Her parting words to me: “Perhaps one day you will learn the real reason of this decision,” seemed ominous ones, while her agitation was strange in such circumstances. She parted from me so hastily that it seemed almost as though she held me in fear. But why? I am sure I acted towards her with all the gallantry in my rather rough nature. No; the more I thought over it the more remarkable seemed the incident.
But a few days later I discovered yet a stranger circumstance. In order to find out something regarding my pretty companion on that long cab drive, I wrote to Dr. Whitworth at Bude, telling him that she had called, and inquiring the nature of her brother’s complaint. To this I received a brief note saying that he had never heard of “Miss Bristowe” in his life.
Then the truth was rudely forced upon me that the woman who had held me fascinated by her beauty was actually an impostor.
What, however, could have been her object in inducing me to accompany her upon such a vain errand? Doctors see some queer things and meet with strange adventures in the course of their practice, but surely her motive in fooling me was utterly unintelligible.
Through the remaining fortnight I continued to treat the crowd of poor suffering humanity that seemed to greet me ever in the waiting-room; for Whitworth was a kindly man, hence all the poor came to him. Night after night I sat listening to the ills of costermongers and their wives, labourers, factory hands, cabmen, tram-men, and all that hard-working class that makes up lower London “over the water.” Sometimes they told me their symptoms with quaint directness, using scientific terms wrongly or atrociously pronounced—the result of School Board education in elementary physiology, I suppose. But, as in every neighbourhood of that class, drink was accountable for, or aggravated, at least two-thirds of the cases that I saw. Surely it would open the eyes of the social reformer or the temperance advocate if he spent one evening in the consulting-room of a dispensary in lower London.
At last Whitworth returned, fresh and bronzed, from the Cornish coast, and as I sat handing back to him the keys of the place and receiving a cheque for my services, I mentioned the subject of Miss Bristowe.
“Ah!” he laughed, “what did you mean by that letter? I don’t know any such person, nor even anyone who lives at Blackheath.”
“And she said that you had attended her brother for nearly two years for some internal ailment. She came here one night to fetch you. I told her you were away, and after some persuasion she allowed me to accompany her. Then, when we got to Blackheath, she suddenly changed her mind and sent me back.”
“You never saw the brother?”
“Never went to the house. She wouldn’t let me.”