The Classic Mystery Collection - Arthur Conan Doyle [1473]
She had just placed the letter in her desk, when a visitor was announced. Doctor Allday presented himself (in a hurry as usual).
"Another patient waiting?" Emily asked mischievously. "No time to spare, again?"
"Not a moment," the old gentleman answered. "Have you heard from Mrs. Ellmother?"
"Yes."
"You don't mean to say you have answered her?"
"I have done better than that, doctor--I have seen her this morning."
"And consented to be her reference, of course?"
"How well you know me!"
Doctor Allday was a philosopher: he kept his temper. "Just what I might have expected," he said. "Eve and the apple! Only forbid a woman to do anything, and she does it directly--be cause you have forbidden her. I'll try the other way with you now, Miss Emily. There was something else that I meant to have forbidden."
"What was it?"
"May I make a special request?"
"Certainly."
"Oh, my dear, write to Mrs. Rook! I beg and entreat of you, write to Mrs. Rook!"
Emily's playful manner suddenly disappeared.
Ignoring the doctor's little outbreak of humor, she waited in grave surprise, until it was his pleasure to explain himself.
Doctor Allday, on his side, ignored the ominous change in Emily; he went on as pleasantly as ever. "Mr. Morris and I have had a long talk about you, my dear. Mr. Morris is a capital fellow; I recommend him as a sweetheart. I also back him in the matter of Mrs. Rook.--What's the matter now? You're as red as a rose. Temper again, eh?"
"Hatred of meanness!" Emily answered indignantly. "I despise a man who plots, behind my back, to get another man to help him. Oh, how I have been mistaken in Alban Morris!"
"Oh, how little you know of the best friend you have!" cried the doctor, imitating her. "Girls are all alike; the only man they can understand, is the man who flatters them. Will you oblige me by writing to Mrs. Rook?"
Emily made an attempt to match the doctor, with his own weapons. "Your little joke comes too late," she said satirically. "There is Mrs. Rook's answer. Read it, and--" she checked herself, even in her anger she was incapable of speaking ungenerously to the old man who had so warmly befriended her. "I won't say to you," she resumed, "what I might have said to another person."
"Shall I say it for you?" asked the incorrigible doctor. "'Read it, and be ashamed of yourself'--That was what you had in your mind, isn't it? Anything to please you, my dear." He put on his spectacles, read the letter, and handed it back to Emily with an impenetrable countenance. "What do you think of my new spectacles?" he asked, as he took the glasses off his nose. "In the experience of thirty years, I have had three grateful patients." He put the spectacles back in the case. "This comes from the third. Very gratifying--very gratifying."
Emily's sense of humor was not the uppermost sense in her at that moment. She pointed with a peremptory forefinger to Mrs. Rook's letter. "Have you nothing to say about this?"
The doctor had so little to say about it that he was able to express himself in one word:
"Humbug!"
He took his hat--nodded kindly to Emily--and hurried away to feverish pulses waiting to be felt, and to furred tongues that were ashamed to show themselves.
CHAPTER XXXI.
MOIRA.
When Alban presented himself the next morning, the hours of the night had exercised their tranquilizing influence over Emily. She remembered sorrowfully how Doctor Allday had disturbed her belief in the man who loved her; no feeling of irritation remained. Alban noticed that her manner was unusually subdued; she received him with her customary grace, but not with her customary smile.
"Are you not well?" he asked.
"I am a little out of spirits," she replied. "A disappointment--that is all."
He waited a moment, apparently in the expectation