‘That I will, mum!’ undertook Nora playfully.
‘Sugar and cream, Mr Carrados?’ asked Miss Tilehurst, seeing that Ophelia had arrived at the arbour with the tea tray.
‘Cream—no sugar, thank you.’
It is as well, since it had some little bearing on the course of events that afternoon, and thereafter perhaps for centuries, to indicate the rearrangements of positions that had come about from so trifling a cause as the dilapidation of the summer-house appointments. The tea, as originally planned, was laid in there, with Miss Tilehurst pouring out and Ophelia acting as a connecting link between supply and demand until her services were dispensed with. Mr Carrados, choosing the sun as we have seen, sat on an isolated chair some little distance from the arbour, while on the other side of the grass-plot in the shade of a catalpa tree, a substantial bench accommodated Dr Olivant when he came out and Nora and Miss Tilehurst in turn as they went backwards and forwards refilling cups and offering the more substantial refreshment. Geoffrey had not yet arrived—but of course he must any minute now, and in the minds of three out of the five people there his absence, as the time went on, was the one thing that engrossed them. Three out of the five: but which three?
‘Your cup of tea, sir,’ considerately announced Ophelia, approaching Mr Carrados and regarding him with fascinated interest. ‘I was to be careful. You’re blind, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, Ophelia. Quite blind,’ he replied with a reassuring smile as he took the cup and saucer neatly from her.
‘You don’t know of things that go on then?’ she elaborated.
‘Sometimes kind people tell me of them.’ He stirred in the floating cream deliberatingly. ‘If they think it will amuse me.’
‘Amuse!’ she giggled at the recollection. ‘Not half, it wasn’t! You ought to have seen him with his moustache coming off when he washed his face there. It did look funny, I can tell you.’
‘It must have done. Did he know you saw him?’
‘Not him! I was looking through the—well, a place where he couldn’t see me.’
‘Ophelia! Come, Ophelia,’ called out Miss Tilehurst and with a friendly nod and the consciousness that she had done her best to ‘amuse’, Ophelia ambled back to the arbour.
‘Bread-and-butter or anchovy sandwiches, Uncle?’ inquired Nora, coming round in turn. ‘Charming man that—sort I abhor. Makes you feel it must lead up to borrowing a fiver every minute. Or raspberries first?’
‘Sandwich, thanks.’ He dexterously put down the cup on the grass beside him (Nora knew better than to butt in with help) and supplied himself from the plate she offered. ‘By the way, don’t you want to go out into the road to see if anyone is coming?’
‘Not particularly. Why?’
‘Oh, I think I should … Perhaps because I want you to.’
‘Uncle Max, what is to be the hocus-pocus now? You’ve suddenly gone rather serious.’
‘I don’t know that there will be any hocus-pocus, Nora. But I think it may have suddenly gone rather serious.’
‘Very well. I know that when … Tell me what I am to do.’
‘Keep your wits about you and don’t give anything away. You are going to look down the road to see if Tilehurst isn’t coming. Get the number of that car and let me have a description.’
Nora passed on, admirably calm, to the other guest and smiled off on him another anchovy sandwich. Then she returned her stock to the arbour, and securing her own tea and plate began to walk across to the shade of the catalpa.
‘Oh, I think I’ll just give a look to see if Geoffrey is in sight yet and hurry him up if he is,’ she called back. ‘He’s really naughty.’
‘Yes, do, dear,’ approved Miss Tilehurst, following her across, ‘but don’t stay out looking. I’m going to sit with Dr Olivant for a minute now but I feel that we are neglecting our visitors shockingly. It would have been different if we could have all been together in the summer-house. As it is—’
‘Have another sandwich, sir, while they’re here,’ croaked Ophelia confidentially at the blind man’s elbow. Being unable, as she argued, to look after himself, she was moved to take him under her special protection. ‘I know these picnic parties: once a thing’s gone you’re never sure if you’ll ever see it again. “A bird in the hand” is what I believe in being.’
‘I think you are quite right,’ he admitted no less confidentially, ‘but not yet, thank you. This time I’ll risk it.’
