“You are ill?” and
“You are early?” came from each of them simultaneously. If the doctor had slipped out of the room they would perhaps have found more to say. But he stayed and joined in that short dialogue, thinking he was meeting her wishes.
“She has had an attack of angina, a pretty hot one at that. I gave her a morphia injection and it did not suit her. She is simply not fit for any emotion or excitement. As a matter of fact she ought not to be out of bed today.”
“Has my coming by an earlier train distressed you?” Gabriel asked Margaret, perhaps a little coldly. Certainly not as he would have asked her had they been alone. Nor were matters improved when she answered faintly:
“Tell him, Peter.”
Her lover wanted to hear nothing that Peter Kennedy might tell him. He was startled when she used his Christian name. He had a distaste at hearing his fiancée’s health discussed, a sensitiveness not unnatural. From an older or more impersonal physician he might have minded it less; or from one who had not admitted to him, and gloried in the admission, that he was in love with his patient.
“I don’t want to hear anything that Dr. Kennedy can tell me,” was what he said, but it misrepresented his mind. It sounded sullen or ill-tempered, but was neither, only an inarticulate evidence of distress of mind.
“Surely, Margaret, your news can wait....” This was added in a lower tone. But Margaret was beyond, and Peter Kennedy impervious to hint. The only thing that softened the situation to Gabriel was that she made room for him on the sofa, by a gesture inviting him to seat himself there. Almost he pretended not to see it, he felt rigid and uncompromising. Nevertheless, after a moment’s hesitation, he found himself beside her, listening to Dr. Kennedy’s unwelcome voice.
“You knew, didn’t you, that there had been a man hanging about the place, trying to get information from the servants? Margaret first heard of this last Tuesday....” Gabriel missed the next sentence. That the fellow should speak of her as “Margaret” made him see red. When his vision cleared Peter was still talking. There had been some allusion to or description of cook’s weakness, and the discursiveness was a fresh offence.
“What she told him in her amorous moments we have no means of knowing, but that it included the information that you had stayed in the house there is not much reason to doubt. And down came this woman like a ton of bricks on Wednesday morning and flung a bomb on us in the shape of a demand for a thousand pounds.”