“He had somehow in the laboratory—you know the danger; and Dorrien was a reckless chap, those last years, not like himself, his friends said. They all used to worry over his riding, his shooting, his yachting—everything.”
I broke off. It was extremely hard to tell the man who apparently knew most about Dorrien, even though he had never called Dorrien friend. “He had somehow, through a cut, the slip of an instrument—I don’t know the sickening scientific detail of it—inoculated himself with a disease he was working with. He made nothing of it at the time, I’m told. Everybody had forgotten it. Suddenly—when he found out what he was in for, I suppose—he shot himself. After what you’ve told me, I should say it was probably from disgust. Why blame him?”
“What was it?” Hoyting had not stirred, but his voice had changed immeasurably.
“Tuberculosis.”
The great shoulders shrugged once. I felt impelled to explain—a miserable little feverish strut. And before Hoyting, of all men!
“It gives the measure of his revolt—a man who had cured so many, and could have cured himself mechanically, you might say; a man whose special business in life had been to snap his fingers at that particular plague. That’s why, until you told me all this, I never understood. Now it’s clear enough.”
I shut my eyes, glad to put the ironic thing away, glad to be at peace, with no further need to speak of it. When I opened them again, I was alone. Hoyting, the foot-loose, was gone.