scientist of his day, it was also freely rumoured that he had paid the penalty of genius. The dividing line between genius and insanity is a very thin one, and Professor Appleby was very much on the borderline: he had a cruel and sinister side to his character which could scarcely be called normal.
There were rumours current of strange habits he had acquired during his long sojourn in the East. Gossip has many votaries in an English country village, and Professor Appleby’s house, the Lodge, discreetly retired though it was, behind a long avenue of trees, was the object of much curiosity and an astonishing penetrative insight on the part of the villagers.
‘How he ever married her. I don’t know’—this referred to the gracious woman with hair of golden-brown and large, pathetic brown eyes who was occasionally to be seen flitting through the village with flushed face averted as though she knew she were an object of pity. Local opinion was unanimous about Eleanor Appleby. Two years before she had been a girl of breathless beauty; now it was evident that she walked with fear. She had been induced by the persuasions of her mother and her friends to accept the brilliant Professor Appleby as suitor—and now she was paying the cost of her husband’s erratic genius.
There was a great deal more gossip. Stories of his cruelty, and of his preference for the society of other women. How these got about in the village it is difficult to tell, for Professor Appleby was careful to throw a barricade of secrecy around the Lodge. His menage consisted of two domestics, a white-haired cook whose frightened manner and consistent head-shaking was the answer to any curious question about life at the Lodge, an old gardener and handy man who for some reason of his own had the silence of the sphinx in his tongue, and Vera, the house parlourmaid. Vera? Well, Vera, too, may have had her own reasons for not talking.
Yet rumour had got about, and Professor Appleby was conscious of it. He was sensitive about it, too, sensitive as a man who has some secret vice. As he stood back from the snake which was now twisting to the carpet, a sudden savagery flitted across his gross, white face. It was quickly eradicated. Indeed, he crossed the carpet, softly as a cat, and looked at his own reflection in a mirror, screwed his monocle in his eye and wagged a white forefinger warningly at himself.
No one must see it. No one must guess.
He turned away from the mirror again, and tried to capture elusive memories of an astonishing outburst he had made at a medical board in London a week before. What had he done—what had he said? Really he ought not to do these things. He must keep a closer guard over himself.
He thrust his hands deep in the pockets of his trousers and stood with feet apart, his chin sunk as he stared with glittering eyes at the cobra.
Suddenly he started.
Through the microphone concealed in one of the dummy books had come distinctly the sound of a knock at the front door of the Lodge, then faintly the sounds of the maid’s footsteps and the opening of the door. Then voices; a man’s deep and hearty, and a woman’s confused low tones.
Professor Appleby’s brows drew together, and somehow the faint contortion gave the heavy white face with its bright eyes a terribly sinister expression. The professor had that type of gross face that many exceedingly clever men possess; to watch its fleeting expressions provided a fascinating, if rather frightening study.
He listened. It was evident that those in the hall were taking care not to be overheard, for their voices sounded in undertone to their footsteps moving towards the drawing-room. The microphone made of their conversation a mere confused buzz, and only now and then did a word sound with clarity.
Professor Appleby knew that his wife and Doctor Alec Portal were talking together in the drawing-room.
He caught snatches through the microphone, chiefly in the man’s voice.
‘… You must not … then leave him … For your own sake I beg of you, Eleanor.’
The listening professor smiled beneath frowning brows. Quickly he picked up the writhing, harmless cobra and stowed it away in the wickerwork basket, then once more wiping his hands in his handkerchief, he crossed the carpet, lithe and buoyant to an astonishing degree in a man of such heavy build.
Softly traversing the passage between the study and the drawing-room, he opened the door suddenly, and the two inside the room, seated on a settee near the window, looked up startled to see him regarding them from the threshold.
In the woman his presence caused instant and dire confusion. Eleanor Appleby snatched away the delicately moulded hand that Doctor Portal had been holding whilst in pursuance of his professional duties he felt her pulse, and that same hand went like a fluttering bird to her heart. She paled—it was pitiable that swift pallor that drained her face of every vestige of colour—and her dilated eyes stared at her husband whilst she trembled.
Doctor Alec Portal looked swiftly from Professor Appleby to the beautiful, stricken creature on the settee beside him, and a frown knit his brows as he sprang to his feet.
Across the empty space of the room the two men measured glances. Doctor Alec Portal’s level-gray eyes did not waver, though in those few seconds he knew that rumour was right about Professor Appleby.
His eyes were restless, unnaturally bright under the frowning brows; his mouth twitched ever so slightly. He held himself well in check, of course, but the cruel glow that showed in his eyes as he looked at Eleanor could not belong to a quite normal man.
It was Doctor Alec Portal who spoke first.
‘Professor Appleby, I believe?’ he said in icy tones.
These two had crossed each other’s path many times, yet had never spoken. In public Professor Appleby was an extremely dignified and even ponderous man, and scarcely likely to take notice of a country medico.
Alec Portal, however, looked far different from the traditional village doctor. He had bought the country practice at Farncombe merely as a diversion from his wealth and because medicine appealed to him. Earlier in life he had selected the army as a career, and he bore the stamp of it unquestionably.
Hardly yet in his forties, he stood some six feet in his socks, with a fair, tanned and clean-cut face that could be unbelievably boyish and handsome, and at times implacably stern.
Stern he appeared now as Professor Appleby crossed the room towards him. It was quite obvious from the professor’s attitude, the sneering smile upon his lips, that he was going to commit one of those breaches of good taste for which he was becoming notorious.
‘Every one in Farncombe knows that I am Professor Appleby, I think,’ he said with icy contempt. ‘And also that my wife is—well, mine.’
Doctor Alec Portal flushed.
He could not mistake the implied allusion. It was, in fact, coldly brutal, and he heard a little gasp from the settee. Professor Appleby was regarding him with a provocative and sneering smile, and Doctor Portal controlled his rising anger with difficulty.
‘That is exactly my point,’ he said harshly. ‘I am Doctor Alec Portal, as you know, and I am in attendance upon Mrs Appleby in a medical capacity. I am glad to have the opportunity of seeing you tonight, professor, for I wish to warn you that your wife is far from well.’
Professor Appleby’s eyebrows shot up.
‘Indeed,’ he said suavely, ‘that is news to me. I have qualifications as a medical man myself, and I should have said that Mrs Appleby is enjoying the best of health. Still—’ he crossed the carpet, and took his wife’s hand, feeling her pulse with a judicial air.
His back was half-turned to Alec Portal, but, indeed, the young doctor was not exercising any special vigilance for the moment, and therefore he did not observe the cruel pressure of Professor Appleby’s strong fingers upon his wife’s arm.
Alec Portal was caught up in a sudden strange wonder. As the professor had crossed the room Eleanor Appleby had cast a swift glance of appeal to him. And for a breathless moment a galvanic force that Doctor Portal had never before experienced and did not understand, swept through him.
He