As soon as his back was turned, the doctor began opening and shutting drawers in various parts of the Dispensary, with the air of a man who wants something in a hurry, and does not know where to find it. "Bless my soul!" he exclaimed, suddenly stopping at the drawer from which he had taken his cards of invitation on the previous day, "what's this? A key? A duplicate key, as I'm alive, of my fumigating apparatus upstairs! Oh dear, dear, how careless I get," said the doctor, turning round briskly to Miss Gwilt. "Ihadn't the least idea that I possessed this second key. I should never have missed it. I do assure you I should never have missed it if anybody had taken it out of the drawer!" He bustled away to the other end of the room--without closing the drawer, and without taking away the duplicate key.
In silence, Miss Gwilt listened till he had done. In silence, she glided to the drawer. In silence, she took the key and hid it in her apron pocket.
The Dispenser came back, with the fragments required of him, collected in a basin. "Thank you, Benjamin," said the doctor.
"Kindly cover them with water, while I get the bottle down."As accidents sometimes happen in the most perfectly regulated families, so clumsiness sometimes possesses itself of the most perfectly disciplined hands. In the process of its transfer from the shelf to the doctor, the bottle slipped and fell smashed to pieces on the floor.
"Oh, my fingers and thumbs!" cried the doctor, with an air of comic vexation, "what in the world do you mean by playing me such a wicked trick as that? Well, well, well--it can't be helped.
Have we got any more of it, Benjamin?"
"Not a drop, sir."
"Not a drop!" echoed the doctor. "My dear madam, what excuses can I offer you? My clumsiness has made our little experiment impossible for to-day. Remind me to order some more to-morrow, Benjamin, and don't think of troubling yourself to put that mess to rights. I'll send the man here to mop it all up. Our Stout Friend is harmless enough now, my dear lady--in combination with a boarded floor and a coming mop! I'm so sorry; I really am so sorry to have disappointed you." With those soothing words, he offered his arm, and led Miss Gwilt out of the Dispensary.
"Have you done with me for the present?" she asked, when they were in the hall.
"Oh, dear, dear, what a way of putting it!" exclaimed the doctor.
"Dinner at six," he added, with his politest emphasis, as she turned from him in disdainful silence, and slowly mounted the stairs to her own room.
A clock of the noiseless sort--incapable of offending irritable nerves--was fixed in the wall, a bove the first-floor landing, at the Sanitarium. At the moment when the hands pointed to a quarter before six, the silence of the lonely upper regions was softly broken by the rustling of Miss Gwilt's dress. She advanced along the corridor of the first floor--paused at the covered apparatus fixed outside the room numbered Four--listened for a moment--and then unlocked the cover with the duplicate key.
The open lid cast a shadow over the inside of the casing. All she saw at first was what she had seen already--the jar, and the pipe and glass funnel inserted in the cork. She removed the funnel;and, looking about her, observed on the window-sill close by a wax-tipped wand used for lighting the gas. She took the wand, and, introducing it through the aperture occupied by the funnel, moved it to and fro in the jar. The faint splash of some liquid, and the grating noise of certain hard substances which she was stirring about, were the two sounds that caught her ear. She drew out the wand, and cautiously touched the wet left on it with the tip of her tongue. Caution was quite needless in this case. The liquid was--water.
In putting the funnel back in its place, she noticed something faintly shining in the obscurely lit vacant space at the side of the jar. She drew it out, and produced a Purple Flask. The liquid with which it was filled showed dark through the transparent coloring of the glass; and fastened at regular intervals down one side of the Flask were six thin strips of paper, which divided the contents into six equal parts.
There was no doubt now that the apparatus had been secretly prepared for her--the apparatus of which she alone (besides the doctor) possessed the key.
She put back the Flask, and locked the cover of the casing. For a moment she stood looking at it, with the key in her hand. On a sudden, her lost color came back. On a sudden, its natural animation returned, for the first time that day, to her face. She turned and hurried breathlessly upstairs to her room on the second floor. With eager hands she snatched her cloak out of the wardrobe, and took her bonnet from the box. "I'm not in prison!"she burst out, impetuously. "I've got the use of my limbs! I can go--no matter where, as long as I am out of this house!"With her cloak on her shoulders, with her bonnet in her hand, she crossed the room to the door. A moment more--and she would have been out in the passage. In that moment the remembrance flashed back on her of the husband whom she had denied to his face. She stopped instantly, and threw the cloak and bonnet from her on the bed. "No!" she said; "the gulf is dug between us--the worst is done!"There was a knock at the door. The doctor's voice outside politely reminded her that it was six o'clock.
She opened the door, and stopped him on his way downstairs.
"What time is the train due to-night?" she asked, in a whisper.
"At ten," answered the doctor, in a voice which all the world might hear, and welcome.
"What room is Mr. Armadale to have when he comes?""What room would you like him to have?"
"Number Four."
The doctor kept up appearances to the very last.
"Number Four let it be," he said, graciously. "Provided, of course, that Number Four is unoccupied at the time."* * * * *
The evening wore on, and the night came.
At a few minutes before ten, Mr. Bashwood was again at his post, once more on the watch for the coming of the tidal train.
