“Good-evening, Sir Philip.”
Dr. Netherbridge seemed to breathe more freely when he found himself outside the gray fortress-like walls of the Chase. No patient he had ever yet had could approach in interest that fragile creature with the deathly white face and great dark eyes, whose husband was her worst enemy, and whose servants were her spies.
“You will be my friend, will you not?”
The words and the pathetic look which accompanied them haunted the young man. Especially since he had seen her husband a deep pity for her had taken possession of his mind. In speaking of his wife, Sir Philip’s voice, naturally hard, grew harder still, and the cold gleam of his eyes appeared absolutely diabolical. The whole of the Cranstouns’ miserable married life seemed to be laid bare before the doctor as he made his way thoughtfully toward his bachelor home, borne along the dark roads in the comfortable carriage in which he had come. He pictured to himself the spoiled, impulsive girl, little more than a child, whose strange beauty and proud maidenliness had won Sir Philip Cranstoun’s short-lived but passionate love. Such a union could only end in one way between so ill-matched a pair, and the woman who, with kind and tender but firm treatment, might have proved herself a loving and devoted wife and mother, had been cowed, terrified, sneered at, and repressed, until she had become the miserable nerve-wracked creature whom he had just seen.
It was with some approach to excitement that the little doctor prepared to inquire of his housekeeper—a garrulous, gossiping, stout woman—concerning what had taken place before the Recorder that day. But the initiative was taken by Mrs. Brooks herself, who, as she laid his frugal supper on the table, plunged at once into the subject on her mind:
“Lor’, sir! to think of your going off in the Cranstoun carriage, like that! It’ll make some folks I know that live in a great house outside the town, with a brass plate, and a boy in buttons to carry round the medicine-bottles in a basket, fit to burst themselves of envy. When you’re rested, sir, I’m just longing to know all about the Chase. I’ve always heard tell it’s such a fine place, grand enough for a royal dook. But to think of poor Sir Philip having such things said to him in court to-day, and all along of an impudent poacher fellow, who, I dare say, fully deserves his five years and more if the truth be known.”
The doctor put down his knife and fork.
“What do you mean, Mrs. Brooks?” he asked. “Tell me just what happened.”
“Willingly, sir. If I might make so bold as to take a chair, being rather bad like, with rheumatism in the knees. It was this way, sir. My young sister-in-law, my brother William’s wife, you know, sir, she lives just across the way to the court-house, and William being in the force, she gets in to see the cases, and mostly drops in to tea with me afterward, to tell me about them; well, to-day she says there was a big, dark, young man, and well enough looking for his class of life, as was brought up on a charge of unlawfully wounding one of Sir Philip Cranstoun’s gamekeepers in a plantation near the Chase some few weeks ago. It appears it was about ten or a little before, and two of Sir Philip’s men, one of them with his arm all bandaged up, and a wound in his head, gave evidence as they were on the lookout for poachers, when they caught sight of this young man and another in a plantation near the Chase. Both were well-known poachers, and awful desperate men. The gamekeepers crept silently until they came upon them; but the poachers were very powerfully built and violent, and in the fight Sir Philip’s men were getting the worst of it, and the older ruffian had his knife out to murder the gamekeeper, as he knelt on his chest, pinning him to the ground, when Sir Philip himself, who was in the woods with his gun, hearing the scuffle, came up in the nick of time, and shot the poacher dead.”
Dr. Netherbridge started from his chair.