The Black Mask - E. W. Hornung (10 best books of all time txt) 📗

walk the civilized world again. Here were men with coats on their backs, and ladies in gloves. My only fear was lest I might run up against one or other whom I had known of old. But it was my lucky day. I felt it in my bones. I was going to get this berth; and sometimes I should be able to smell the wood-pavement on the old boy’s errands; perhaps he would insist on skimming over it in his bath-chair, with me behind.

I felt quite nervous when I reached the flats. They were a small pile in a side street, and I pitied the doctor whose plate I saw upon the palings before the ground-floor windows; he must be in a very small way, I thought. I rather pitied myself as well. I had indulged in visions of better flats than these. There were no balconies. The porter was out of livery. There was no lift, and my invalid on the third floor! I trudged up, wishing I had never lived in Mount Street, and brushed against a dejected individual coming down. A full-blooded young fellow in a frock-coat flung the right door open at my summons.

“Does Mr. Maturin live here?” I inquired.

“That’s right,” said the full-blooded young man, grinning all over a convivial countenance.

“I⁠—I’ve come about his advertisement in the Daily Mail.”

“You’re the thirty-ninth,” cried the blood; “that was the thirty-eighth you met upon the stairs, and the day’s still young. Excuse my staring at you. Yes, you pass your prelim., and can come inside; you’re one of the few. We had most just after breakfast, but now the porter’s heading off the worst cases, and that last chap was the first for twenty minutes. Come in here.”

And I was ushered into an empty room with a good bay-window, which enabled my full-blooded friend to inspect me yet more critically in a good light; this he did without the least false delicacy; then his questions began.

“ ’Varsity man?”

“No.”

“Public school?”

“Yes.”

“Which one?”

I told him, and he sighed relief.

“At last! You’re the very first I’ve not had to argue with as to what is and what is not a public school. Expelled?”

“No,” I said, after a moment’s hesitation; “no, I was not expelled. And I hope you won’t expel me if I ask a question in my turn?”

“Certainly not.”

“Are you Mr. Maturin’s son?”

“No, my name’s Theobald. You may have seen it down below.”

“The doctor?” I said.

“His doctor,” said Theobald, with a satisfied eye. “Mr. Maturin’s doctor. He is having a male nurse and attendant by my advice, and he wants a gentleman if he can get one. I rather think he’ll see you, though he’s only seen two or three all day. There are certain questions which he prefers to ask himself, and it’s no good going over the same ground twice. So perhaps I had better tell him about you before we get any further.”

And he withdrew to a room still nearer the entrance, as I could hear, for it was a very small flat indeed. But now two doors were shut between us, and I had to rest content with murmurs through the wall until the doctor returned to summon me.

“I have persuaded my patient to see you,” he whispered, “but I confess I am not sanguine of the result. He is very difficult to please. You must prepare yourself for a querulous invalid, and for no sinecure if you get the billet.”

“May I ask what’s the matter with him?”

“By all means⁠—when you’ve got the billet.”

Dr. Theobald then led the way, his professional dignity so thoroughly intact that I could not but smile as I followed his swinging coattails to the sickroom. I carried no smile across the threshold of a darkened chamber which reeked of drugs and twinkled with medicine bottles, and in the middle of which a gaunt figure lay abed in the half-light.

“Take him to the window, take him to the window,” a thin voice snapped, “and let’s have a look at him. Open the blind a bit. Not as much as that, damn you, not as much as that!”

The doctor took the oath as though it had been a fee. I no longer pitied him. It was now very clear to me that he had one patient who was a little practice in himself. I determined there and then that he should prove a little profession to me, if we could but keep him alive between us. Mr. Maturin, however, had the whitest face that I have ever seen, and his teeth gleamed out through the dusk as though the withered lips no longer met about them; nor did they except in speech; and anything ghastlier than the perpetual grin of his repose I defy you to imagine. It was with this grin that he lay regarding me while the doctor held the blind.

“So you think you could look after me, do you?”

“I’m certain I could, sir.”

“Single-handed, mind! I don’t keep another soul. You would have to cook your own grub and my slops. Do you think you could do all that?”

“Yes, sir, I think so.”

“Why do you? Have you any experience of the kind?”

“No, sir, none.”

“Then why do you pretend you have?”

“I only meant that I would do my best.”

“Only meant, only meant! Have you done your best at everything else, then?”

I hung my head. This was a facer. And there was something in my invalid which thrust the unspoken lie down my throat.

“No, sir, I have not,” I told him plainly.

“He, he, he!” the old wretch tittered; “and you do well to own it; you do well, sir, very well indeed. If you hadn’t owned up, out you would have gone, out neck-and-crop! You’ve saved your bacon. You may do more. So you are a public-school boy, and a very good school yours is, but you weren’t at either University. Is that correct?”

“Absolutely.”

“What did you do when you left school?”

“I came in for money.”

“And then?”

“I spent my money.”

“And since then?”

I stood like a