The horse broke into a rapid trot, and he and the doctor were left standing together.
Mr. Francis stood looking after the diminishing vehicle for a moment, still smiling.
"And Lady Oxted, and Lady Oxted," he continued to murmur to himself. Then he turned briskly to his companion and in gentle, low-modulated tones and without haste:
"A charming woman—one whom one is delighted to call friend," he said. "And dear Geoffrey too—dear Geoffrey, Harry's great friend. How nice to have even so short a glimpse of him! What good fortune to meet you all together like this! Well, well, I must go on. Good-bye, for the present, my dear man."
He turned from him, walked three paces away, then stopped and faced round again. For the moment the doctor thought his eye or his brain had played him some inexplicable trick; he could barely credit that the face now looking at him was the same as that which two seconds ago had been so smiling a show of sunlit urbanity. Now it was scarce human; a fiend or a wild beast, mad with passion and hate, glared at him. The iris of the eye seemed to have swelled till the white was invisible; from each, a pin-point of a pupil was focused on him. Great veins stood out on his forehead and neck, blue and dilated; the lips were drawn back from the mouth till the gums appeared, showing two rows of white and very even teeth. The pleasant rosiness of the face was blotched and mottled with patches of white and purple, the forehead and corners of the quivering mouth were streaked with corrugations so deeply cut that the dividing ridges of flesh cast shadows therein. The stamp of humanity was obliterated.
He stood there for perhaps five seconds, his lower jaw working gently up and down as if chewing, and a little foam gathered on his lips. Each moment the doctor expected him either to fall senseless on the pavement or to spring upon him, for it seemed impossible that any human frame could contain so raging an energy of emotion, and yet neither break nor give it outlet. Then the horrible chewing of the jaw ceased, and the man or beast wiped the froth from his lips.
"You black, treacherous scoundrel!" he said, very softly. "Do you think I am the sort of man to be thwarted by a faithless subordinate?"
He came a step nearer; his mouth still seemed to be forming words, but it was as if the human nature of the man had been so effaced as to preclude speech, and he stood chattering and gesticulating like some angry ape. Yet the resemblance roused in the doctor no sense of the ludicrous, but only a deep-seated horror at this thing which had doffed its humanity like a cloak and become part of the brute creation. He summoned all his courage to his aid—an empty effort, for he knew within himself that if this travesty of a man came but one step nearer he would, in spite of himself, simply turn tail and run from it.
But Mr. Francis came no nearer, nor did he speak again, and before the lapse of another five seconds he turned away and walked quickly down toward the corner of the square without looking back. The doctor followed him with his eye, and saw him hail a hansom at the end of Upper Grosvenor Street, get in, and drive northward. He himself stood there, his brain a tumult of bewildered conjecture, and did not see who it was rapidly approaching him till the figure was by him, and he heard his own name called.
"I got down as soon as I could stop the cab," said Geoffrey. "He has gone? Where? What has happened?"