Nora came back from the side gate again and for a moment loitered at the bench, claiming her tea and plate with the light flippancies of the occasion.
‘No sign of the defaulter yet,’ she reported, to Miss Tilehurst chiefly; then nibbling her bread-and-butter she passed on to Carrados to see how he was faring.
‘Dark blue Lemartine four-seating tourer; four-wheel brakes; mica screen; disc wheels and carries spare one—cased—left of engine. Sphinx mascot. And the tool box has a hammer in it.’
‘Good girl,’ he commended, taking out a slender note-book and proceeding to make an inconsiderable entry. ‘Number?’
‘PZ 9741.’
‘Just as well to have it, though for a certainty it’s bogus.’
‘What is bogus for a certainty, you two conspirators?’ loudly proclaimed Miss Tilehurst, innocently taking advantage of their absorption and the muting grass to spring this devastating revelation. Carrados felt Nora’s sterilised dismay as he smilingly took over the situation.
‘My niece thinks she has made a find—one of Wheatley’s “Cries of London” in a Mutbury second-hand shop,’ he obligingly explained; ‘but I tell her that there are a hundred fakes for every genuine copy. Still, it might be worth while—I wonder if Dr Olivant knows anything of prints? Some doctors have uncommonly good things on the walls of their reception rooms. We might ask him.’
‘Oh, Doctor, do you know anything about prints?’ called out Miss Tilehurst, glad of the opportunity to make the talk more general, and Olivant politely came forward. ‘Miss Melhuish thinks that she has discovered a rare engraving in a shop somewhere, only Mr Carrados is afraid that it may be—what is it?—bogus! We wondered if you knew—’
‘I fear I must admit my ignorance,’ replied Dr Olivant, making the admission sound more weighty than most other people’s claim to extensive knowledge. ‘It is a subject that—I beg your pardon, Miss Tilehurst?’
‘Geoffrey at last!’ the interruption had been, her mind off like a bird as the front gate clanged and a man was seen through the laurels. ‘Oh, Geoffrey,’ she exclaimed in a voice of petulant relief, ‘you are a—’ and then as he came round the bend, in a voice that was drained of every shade of expression but dismay: ‘Geoffrey!’
CHAPTER IX
IN WHICH THE ASSURANCE OF THE EYE DECEIVES THE MIND
THE man who had come in by the front gate and who was walking up the path, trundling a buckled and deflated bicycle at his side, looked up at the cry but he made no response nor did he evince any appreciable sign of recognition. His face had a grey strained look, not as of fear or apprehension now but as though some terrible experience had come suddenly and passed and left a benumbed and abiding impression. He took in the five people gathered there with an incurious acceptance that passed them by and it was distressingly obvious that if left to himself he would go straight on by the way he knew and not bestow another glance or a thought about what they were doing. When Miss Tilehurst laid an impulsive hand on his arm he stopped, but it was as an obedient cart-horse stops and without any personal concern in the proceedings.
‘Geoffrey, my dear, what is it? Why don’t you speak?’ implored Miss Tilehurst rather wildly. ‘Oh, my goodness, look at his poor face! Have you had an accident, Geoffrey—are you hurt? Do, for God’s sake, say something!’
‘One moment, my dear lady—you must control yourself,’ interposed Dr Olivant, coming forward with the quiet authority of his recognised position. ‘Is this—?’
‘Yes, my nephew whom we’ve been expecting. He must have
met with an accident—look at his face, look at the machine. But why doesn’t he speak? It’s so—so alarming, so inconsiderate. He may be badly injured for all we know and trying to keep it from us by not talking. But I can’t let him go on like this. We must find out if there’s anything worse and what has happened.’
‘Yes—yes, of course,’ admitted Olivant soothingly. ‘You are naturally distressed although it may not be anything like so serious as your first impression leads you to imagine. It is extremely probable that this is only a temporary phase—a matter of hours, or possibly days, and our young friend will be all right again and even laughing at his curious experience.’
‘You really think that, Doctor; you aren’t just saying it—?’
