Now that suspicion, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, a kind of doubting curiosity, had been aroused in the doctor's mind, it would not down; a dozen instances of slips or inconsistencies in Huddesley's conduct thronged upon him. He sat a long while, frowning in uncomfortable recollection; then got up at last, and halfway to the mantelpiece to get a cigar, paused again in puzzled meditation with his gaze on the floor. At his feet there lay the broken bits of Teddy's final glass in a sticky morass of Mynheer Van der Cuyp's wine, that calamitous beverage, seeped into the nap of the carpet. Doctor Vardaman gathered up the largest pieces gingerly, and tried to fit them together; that set of glasses had been his mother's when she went to housekeeping. It was beyond mending, however, and he was on the point of tossing the shards into a waste-basket, when a fresh discovery restrained him. He sniffed at them, sniffed his fingers, got down on all-fours and laboriously sniffed the stained carpet. He rose; "Teddy didn't drink that glass," he said aloud. "He only drank the first one Huddesley gave him. But he had been drinking all evening." He smelled at some other glasses standing near the young man's place, but apparently could make nothing of them. He went hesitatingly toward the door of a little room opening upon the hall, and at the very threshold wavered in indecision. "Oh, this is all foolishness," he said. "How could Huddesley—what possible motive——?" He opened the door. It was a dark, windowless place, little more than a closet, which the doctor had put to all sorts of uses, experimenting with chemicals, photographic plates, raising mushrooms, the hundred-and-one devices of industrious idleness. Everything there was in a kind of handy masculine disorder, and he often boasted that he could go there in the dark and pick up whatever he wanted without a moment's hesitation. But now he struck a match, and ran an anxious eye along the shelves; he breathed a little freer when he discerned the bottle he sought in its accustomed place with contents undisturbed; it was colourless stuff. "All fancy! I'm getting as notional as an old woman," he said to himself, and was turning away, when some second thought prompted him to reach the bottle down from the shelf. His match had gone out; the doctor went into the parlour, where all the gas-jets were burning wastefully high, and some red tulips he had bought that afternoon to decorate his banquet flagged miserably in the old French china vases. He deliberately removed the cork, smelled it, hesitated, touched the bottle to his tongue. "Well, I'll be——," he ejaculated, facing his own pale and perturbed image in the old-fashioned gilt mantel-glass.
Doctor Vardaman did not finish saying what he would be, but with a mechanical precision, poured the rest of the liquid into a vase of tulips. "There wasn't enough there to hurt him," he said thoughtfully. "I thought he didn't seem like a plain drunk somehow. He'll be pretty sick when he comes to, but he'd be that anyway." He sought a cigar, and sat down by the fireless grate with his hands on his knees. "The question is, what next?" said he. "What is the bottom of all this? And what on earth ought I to do?"
The old gentleman smoked his cigar out with his queries unanswered, and sat staring intently at the mantel-board, his mind travelling up and down in a fog of doubt and futile conjecture. The mantel-board exactly fitted the opening of the fireplace, and was covered with pale green wall-paper, having an arabesque border in white and gold all around the edges, and in the middle a design of a Watteau gentleman and lady kissing beside a fountain at the foot of a flight of marble steps with a temple in the background. Clouds, roses, swans, butterflies and turtle-doves contributed to the scene, and on a ribbon scroll beneath one read: "Dolce far niente." It was an interesting mantel-board and at least fifty years old. The doctor stared so long and so hard that presently he experienced no surprise at finding himself on his way to morning-service at the temple with a bunch of tulips in one hand and a bottle of Mynheer Van der Cuyp's wine labelled somewhat erratically "CAUTION. POISON. Antidote, very strong black coffee," in the other. He was obliged to take passage in a boat with old Mrs. Botlisch, and when Huddesley came around to collect the fare, discovered to his mild annoyance that he had omitted to put on his trousers—a lapse from conventionality which nobody else noticed, however. There arose a terrific storm of thunder mainly, and someone began to be very seasick—and—and——
And then the doctor waked up, with a jerk and the well-known but perfectly indefinable feeling of lateness in the air. He looked around blinking. Certain dismal sounds from the bedroom overhead accounted for one feature of his dream, and a fusillade of knocks on the front door supplied the thunder. "Why, I believe I've been asleep!" said Doctor Vardaman, slowly collecting his faculties. A pause, and then more knocking; voices muttered together, feet went to and fro on his porch, somebody fumbled for the bell-handle, struck a match and found it, and directly the bell sent forth a shattering broadside of sound in the waste and deserted kitchen. "I'm coming!" shouted the doctor, adding a brief anathema under his breath, and went to the door. Outside the rain had ceased, but a wet wind shook and tip-toed among the trees. There was a ghostly twilight abroad; it was possible dimly to descry the outlines of the landscape. Stationary before his gate the lamps of a carriage burned dimly. It was dawn! The doctor repressed an exclamation of surprise and turned to his visitors. There were three of them; one was a policeman in a shining waterproof cape-coat; he was a head and shoulders above the others, and stood back from them deferentially as one in the presence of his superiors. Before a word was spoken Doctor Vardaman observed confusedly that all three drew together, and closed up in front of the opening door, and the policeman shortened his grasp on the baton he carried.
"Somebody hurt?" inquired the doctor, following up the first idea suggested by this apparition. He was met by a counter question.
"Doctor Vardaman?" said the foremost. The doctor looked at him. He was a commonplace man in commonplace clothes, stoutly-built and active, with rather hard features and quick black eyes. The other might have been his twin, save for a certain youthfulness in his alert gaze; he leaned against the door-post chewing the fag end of a dead cigar. There was a vague hostility in the appearance of these people; in the unbecoming light of early morning, everyone wore a haggard and unkempt air, except the burly fresh-faced policeman in his trim wet-weather gear.
"I am Doctor Vardaman," said the old gentleman. "Is anyone hurt or sick?"
"No, it's all right, Doc., take it easy, nobody's needin' you," said the first speaker. "Sorry to knock you up this time o' night, but it couldn't be helped. If my train had 'a' got in on time, I'd 'a' been here not much after supper; but we're just in, I come right up from the deepo. I gotta hump myself, or I wouldn't 'a' thought o' disturbin' you. Here's my card. Say, you got a man named Huddesley, ain't you?"
"Huddesley?" echoed the doctor, in helpless bewilderment. During the above speech, which had been delivered in a brisk, authoritative, but carefully lowered voice, the speaker had walked in without the ceremony of waiting to be asked, and now stood in the middle of the hall, apparently inventorying everything in it with a swift and practised eye. His subordinates followed, the policeman halting at the door-mat and respectfully wiping his shoes.