“Who said anything about secrecy?” A dangerous, feline muttering. “I don’t want secrecy....”
Silence. Anxieties walked across it arm-in-arm with that lank man’s doubtful heat.
“I say, Masters, is she—is she very ill? But, of course, if I’m intruding....”
Those worried eyes were fixed on the feet stuck far out from the chair on which he lay as though exhausted. The lay-sister appeared to be pottering about in the next room. “Thinking of Donna Guelãra, are you? Haven’t much faith in me and Martel-Bonnard, have you?” Faintly amused those worried eyes looked to be. That was that man’s way. You would think he was being shifty with you when he might be just laughing at you.
Some would speak well, very well, of Dr. Masters; whilst others almost libellously, saying that, working as he did with Eugene Martel-Bonnard, the surgeon, he couldn’t be over-scrupulous in advising profitable but unnecessary operations. Martel-Bonnard’s wife wore a famous pearl rope, of which it was said that each pearl had been bought at the price of a woman’s life. But a brilliant surgeon’s life. Martel-Bonnard would say, is full of drawbacks. He charged accordingly. I think that he and Mrs. Masters must have bullied Masters every now and then—not that he wouldn’t have looked worried in the Elysian Fields. Between them, those three had once made poor Anna Estella Guelãra very sorry she had ever left Chile. She was quite well, Martel-Bonnard said she was very ill, he almost killed her, then he saved her, and how he hurt her! “Naturally,” smiled Martel-Bonnard. “Such things hurt. But, my friend, she was—pouf!—but for me.” How one would have liked to operate on that sleek little man, unsuccessfully! He despised you if you differed from him, operated on you if you were fool enough, and robbed you according to a special system he had of discounting the exchange. One hundred thousand francs, poor Anna Estella’s life had cost her that time. And pain, such as falls only to the lot of women!
“But. Masters, it’s surely not as bad a case as that!”
“Mm ... not as bad? Well ... different shall we say?”
“But that was an internal operation! You just said—”
“Quite. That’s why it’s different....”
Talking with Conrad Masters was like playing a game in which he who made out the most of the other’s words scored the most points.... But Iris alone here, in this obscure place as full of crucifixes as a cemetery!