THE SURGEON OF GOUGH SQUARE
He was a young man, but appearing careworn and prematurely aged. His face had a spoiled and dingy look such as an actor’s bears by daylight, when for the paint and glow and glamour of the boards are substituted the grey and gripping realities of existence. The fruitlessness of all hope, of all cheery effort, seemed typified for him in the stagnant November fog which brooded over the City without. As he gazed through his window into the dreary murk, the dull roar which reached his ears from Fleet Street and its adjacent market sounded to him like the boom of surf to a castaway in a desolate land. He was stranded, he felt, among the waste places of life, and no prospect of release was ever more to be his.
He had started his professional career with high expectations and a confidence born of capital possession. They had all, hopes and confidence and capital, gone to wreck on the shoals of a giant fraud. What solace to him was it that the law had ended by claiming its own? It had been a greater mercy had it remained eternally blind, and left him, one of many victims, to live on content in his fool’s paradise. Though his substance had been dissipated, the interest, regularly paid, had served him for his needs. It had been all the sinews he desired in his wrestle with fortune. Was it not in the bitter irony of things that his high rectitude should be expected to rejoice in that vindication of justice which had left him a pauper?
He recalled, in a sudden impotent fury, the occasion, or the suspected occasion, which had marked him down for ruin. His capital had been all invested in Bank of England stock, and the securities had been deposited with Fauntleroy, the now notorious banker of Berners Street. It had been this villain’s practice to forge powers of attorney enabling him to dispose of his clients’ property, and the man’s cool audacity had even, it was said, carried him so far as to the occasional appending of a customer’s name to a fraudulent deed in the customer’s own presence, and the then sending it, with its ink still wet, as though from the visitor’s hand, into the clerks’ department.
Such, he fully believed, had been the case with him during a business call he had made one day upon the head of the house. He remembered, cursing the memory, the sleek, plausible figure in its black tights and broadcloth, the spotless frill at its bosom, the smile on its prosperous face, the pen travelling in its plump fingers while the voice went on, even, polite, and interested. To be signing away so inhumanly the fortune, the happiness, the soul of a fellow-creature, and never all the while to flush or falter. Damn him!
Well, he was damned maybe. A glutton, a sybarite, a voluptuary, he had come to the end of his feasting, and only for Lazarus remained the scraps and dregs of the banquet.
A rap at the door broke in upon his miserable reverie, and a small servant entered the room. Two gentlemen, she said, desired particularly to see him. Who were they? She did not know, they would give no name. Where were they? In the surgery, which opened on the back. They had brought something with them, something on a hand-cart, and then other men, who had deposited the something, had left. She was used to the traffic, or had been, and showed no agitation or alarm.
Resurrection-men! He had no desire to pay their price, and, if he had, no means. The very house in which he lived, an inheritance, was already under treaty for sale. Frowning and compressing his lips, he descended to the room below. The something, stark and obvious under a black cloth, was laid already on the dissecting-table. Two gentlemen turned to greet him.
They were both grave, formal, unconvincing; yet perfectly refined in manner. One, who constituted himself the spokesman, began to address him at once in a low voice:
“You will please to pardon, sir, on the ground of extreme urgency, this unceremonious visit. I must say at once that we do not wish to state our names, and I will admit unhesitatingly that we are disguised. This”—he signified the silent shape—“is the subject of our visit. We desire your acceptance of it in the interests of science. No return is required, and no condition made, save that you undertake to convince yourself, beyond the possibility of a doubt, and before proceeding to extremities, that no flicker of life survives to it.”
Professionally self-possessed, the young doctor had yet to rally all his nerve-power to meet so amazing a charge. He delayed to answer for some moments.
“And if it did?” he said.
“Then you will have no reason to regret your caution,” answered the gentleman.
“I cannot pretend to understand you.”
“I must urge upon you the necessity of a quick decision,” said the stranger. “Will it satisfy you to be told that the subject”—he again pointed to the hidden form—“expressly desired that this task should be deputed to you?”
“Are you mad?” said the young surgeon, “or am I, or do you think me so? What task—and who desired it?”
“The task,” said the gentleman, “of ascertaining, in the first instance, that life is indisputably extinct, and of then devoting the remains, at your complete discretion, to the interests of science. I may tell you”—he seemed to hesitate a moment—“that the subject suffered under a morbid apprehension of premature burial.”
“His apprehensions,” said the surgeon, “could be easily set at rest.”
“I hope so,” answered the stranger.
“But—but,” cried the surgeon in desperation—he made a movement as if clutching at his hair—“you must see, gentlemen, that I cannot possibly undertake the responsibility on these vague premises.”
“Question me, sir, if you will, and I will endeavour to answer to your satisfaction.”
“Tell me then. Who is this man? What was his complaint—presumably mortal? Was he a patient of mine that he selected me for this extraordinary business?”
The gentleman again seemed to hesitate.
