The Man with the Double Heart.

by Muriel Hine.

PART I

"Flower o' the broom Take away love and our earth is a tomb!"

--_R. Browning_.

CHAPTER I

The hour was close on midday, but the lamps in Cavendish Square shone with a blurred light through the unnatural gloom.

The fog, pouring down from Regent's Park above, was wedged tight in Harley Street like a wad of dirty wool, but in the open s.p.a.ce fronting Harcourt House it found room to expand and took on spectral shape; dim forms with floating locks that clung to the stunted trees and, shuddering, pressed against the high London buildings which faded away indistinctly into the blackened sky.

From thence ragged pennons went busily fluttering South to be caught in the draught of the traffic in noisy Oxford Street, where hoa.r.s.e and confusing cries were blent with the rumble of wheels in all the pandemonium of man at war with the elements.

The air was raw and sooty, difficult to breathe, and McTaggart, already irritable with the nervous tension due to his approaching interview, his throat dry, his eyes smarting as he peered at the wide crossing, started violently as the horn of an unseen motor sounded unpleasantly near at hand.

"Confound the man!" he said, in apology to himself and stepped back quickly onto the narrow path as a shapeless monster with eyes of flame swung past, foiled of its prey.

"A nice pace to go on a day like this!" And here something struck him sharply in the rear, knocking his hat forward onto the bridge of his nose.

"What the...!" he checked his wrath with a sudden shamefaced laugh as he found his unseen adversary to consist of the square railings.

Somewhere down Wigmore Street a clock boomed forth the hour. A quarter to twelve. McTaggart counted the strokes and gave a sigh of relief not unmixed with amus.e.m.e.nt: the secret congratulation of an unpunctual man redeemed by an accident from the error of his ways.

Wedging his hat more firmly down on his head, he dared again the black s.p.a.ce before him, struck the curb on the opposite side and, one hand against the wall, steered round the corner and up into Harley Street.

Under the first lamp he paused and hunted for the number over the nearest door where four bra.s.s plates menaced the pa.s.ser-by with that modern form of torture that few live to escape--the inquisitorial process known as dentistry.

Making a rapid calculation, he came to the conclusion that the house he sought must lie at the further end of the street--London's "Bridge of Sighs"--where breathless hope and despair elbow each other ceaselessly in the wake of suffering humanity.

The fog was changing colour from a dirty yellow to opal, and the damp pavement was becoming visible as McTaggart moved forward with a quick stride that held an elasticity which it did not owe to elation.

He walked with an ease and lightness peculiar in an Englishman who, athletic as he may be, yet treads the earth with a certain conscious air of possessing it: a tall, well-built man, slender and very erect, but without that balanced stiffness, the hall-mark of "drill."

A keen observer would guess at once an admixture of blood that betrayed its foreign strain in that supple grace of his; in the olive skin, the light feet, and the glossy black hair that was brushed close and thick to his shapely head.

Not French. For the Frenchman moves on a framework of wire, fretting toward action, deadly in attack. But the race that bred Napoleon, subtle and resistant, built upon tempered steel that bends but rarely breaks.

Now, as he reached the last block and the house he sought, McTaggart paused for a second, irresolute, on the step.

He seemed to gather courage with a quick indrawn breath, and his mouth was set in a hard line as his hand pressed the bell.

Then he raised his eyes to the knocker above, and with the slight action his whole face changed.

For, instead of being black beneath their dark brows, the man's eyes were blue, an intense, fiery blue; with the clear depths and the temper touch that one sees nowhere else save in the strong type of the hardy mountain race. They were not the blue of Ireland, with her half-veiled, sorrowful mirth; nor the placid blue of England, that mild forget-me-not. They were utterly unmistakable; they brought with them a breath of heather-gloried solitude and the deep and silent lochs.

Here was a Scot--a hillsman from the North; no need of his name to cry aloud the fact.

And yet...

The door was opened, and at once the imprisoned fog finding a new outlet drove into the narrow hall.

A tall, bony parlour maid was staring back at him as, mechanically, McTaggart repeated the great man's name.

"You have an appointment, sir?" Her manner seemed to imply that her dignity would suffer if this were not the case.

Satisfied by his answer, she ushered him into a room where a gas fire burned feebly with an apologetic air, as though painfully conscious of its meretricious logs. Half a dozen people, m.u.f.fled in coats and furs, were scattered about a long dining table, occupied in reading listlessly the papers, to avoid the temptation of staring at each other. The place smelt of biscuits, of fog and of gas, like an unaired buffet in a railway station.

McTaggart, weighed down by a sense of impending doom, picked up a "Punch" and retired to the window, ostensibly to amuse himself, in reality to rehea.r.s.e for the hundredth time his slender stock of "symptoms." The clock ticked on, and a bleak silence reigned, broken at intervals by the sniff of a small boy, who, accompanied by a parent and a heavy cold in the head, was feasting his soul on a volume of the "Graphic."

Something familiar in the cartoon under his eyes drew McTaggart away from his own dreary thoughts.

"I mustn't forget to tell him..." he was saying to himself, when he realized that the paper he held was dated five months back! He felt immediately quite unreasonably annoyed. A sudden desire to rise up and go invaded his mind. In his nervous state the excuse seemed amply sufficient. A "Punch" five months old! ... it was a covert insult.

A doctor who could trade on his patient's credulity--pocketing his three guineas, don't forget that!--and offer them literature but fit to light the fire...

A "Punch" Five Months Old! ... he gathered up his gloves.

But a noiseless step crossed the room, a voice whispered his name.

"Mr. McTaggart? This way, please."

He found himself following the bony parlour maid, past the aggressive eyes of the still-waiting crowd, out into the hall and down a gla.s.s-roofed pa.s.sage.

"Now I'm in for it..." he said silently... "Oh! ... _d.a.m.n_!" He put on his most truculent air.

The maid tapped at a door.

"Come in," said a sharp voice.

McTaggart entered and stood still for a moment, blinking on the threshold, irresolute.

For the scene was unexpected. Despite the heavy fog that filtered through the windows with its insidious breath, a hint of Spring was there in the fresh white walls, the rose-covered chintzes and the presence of flowers.

The place seemed filled with them. An early bough of blossom, the exquisite tender pink of the almond in bloom, stood against a mirror that screened a recess; and the air was alive with the scent of daffodils, with subtle yellow faces, like curious Chinamen, peering over the edge of a blue Nankin bowl.

In the centre of the room a man in a velvet coat was bending over a ma.s.s of fresh violets, adding water carefully to the surrounding moss out of a copper jug that he held in his hands.

McTaggart stared at him; at the lean, colourless face under its untidy thatch of coa.r.s.e, gray hair; at the spare figure, the long, steady hands and the loose, unconventional clothes that he wore. He might have been an artist of Rossetti's day in that shabby brown coat and soft faded shirt. But the great specialist--whose name carried weight wherever science and medicine were wont to foregather. Had he made a mistake? It seemed incredible.

The doctor gave a parting touch to an overhanging leaf and wheeled round to greet his patient with a smile.

"I can't bear to see flowers die from lack of care, and this foggy weather tries them very hard. Excuse me a moment." He pa.s.sed into the recess, and washed his hands vigorously, talking all the while.