Quick as a flash I seized the speaking-tube and directed the chauffeur. We had gone only a mile out of the way, and that was soon retraced.
Both the doctor and his wife were at home, in their rather ugly modern villa, which was one of the few blots on the beauty of Merriton. But there were no pictures at all in the little drawing room. The distempered walls were decorated with a few Persian rugs (not bad, though of no great interest) given to Doctor Jennings, it seemed, by a grateful patient now dead. By round-about ways we tried to learn whether there was artistic talent in the family, but our efforts failed. As Jim said later, when the call had ended in smoke, "There was nothing doing!"
CHAPTER VII
SIR BEVERLEY'S IMPRESSIONS
Jim is not a bad amateur detective, and he didn't abandon his efforts to get behind the portrait mystery. But we had decided that, for Murray's sake, "discretion was the better part of valour" for us; and the care with which he had to work added a lot to his difficulties. Besides, there were a good many other things to think of just then: things concerning ourselves, also things concerning the Murrays. And those things which concerned them were a thousand times more important than any faked heirlooms.
Sir Beverley Drake gave some faint hope that Ralston Murray's life might be saved. There was a serum upon which he had been experimenting for years, and in which he had begun enthusiastically to believe, for obscure tropical maladies resembling Murray's.
We had asked him to motor on to the Abbey and luncheon, after his visit to Ralston Old Manor, hardly daring to think that he would accept. But he did accept; and I saw by his face the moment we met that the news he had to give was, at the worst, not bad. I was so happy when I heard what he had to say that I could have danced for joy.
"Mind, I don't promise anything," Sir Beverley reminded me. "But there is hope. Murray must have had a marvellous constitution to have gone through what he has, in the war and since. If he hadn't had that, he'd be dead now. And then, of course, this amazing romance of his—this deathbed marriage—as you might call it—has given him a wonderful fillip. Happiness is an elixir of life, even in the most desperate cases at times, so I've got something hopeful to work on. I don't feel sure even of a partial success for my treatment, and I told them that. It's an experiment. If it fails, Murray may burn out rather than flicker out, and go a few weeks sooner than he need if let alone. If it succeeds—why, there's no limit to the success it might have!"
"You mean, he might be entirely cured—a well man again?" I almost gasped.