“Very well. What motive, then, could Mr. Carlton have had to work her ill? The very worst man permitted to live on earth would not poison a fellow-creature, and a stranger, for the sake of pastime; and Mr. Carlton is an educated man, a man of a certain refinement, and, so far as I have seen—for I met him two or three times before I left home—he is a pleasant and agreeable one. Assuming for the moment’s argument that your views were correct, what motive could have actuated Mr. Carlton?”
Frederick Grey leaned his head on his hand. The question was a poser: in fact, it was the precise point that had puzzled him throughout. Judith Ford, the widow Gould, Mr. Stephen himself, had all testified that the lady had come to South Wennock a stranger to Mr. Carlton as to the Greys.
“I don’t deny that that’s a point difficult to get over, or that the case is completely shrouded in mystery,” ho confessed at length. “It puzzles me so that sometimes I can’t sleep, and I get thinking that I must be wronging Carlton.I ask myself what he thought to gain by it. Nothing, that I can see. Of course he now keeps up the prejudice against papa to get his patients; but he could not have entered upon it from that motive———"
“For shame, Frederick!”
“Dear mamma, I am sorry you are so vexed, and I wish I had not mentioned it at all. I tell you I have lain awake night after night, thinking it over in all its aspects, and I see that any probable accession of practice could not have been his motive, for the draught might have been made up by me or by Mr. Whittaker, for all Mr. Carlton know, and in that case the odium could not have touched papa. I see that you are angry with me, and I only wish I could put away this suspicion of Carlton from my mind. There is one loop-hole: that the man he saw concealed on the stairs may have been the villain, after all.”
“What man? What stairs?” exclaimed Mrs. Grey in astonishment.
“As Mr. Carlton was leaving the sick lady’s room that same night, he saw—Hush! Here’s papa!” cried the boy, breaking off abruptly. “Don’t breathe a word of what I have been saying, there’s a dear mother.”
Mr. Stephen Grey came in, a gloomy cloud on his usually cheerful face. He threw himself in an armchair opposite his wife’s sofa, his mood one of grievous weariness.
“Are you tired, Stephen?” she asked.
“Tired to death,” he answered; “tired of it all. We shall have to make a move.”
“A move?” she repeated, while Frederick turned round from the window, where he was now standing, and looked at his father.
“We must move from this place, Mary, to one where the gossip of Stephen Grey’s having supplied poison in mistake for safe medicine will not have penetrated. It gets worse every day, and John’s temper is tried. No wonder: he is worked like a horse. Just now he came in, jaded and tired, and found three messengers waiting to see him, ready to squabble amid themselves who should get him first. ‘I am really unable to go,’ he said. ‘I have been with a patient for the last seven hours and am fit for nothing. Mr. Stephen will attend.’ No, there was not one would have Mr. Stephen: their orders were, Mr. Grey or nobody. John is gone, unfit as he is: but this sort of thing cannot last.”
“Of course it cannot,” said Mrs. Stephen Grey. “How extraordinary it is! Why should people so prejudiced in the face of facts?”
“I had a talk with John yesterday, and broached to him what has been in my own mind for weeks. He and I must part. John must take a partner who will be more palatable to South Wennock than I now am, and I must try my fortune elsewhere. If I am ruined myself, it is of no use dragging John down with me; and, were I to stay with him, I believe the whole practice would take itself away.”
Mrs. Grey’s heart sank within her. Can any one wonder?—hearing that her home of years must be broken up. “Where could we go?” she cried in agitation.
“I don’t know. Perhaps London would be best. There, a person does not know his next-door neighbour, and nobody will know me as the unfortunate practitioner from South Wennock.”
“It is a great misfortune to have fallen upon us!” she murmured.
“It is unmerited,” returned Stephen Grey; “that’s my great consolation. God knows how innocent I was in that unhappy business, and I trust He will help me to get a living elsewhere. It’s possible that it may turn out for the best in the end.”
“What man was it that Mr. Carlton saw on the stairs that night?” inquired Mrs. Grey, after a pause, her thoughts reverting, in spite of herself, from their own troubles. And Frederick, as he heard the question, glanced uneasily at his mother, lest she should be about to betray confidence.
“Nobody can tell. And Carlton fancied afterwards that he might have been mistaken—that the moonlight deceived him. But