... "Business was going well. There seemed no prospect of a child just then, so Mary got in with Church work at St. Philip's. That brought a lot more customers to the shop too. Fancy soaps, scents and toilette articles and all that. Dr. Mitch.e.l.l of Hackney, was a church-warden at St. Philip's and in time all his prescriptions came to me. No one had a better chance than I did. And Mary was that good to me." ...

Two facile, miserable tears rolled from the man's glazing eyes. He wiped them away with the back of his hand.

"You can't think, sir, being a bachelor. Anything I'd a mind to fancy!

Sweet-breads she could cook a treat, and Burgundy we used to 'ave--California wine, 'Big Bush' brand in flagons at two and eight.

And never before half-past seven. Late dinner you might have called it, while my a.s.sistant was in the shop. And after that I'd play to her on the violin. Nothing common, good music--'Orer pro n.o.bis' and 'Rousoh's Dream.' You never heard me play did you? I was in the orchestra of the Hackney Choral Society. I remember one day ..."

"And then?" the Doctor said, gently.

He had already gathered something, but not all that he had come to gather. The minutes were hurrying by.

The man looked up at the doctor with a sudden glance, almost of hatred.

For a single instant the abnormal egoism of the criminal, swelled out upon the face and turned it into the mask of a devil.

Dr. Morton Sims spoke in a sharp, urgent voice.

"Why did you ask me to come here, Hanc.o.c.k?" he said. "You know that I am glad to be here, if I can be of any use to you. But you don't seem to want the sort of sympathetic help that the chaplain here could give you far better than I can. What do you want to say to me? Have you really anything to say? If you have, be a man and say it!"

There was a brief but horrible interlude.

"Well, you are cruel, doctor, not 'arf!--and me with only an hour or two to live,"--the man said with a cringing and sinister grin.

The doctor frowned and looked at the man steadily. Then he asked a sudden question.

"Who were your father and mother?" he said.

The convict looked at the doctor with startled eyes.

"Who told you?" he asked. "I thought n.o.body knew!"

"Answer my question, Hanc.o.c.k. Only a few minutes remain."

"Will it be of use, sir?"

"Of use?"

"In your work--It was so that I could leave a warning to others, that I wanted to see you."

"Of great use, if you will tell me."

"Well, Doctor, I never thought to tell any one. It's always been a sore point with me, but I wasn't born legitimate! I tried hard to make up for it, and I did so too! No one was more respectable than I was in Hackney, until the drink came along and took me."

"Yes? Yes?"--The hunter was on the trail now, Heredity? Reversion? At last the game was flushed!--"Yes, tell me!"

"My father was a gentleman, Doctor. That's where I got my refined tastes. And that's where I got my love of drink--d.a.m.n him! G.o.d Almighty curse him for the blood he gave me!"

"Yes? Yes?"

"My father was old Mr. Lothian, the solicitor of Grey's Inn Square. He was a well-known gentleman. My mother was his housekeeper, Eliza Hanc.o.c.k. My father was a widower when my mother went into his service.

He had another son, at one of the big schools for gentlemen. That was his son by his real wife--Gilbert he was called, and what money was left went to him. My father was a drunkard. He never was sober--what you might rightly call sober--for years, I've heard ... Mother died soon after Mr. Lothian did. She left a hundred pounds with my Aunt, to bring me up and educate me. Aunt Ellen--but I'm a gentleman's son, Doctor!--drunken old swine he was too! What about my blood now? Wasn't my veins swollen with drink from the first? Christ! _you_ ought to know--you with your job to know--_Now_ are you happy? I'm not a _love_ child, I'm a _drink_ child, that's what I am! Son of old Mr. Lothian, the gentleman-drunkard, brother of his son who's a gentleman somewhere, I don't doubt! P'r'aps 'e mops it up 'imself!--shouldn't wonder, this--brother of mine!"

The man's voice had risen into a hoa.r.s.e scream. "Have you got what you came to get?" he yelled. His eyes blazed, his mouth writhed.

There was a crash as the deal table was overturned, and he leapt at the doctor.

In a second the room was full of people. Dark figures held down something that yelled and struggled on the truckle bed.

It was done with wonderful deftness, quickness and experience... .

Morton Sims stood outside the closed door of the condemned cell. A m.u.f.fled noise reached him from within, the prison doctor was standing by him and looking anxiously into his face.

--"I can't tell you how sorry I am, Dr. Morton Sims. I really can't say enough. I had no idea that the latent toxic influence was so strong... ."

On the other side of the little gla.s.s-roofed hall the door was open.

Another cell was shown, brilliantly lit. Two men, in their shirt-sleeves, were bending over a square, black aperture in the wooden floor. Some carpenters' tools were lying about.

An insignificant looking little man, with a fair moustache, was standing in the doorway.

"That'll be quite satisfactory, thank you," he was saying, "with just a drop of oil on the lever. And whatever you do, don't forget my chalk to mark where he's to stand."

From behind the closed door of the condemned cell a strangulated, m.u.f.fled noise could still be heard.

"Not now!" said Dr. Marriott, as the executioner came up to him--"In half an hour. Now Dr. Morton Sims, please come away to my room.

This must have been most distressing. I feel so much that it is my fault." ...

The two men stood at the Prison gate, Sims was shaking hands with the younger doctor. "Thank you very much indeed," he was saying. "How could you possibly have helped it?--You'll take steps--?"

"I'm going back to the cell now. It's incipient delirium tremens of course--after all this time too! I shall inject hyoscene and he will know nothing more at all. He will be practically carried to the shed--Good-night! _Good_-night, sir. I hope I may have the pleasure of meeting you again."

The luxurious car rolled away from the Citadel of Death and Shadows--down the hill into London and into Life.

The man within it was thinking deeply, sorting out and tabulating his impressions, sifting the irrelevant from what was of value, and making a precis of what he had gained.

There were a dozen minor notes to be made in his book when he reached home. The changing quality of the man's voice, the ebb and flow of uncontrolled emotion, the latent fear--"I must be present at the post mortem to-morrow," he said to himself as a new idea struck him. "There should be much to be learnt from an examination of the Peripheral Nerves. And the brain too--there will be interesting indications in the cerebellum, and the a.s.sociation fibres." ...

The carriage swung again into the familiar parts of town. As he looked out of the windows at the lights and movement, Morton Sims forgot the purely scientific side of thought. The kindly human side of him rea.s.serted itself.

How infinitely sad it was! How deep the underlying horror of this sordid life-tragedy at the close of which he had been a.s.sisting!

Who should say, who could define, the true responsibility of the man they were killing up there on the North London Hill?

Predisposition to Alcohol, Reversion, Heredity!--was not the drunken old solicitor, long since dust, the true murderer of the gentle-mannered girl in Hackney?

_Lothian_, the father of Gilbert Lothian the poet! the poet who certainly knew nothing of what was being done to the young man in the prison, who had probably never heard of his existence even.

The "Fiend Alcohol" at work once more, planting ghastly growths behind the scutcheons of every family!