went out into the hall.
He came back with only one rather bulky letter, addressed to himself, in a woman’s sloping handwriting as yet unknown to him.
He opened the large, square, pale-mauve envelope slowly, deliberately. It contained a note folded in two, and also an enclosure, an envelope on which was written “Prescriptions.”
He glanced over the note:
Dear Dr. Berwick,
You asked me to send you Dr. Lancaster’s prescriptions. I found them just after you left. Jervis is