‘My dear Miss Tilehurst, if there were any immediate cause for anxiety I would be the first to warn you. However, at a time like this you naturally don’t want a stranger—perhaps I had better go—you will no doubt get along all right. Unless of course,’—a considerate after-thought—‘as a doctor who happens to be on the spot you would like me to make a provisional examination? If so—need I say?—I would be only too glad—some slight return—to put my services freely at your disposal.’
‘Oh, Doctor, would you? It would be such a blessed relief. I don’t mind admitting that I’ve had a terrible fright and I’m still—perhaps unreasonably after what you’ve said—very, very anxious.’ Almost resentfully: ‘If only he would say something. Geoffrey, my darling, don’t you recognise us here—me—Ophelia—Nora?’
‘Geoff, dear,’ said Nora, going to his side, ‘can’t you tell me? Don’t I recall anything at all? Humph and Nobbles, you know.’ But Geoffrey only looked painfully apart and fixed his eyes on the door for which he had been making.
‘Um, yes,’ interposed Dr Olivant, capably taking charge with the implication that this was all very well in its amateur way but that it was now time for someone who understood diagnostics to adopt proper methods. ‘This is quite unlooked for, I assume? There has been no previous indication of your nephew being in any way—shall I say strange? Not suffering from any physical or mental shock lately? Not complaining specially of the heat or feeling the sun, for instance?’
‘Nothing at all,’ declared Miss Tilehurst, searching her mind with conscientious detail. ‘Of course we’ve all grumbled about the weather in an ordinary way, and he may have done too, but it didn’t mean anything and he was perfectly happy and normal up to the time I last saw him.’
‘And that was—when?’
‘At lunch today. Afterwards he seems to have taken his bicycle out and gone off somewhere but I didn’t know that he was going or see him go. Ophelia was the last who saw him.’
‘Yes, that’s right; I saw him go,’ confirmed Ophelia, suddenly realising that this trifling circumstance might invest her with a gratifying importance. ‘Came through the kitchen with his machine when I was washing up the things after lunch he did. “Going out for a ride on your bicycle, Mr Geoffrey?” I said, and then—’
‘Yes, yes; there is no doubt that he did go off,’ interrupted Miss Tilehurst, recognising just in time that in the eyes of a very literal man Geoffrey’s absurd reply might pass for evidence of an existing state of delirium. ‘You may take it for granted that he was perfectly normal when he set out, Doctor.’
‘Well, I thought it sounded queer,’ stuck out Ophelia, tolerantly resentful of being somehow ‘done out’ of her scene, but as no one attached any importance whatever to anything that Ophelia might think her testimony faded into the background.
Meanwhile Olivant had taken his patient’s unresisting hand and under cover of a flow of smooth commonplace was feeling his pulse, critically looking into his eyes, and inspecting his bruised condition.
‘Now, Mr Tilehurst, you’ve evidently had something of an adventure; can’t you tell us a little of what has happened to upset you? Your aunt is naturally concerned to see you behave like this; surely you will make an effort—just a few words—to relieve her anxiety. You—? Yes—? Nothing to say, eh?’ For certainly this bland assumption of ability to comply was no more successful than Miss Tilehurst’s frenzied appeal or Nora’s more recondite suggestion. ‘Well, never mind; suppose you simply write down the name of the place where this occurred or even your signature,’ and producing an impressive memorandum tablet from his breast pocket Dr Olivant offered it, together with a pencil, for the purpose.
A sigh of relief went up from at least two throats. Geoffrey accepted the proffered articles—mechanically, indeed, but at any rate he understood the purport of what was said—and for a moment it seemed as though he was engaged in complying with the requirement. Then he held out the pad again—a few meaningless scrawls were the only result of the effort.
‘Yes, yes; exactly,’ commented the doctor, glancing at the lines and accepting them as if they constituted just what he had expected. ‘Thank you, Mr Tilehurst.’
‘Not very much perhaps,’ he confided to his audience aside, ‘but still, in the circumstances, something.’ And to Miss Tilehurst more especially: ‘Oh, he’ll be all right again soon; no need for you to worry.’
‘But what am I to do?’ she asked, swayed between an intense relief that this obvious authority should treat the matter so lightly and a feeling that with Geoffrey like that there must be something more than Olivant would admit behind it. ‘What is it that has happened?’
