“You are not saying what you really think, Sir Frank,” she pronounced boldly. “He has been murdered, and you know it, but you are afraid of shocking me by saying so outright. You needn’t mind. I look on this as a judgment, and I have seen it coming.”
The physician gazed at her as steadily as she was gazing at him.
“Have you any objection to telling me why?”
“No. Now that my mother isn’t here I don’t care what I tell you. Dr. Weathered never loved her, but she loved him. She wouldn’t believe anything bad of him while he was alive, and now he’s dead I don’t want her to hear anything that would grieve her for nothing.” She seemed to consider for a moment what to say next. “You mustn’t think he was altogether wicked, at all events at first. He was very clever, and he knew that he could do well in London with my mother’s money. And he was really interested in science. He had studied psychology for years before he started as a nerve specialist. I believe that he meant to practise quite respectably when he began here. It was the women who led him astray.”
A singular statement to be made by the step-daughter who had so much reason to hate him, and who every now and then gave me the impression that she had hated him.
“Half the women who came to consult him, I believe, had nothing the matter with them except a craving for excitement. He told us that himself, though, of course, he didn’t say what kind of excitement they craved for. He used to talk about his practice at first, and tell us the names of some of his patients, when they were big people. One was a duchess, another was a famous author. But after a time he stopped talking about them. That was when he began to fall under their influence. They sent him invitations to dinner without inviting my mother. And he accepted them.”
One could see, as it were, the rift opening, and this keen-eyed, strong-minded girl taking precocious notice of everything and watching her step-father’s downward progress.
“Then he took up with this psycho-analysis, pretending he could cure people of their troubles and change their dispositions by encouraging them to talk to him freely. I knew he didn’t really believe in it. He had sneered at it often enough when it first came up. He took to it simply because it was the way to make money. I fancy the other doctors looked down on him because of it. At all events they seemed to boycott him. None of them ever came here, and their wives left off calling on us. I soon saw there was something wrong.
“I tried to get my mother to do something, but she wouldn’t or couldn’t. She had no influence over him apart from her money, and he was making so much that he was independent of her. And she wouldn’t leave him. She had no legal grounds, of course. Whatever went on was carefully concealed from her. He couldn’t have afforded an open rupture. That would have frightened off his patients.”
Sarah paused for breath, and my chief and I exchanged looks. It was a curious revelation, and the strangest part of it was the manner in which it was being made. The accuser seemed to be also the defender. There was a very thoughtful wrinkle on Tarleton’s brow, as though he was listening to more than the words that reached his ear.