“He was,” he said, “—yes, I may call him a patient of yours, inasmuch as you attended him during the course of a distemper or aberration with which he was seized. He considered that he owed you a return for his somewhat cavalier exploitation of your services, and, at the last, these were the only means he could devise for giving some effect to—well, shall we call it his remorse? The sentiment, combined with the fact that his demise, or his assumed demise, occurred in this neighbourhood, decided our choice.”
The young surgeon, forcing all his wits to a focus, fixed his eyes searchingly on the speaker.
“He was murdered,” he said. “Is that it?”
The other shrugged his shoulders, with a scarce perceptible smile.
“O, sir,” he said, “if you take that view! But a moment’s examination will convince you.”
“Let me make it, then.”
The stranger interposed his body, quietly but resolutely.
“After we are gone.”
“Why will you not give me your names?”
“Because, sir, we do not wish to associate ourselves with an act which might prove difficult of explanation, and which, given publicity, must most certainly defeat its own object. You must accept our word for it that we were both close personal friends of the deceased, and that we have undertaken this difficult charge out of pure regard for an intimacy which contains for us many endearing recollections.”
“What was the cause of death? Will you tell me so much?”
“It was the result of a fall.”
The surgeon, wavering between conscience and professional acquisitiveness, gnawed his forefinger in an agitated way.
“But why,” he said—“why should not a post-mortem examination at his own house have sufficed for his apprehensions?”
“There is no calculating,” answered the stranger, “the lengths to which such diseased imaginativeness will carry a man. Safety, no doubt, to his mind, consisted in nothing short of dismemberment.” He looked at his watch in a hurried way. “Time, sir,” he said, “presses. If our natural scruples shrink, as I say, from association with this business, no such sentiment need apply to you. Gentlemen of your profession, I understand, are not expected to be over-inquisitive as to the material provided for their anatomical studies. You may rest completely satisfied that nothing discreditable to ourselves or harmful to you attaches to this case. Very well. Subjects, I believe, are costly. Here is one to your hand for nothing. But should our friend’s terrors prove actually justified, and this to be a case of suspended animation, in that event, sir, I will answer for it that the patient’s gratitude would take a form upon which you would have plentiful reason to congratulate yourself. And in the meantime every wasted minute is a reproach to us. Answer, sir, will you accept the conditions or not?”
“You will not tell me your name?”
“No.”
“Nor his there?”
“I must not, indeed.”
“Nor where to communicate with you, in case——?”
“No purpose would be served thereby. We have done what he desired of us, and there our duty to him ends. The rest lies between you and him.”
The surgeon, with a gesture which might have implied resignation or repudiation, turned his back. When he looked round again he was alone.
He made a movement towards the door, as if in a pretence to himself to recall his visitors, but stopped on the instant, biting his lip.
“I will not be such a hypocrite,” he muttered. He knew perfectly well, indeed, what was at the bottom of his heart—hope; a vague, indefinable feeling that all here was not as intimated; that out of the very strangeness and mystery of the affair might come profit and perhaps salvation to himself, a desperate man.
With a somewhat haggard face he moved on tiptoe to lock both the surgery door and that leading into the yard at the back. Then, feeling awed against his will, he turned to the hidden form.
It was still early morning, but the fog made a thick, dingy twilight in the room. Not a sound broke the dead stillness; nothing moved.
Yes, something—the thing under the cloth!
Was he overwrought—victim to some wild delusion? He could have sworn it; and yet the motion had been so slight, so hardly perceptible, it might have been the mere contraction or dilation of a shadow.
Again!
With a gasp of horror he leaped to the table, tore away the cloth, and revealed the face, blotched and livid, of Fauntleroy the forger.
The truth rushed upon him as he stood there, pallid and staring, and with it an understanding of each one of his visitor’s studied ambiguities. The great criminal, he remembered now, was to have been executed that morning. Where had he heard it—that whisper, that incredible rumour, hinting of a hangman extravagantly bribed by friends of the criminal, and of a silver tube to be passed into the condemned gullet? A thing impracticable—preposterous—he had dismissed it as a canard; yet, somehow, it appeared, accomplished. Either that way or another—what did it matter? The man had been hanged, patently on the evidences before him, and as patently he still lived—only as yet the merest flicker of vitality, expressed in the pulsing of the purple œdematous swelling about the throat. A little either way, and the spark were coaxed into flame or quenched for ever.
Which way, then? He stood for minutes, quite rigid, battling with his emotions. His wrongs; his diabolical opportunity; his perfect immunity from detection; his justification, inasmuch as this life was already forfeit to the law. Hyde roared in him, and Jekyll pleaded. The very clothes of the thing, unaltered in their black neatness, sleekness, hypocrisy, filled him with an indescribable loathing. He stepped forward, his fingers crooked.
At that moment the laugh of a baby sounded in the yard outside. He paused, and stood listening. Suddenly his face lightened:
“Not guilty!” he cried, “not guilty, little one!” and hurried to the succour of his enemy.