When she reached her hotel the sallow clerk called to her as she passed his desk.
"Oh, Mees, I have here a note for you. It has just arrived."
She tore open the envelope. It contained two lines in a small, slovenly hand, on thick, engraved paper.
"Dr. Sartorius will expect Nurse Rowe to-morrow, Wednesday, at nine in the morning."
So that was that!
CHAPTER III
Esther was not mistaken in her surmise that the doctor was by choice at least more of a scientist than a physician. Patients he had to be sure, a respectable number, composed mostly of English and American tourists, well-to-do people. Esther thought that if he had been more keenly interested or a better business man he might have developed his practice into a large and lucrative one. She recognised in him the sure instinct of the natural diagnostician, she knew enough to realise that his methods and knowledge were up to date. Even that manner of his, though a little forbidding, had the merit of inspiring confidence. One felt he was a big man and could afford to dispense with geniality. Yet it was perfectly apparent that his practice never came first with him. Esther had not been in the house with him half a week before she made that discovery. Every free minute of the day found him engrossed in his experiments, to the utter exclusion of all else, so intolerant of interruption that he more than once kept patients waiting a quarter of an hour in the gloomy salon while he finished some piece of work.
The laboratory, with which Esther quickly became familiar, was at the top of the house, up two flights of stairs, a bare, L-shaped room built originally for a studio. A sloping skylight admitted a strong north light, which streamed down on the long table covered with all the paraphernalia of research. There were two glass cabinets containing bottles of many descriptions, and a plain Normandy oak armoire, fitted with shelves upon which were specimens and materials for work. A fibre mat and a couple of kitchen chairs completed the furnishings of the main part, but in a sort of alcove which formed the base of the L, and which was curtained off by thick red hangings, was a camp bed with a table beside it and a chest of drawers. Here, so she was told by Jacques the servant, the doctor not infrequently slept when he had carried on his labours far into the night. He would drop down on the hard bed at perhaps five in the morning, just as he was, in his shirt and trousers, with only an old army blanket over him, and there he would sleep like a dead man till Jacques brought him his tea.
Esther learned a good deal from Jacques who, despite his desperado exterior, proved to be friendly and communicative, glad no doubt of someone to chat with since his master was so particularly reserved. His master, Jacques confided about the third day, was not a man at all but a machine. Work, work, work—day and night, no thought for comfort, no distractions, no voices. Voyons! It was against nature when a man lived like that. And what did he get for it?
"Écoutez, mademoiselle," the little man of the Midi said to her earnestly, laying his finger on her arm, "if the doctor worked only one half so hard—only one half, now I am telling you—he could be a rich man to-day, with a palace, three, four cars, a chauffeur, a valet de chambre. It is only because he spends his time up there in that room that he makes so little money."