‘Even without our having anything more than this extraneous evidence to go on’—a gesture indicated his patient’s bruised and soiled condition and the damage to his machine—‘it is pretty plain what has happened. Your nephew has experienced a severe shock—mental and physical combined—with the not unnatural result that for the time certain functions of the brain have been thrown out of action. Whether he was involved in a collision with someone else or merely had a spill or—what is perhaps more probable—received this damage and at the same time underwent the terrifying experience of what is termed a “narrow squeak” from something much worse is beside the question. Something happened and as the result he is now suffering from what I should confidently predict will be only a temporary form of motor aphasia.’
‘My word, but that sounds bad,’ confided Ophelia—in the absence of Sultan—to herself. ‘Them motors didn’t ought to be allowed—’
‘Inability to speak, that is of course,’ amplified Dr Olivant with dignified severity. ‘And as we see here’—tapping the pad that he still held—‘inability to write: agraphia.’
‘You don’t think that he may be hurt internally somewhere all the time, Doctor, and unable to tell us? It must surely have been a very severe crash—’
‘Not at all, not at all. As a matter of fact, physical violence is not necessary to produce the condition of aphasia. Quite recently I was called in to a case where a financier fell into the state as a result of unexpected market reverses. Three days later he suddenly recovered the power of speech completely on seeing his wife breaking some coal with his favourite golf club. Another case I had—a lady saw a ghost apparently coming out of her husband’s bedroom. It was really the housemaid, who then admitted that she was a confirmed sleep-walker.’
‘You have had other cases? Then you do actually know all about it?’ suggested Miss Tilehurst, still more reassured though not perhaps choosing her words quite happily.
‘My dear lady, I am a nerve specialist; of my standing as a consultant—that is a matter on which it is more befitting for me to leave others to express an opinion,’ replied Dr Olivant with a fine discrimination of manner. ‘In Harley Street I deal with analogous cases practically every day. Your own doctor will doubtless confirm my diagnosis if you think it necessary to consult him.’
‘I suppose we ought to—he has attended Geoffrey for everything from childhood. But, oh, how very unfortunate! Dr Tyser is away on his holidays and his locum isn’t at all—You do think that it would be better for him to be seen by an ordinary doctor as well, don’t you?’
‘Well, as to that—perhaps y
ou would like me to make a more detailed examination to see definitely if there is any internal trouble and say what I think then? If so—I’m entirely at your service.’
‘Oh, I should; I should. But it is so very, so very good of you, Dr Olivant.’
‘Not at all. Your own man is away and in cases of emergency professional etiquette is mercifully elastic. The circumstances naturally encourage me to take a personal interest in our young friend here. Besides, I am scientifically concerned in observing the curious and varied effects of these sensory disturbances. Then we will go inside for a few minutes if you will kindly indicate where it will be convenient.’
‘Yes, yes, certainly, Doctor. You had better be at hand, Ophelia. Dr Olivant may require something bringing.’
‘That I will, mum,’ promised Ophelia, one might even say with an anticipatory gloating.
‘Now, Mr Tilehurst, we are going into the house,’ said the doctor; ‘suppose you show me the way,’ and obedient to the suggestion Mr Tilehurst did lead the way towards the front door almost naturally. Dr Olivant turned to throw a weighty nod of approval towards Miss Tilehurst at this achievement.
‘I’m so, so terribly sorry that our afternoon has turned out like this, Mr Carrados,’ apologised Miss Tilehurst, stopping for a moment beside her visitors before she hurried on to catch up with the others on the door steps. ‘You won’t mind my running away I know but I do hope that you will stay and finish your interrupted tea—you will look after him, won’t you, Nora? I’ll let you hear what Dr Olivant says the minute I can, dear. I know that you are quite as anxious as I am. It’s all so sudden and alarming—but wasn’t it lucky that just the one man in a thousand should be here?’
‘Yes; wasn’t it!’ agreed Mr Carrados, but as his hostess was well on her way towards the house, and, further, his remark had more significance than polite assent, it was not surprising that Nora was disinclined to let it pass unchallenged.
The Bravo of London Page 13
