Taken all around, I had only substituted one mystery for another.
If I knew now why Rosie had taken the basket of dishes, I did not know who had spoken to her and followed her along the drive. If I knew that Louise was in the lodge, I did not know why she was there. If I knew that Arnold Armstrong had spent some time in the lodge the night before he was murdered, I was no nearer the solution of the crime. Who was the midnight intruder who had so alarmed Liddy and myself? Who had fallen down the clothes chute? Was Gertrude’s lover a villain or a victim? Time was to answer all these things.
CHAPTER XIII LOUISE
The doctor from Englewood came very soon, and I went up to see the sick girl with him. Halsey had gone to supervise the fitting of the car with blankets and pillows, and Gertrude was opening and airing Louise’s own rooms at the house. Her private sitting- room, bedroom and dressing-room were as they had been when we came. They occupied the end of the east wing, beyond the circular staircase, and we had not even opened them.
The girl herself was too ill to notice what was being done. When, with the help of the doctor, who was a fatherly man with a family of girls at home, we got her to the house and up the stairs into bed, she dropped into a feverish sleep, which lasted until morning. Doctor Stewart–that was the Englewood doctor– stayed almost all night, giving the medicine himself, and watching her closely. Afterward he told me that she had had a narrow escape from pneumonia, and that the cerebral symptoms had been rather alarming. I said I was glad it wasn’t an “itis” of some kind, anyhow, and he smiled solemnly.
He left after breakfast, saying that he thought the worst of the danger was over, and that she must be kept very quiet.
“The shock of two deaths, I suppose, has done this,” he remarked, picking up his case. “It has been very deplorable.”
I hastened to set him right.
“She does not know of either, Doctor,” I said. “Please do not mention them to her.”
He looked as surprised as a medical man ever does.
“I do not know the family,” he said, preparing to get into his top buggy. “Young Walker, down in Casanova, has been attending them. I understand he is going to marry this young lady.”
“You have been misinformed,” I said stiffly. “Miss Armstrong is going to marry my nephew.”
The doctor smiled as he picked up the reins.
“Young ladies are changeable these days,” he said. “We thought the wedding was to occur soon. Well, I will stop in this afternoon to see how my patient is getting along.”
He drove away then, and I stood looking after him. He was a doctor of the old school, of the class of family practitioner that is fast dying out; a loyal and honorable gentleman who was at once physician and confidential adviser to his patients. When I was a girl we called in the doctor alike when we had measles, or when mother’s sister died in the far West. He cut out redundant tonsils and brought the babies with the same air of inspiring self-confidence. Nowadays it requires a different specialist for each of these occurrences. When the babies cried, old Doctor Wainwright gave them peppermint and dropped warm sweet oil in their ears with sublime faith that if it was not colic it was earache. When, at the end of a year, father met him driving in his high side-bar buggy with the white mare ambling along, and asked for a bill, the doctor used to go home, estimate what his services were worth for that period, divide it in half–I don’t think he kept any books–and send father a statement, in a cramped hand, on a sheet of ruled white paper. He was an honored guest at all the weddings, christenings, and funerals–yes, funerals–for every one knew he had done his best, and there was no gainsaying the ways of Providence.
Ah, well, Doctor Wainwright is gone, and I am an elderly woman with an increasing tendency to live in the past. The contrast between my old doctor at home and the Casanova doctor, Frank Walker, always rouses me to wrath and digression.