"Arriving end week with interesting patient. Details index under Mason. Prepare private suite.
"Devonham."
[CHAPTER V]
IT was, however, some two weeks later before Dr. Fillery was on his way to the station to meet Devonham and his companion. A slight delay, caused apparently by the necessity of buying an outfit, had intervened and given time for an exchange of letters, but Devonham had contented himself chiefly with telegrams. He did not wish his chief to know too much about the case in advance. "Probably he regrets the Notes already," thought the doctor, as the car made its way slowly across crowded London. "He wants my first unbiased judgment; he's right, of course, but it's too late for that now."
The delay, however, had been of value. The Home was in working order again, the staff returned, the private suite all ready for its interesting occupant, whom in thought he had already named "N. H."; for in the first place he did not know his name as yet, and in the second he felt towards him a certain attitude of tolerant, half-humorous scepticism.
Cut off from his own kind for so many years, educated, perhaps half-educated only, by too speculative and imaginative a mind, equally warped by this long solitude, a mind unduly stretched by the contemplation of immense geological perspectives, filled, too, with heaven knows what strange stories of pantheistic Nature-feeling—"N. H." might be distinctly interesting, but hardly all that Mason had thought him. "Unique" was a word rarely justified; the peculiarities would prove to be mere extravagances that had, of necessity, remained uncorrected by the friction of intercourse with his own kind. The rest was inheritance, equally unpruned; a mind living in a side-eddy, a backwater with Nature....
At the same time Dr. Fillery admitted a certain anticipatory excitement he could not wholly account for, an undercurrent of wonder he ascribed to his Khaketian blood.
He had written once only to his assistant, sending briefest instructions to say the rooms would be ready, and that the young man must believe he was an invited guest coming on a visit. "Let him expect complete freedom of movement and occupation without the smallest idea of restraint in any way. He is merely coming to stay for as long as he pleases with a friend of Mason. Impress him with a sense of hearty welcome." And Devonham, replying, had evidently understood the wisdom of this method. "He is also greatly pleased with your name—the sound of it," was stated in the one letter that he wrote, "and as names mean a lot to him, so much the better. The sound of it gives him pleasure; he keeps repeating it over to himself; he already likes you. My name he does not care about, saying it quickly, sharply. But he trusts me. His trust in anyone who shows him kindness is instantaneous and complete. He invariably expects kindness, however, from everyone—gives it himself equally—and is baffled and puzzled by any other treatment."
So Devonham, with "N. H.", who attached importance to names and expected kindness from people as a natural thing, would be in London town within the hour. Straight from his forests and mountains for the first time in his life, he would find himself in the heart of the greatest accumulation of human beings on the planet, the first city of the world, the final expression of civilization as known to the human race.
"'N. H.' in London town," thought Dr. Fillery, his mouth twitching with the smile that began in his quiet eyes. "Bless the lad! We must make him feel at home and happy. He shall indeed have kindness. He'll need a woman's touch as well." He reflected a moment. "Women are a great help in doubtful cases—the way a man reacts to them," he mused. "Only they must be distinct in type to be of value." And his mind ran quickly, comprehensively over the women of his acquaintance, pausing, as it did so, upon two in particular—a certain Lady Gleeson, and Iraida—sometimes called Nayan—Khilkoff, the daughter of his Russian friend, the sculptor.