Then I remembered what I had overheard between Ethel and The Tundish as I sat in the umpire’s chair and endeavored to connect the one conversation with the other. Had Ethel referred to Stella when she said that she would not have asked her unless he had persuaded her to do it? But they had met only the week before at Camford—or was it possible that he had seen Stella’s name in the paper and had written asking Ethel to invite her to Dalehouse? In that case Ethel probably knew something about the mystery—if mystery there was—and the doctor had lied when he spoke to Stella in the drawing-room. And if the reference had not been to Stella, then it must have been to Margaret, my partner, and that was equally inexplicable, for what possible reason could Ethel have for saying that Margaret was spoiling everything? True, there was her rather inane conversation, but they were old friends, and Ethel must have known all about that. No—I decided that she must have meant Stella, and no sooner had I come to the decision, than I felt equally convinced that the doctor did not look like a liar.
Miss Summerson had lied in the dispensary—the place seemed full of lies and ill temper. As I sat pondering under the cedar with its far-spread boughs black against the sky, a couple of bats went fluttering in the fading light and somehow their floppy uncertain flight seemed symbolic of deceit and lying too. The half-hour after nine came floating across the still calm air from the clock in the cathedral tower. Looming big and white over the black of the shadowed garden wall, it looked ghostly, I thought, and seemed less real than the bats and the shadows themselves. I rose and went back to the house full of a vague uneasiness and wishing that I was home.
Stella was still tucked up on the settee immersed in a book and obviously desiring neither company nor conversation, so I picked up the daily paper.
I could not have been seated for more than five minutes when the bell at the consulting-room entrance began to peal, and a few moments later Ethel appeared at the drawing-room door asking me if I would go to the doctor in the dispensary. There had been a motor accident and he required my help. I found a small boy of about eight stretched out on the couch. He had been badly cut by the broken glass and his poor little face made a pitiful sight as the tears trickled down through the blood. It fell to Ethel’s lot to look after the parents, who were distracted to incapacity, and to mine to hold the child while the doctor swabbed and stitched and bandaged.
I was astounded at the way he handled that small boy. His deft fingers moved at such lightning speed that the bandages seemed to fly into place of their own volition, and all the time he worked he was chatting kindly to the boy and giving me instructions. How can I describe it—unadulterated genius—magical—a superman at work on work he loved. Anyhow, incredible as it may sound, the job was completed and he was lifting the patient into the taxi that Ethel had sent for, as the cathedral clock chimed ten.
Have I described The Tundish as impassive and imperturbable—a man with a face like a mask that nothing could move? That was not the man who had bent tenderly over the morsel of damaged humanity that I had held in my arms. No nurse could have been more gentle; no mother more anxiously loving. Night and day, ice and fire, could not have differed more.
I was alone with Ethel for a moment while the doctor was talking at the side of the taxi, and she asked me with an amused little flicker of a smile whether I had been impressed.
“Why, the man must be a marvel,” I replied. “Please don’t spoil it by telling me that all G. P.’s can manage such things with similar proficiency.”
“My dear old thing,” she laughed, “did daddy never tell you about our Tundish? He is supposed to be one of the best surgeons in the country, and with children he is almost uncanny. When he left Shanghai they broke their yellow little hearts in dozens. Now he is resident doctor at a large children’s home in London, merely because he is so passionately fond of them and has money enough to do as he likes. But here he comes, and he wouldn’t thank me, or any one else, for singing his praises.”
Ethel returned to Margaret and the ironing, and the doctor and I went back to the drawing-room where Stella was still reclining on the settee. He told her that she could take her draft any time she liked, said good night to us both and went up-stairs to bed. Stella answered all my attempts at conversation with a disheartening “yes” or “no” and after pottering about for a time, I left her too, intending to follow the doctor’s example.