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Page 29
The bedroom was on the second landing. Douglas Stone followed
the old nurse into it, with the merchant at his heels. Here, at
least, there was furniture and to spare. The floor was littered
and the corners piled with Turkish cabinets, inlaid tables, coats
of chain mail, strange pipes, and grotesque weapons. A single
small lamp stood upon a bracket on the wall. Douglas Stone took it
down, and picking his way among the lumber, walked over to a couch
in the corner, on which lay a woman dressed in the Turkish fashion,
with yashmak and veil. The lower part of the face was exposed, and
the surgeon saw a jagged cut which zigzagged along the border of
the under lip.
"You will forgive the yashmak," said the Turk. "You know our
views about women in the East."
But the surgeon was not thinking about the yashmak. This was
no longer a woman to him. It was a case. He stooped and examined
the wound carefully.
"There are no signs of irritation," said he. "We might delay
the operation until local symptoms develop."
The husband wrung his hands in uncontrollable agitation.
"Oh! sir, sir," he cried. "Do not trifle. You do not know.
It is deadly. I know, and I give you my assurance that an
operation is absolutely necessary. Only the knife can save her."
"And yet I am inclined to wait," said Douglas Stone.
"That is enough," the Turk cried, angrily. "Every minute is of
importance, and I cannot stand here and see my wife allowed to
sink. It only remains for me to give you my thanks for having
come, and to call in some other surgeon before it is too late."
Douglas Stone hesitated. To refund that hundred pounds was no
pleasant matter. But of course if he left the case he must return
the money. And if the Turk were right and the woman died, his
position before a coroner might be an embarrassing one.
"You have had personal experience of this poison?" he asked.
"I have."
"And you assure me that an operation is needful."
"I swear it by all that I hold sacred."
"The disfigurement will be frightful."
"I can understand that the mouth will not be a pretty one to
kiss."
Douglas Stone turned fiercely upon the man. The speech was a
brutal one. But the Turk has his own fashion of talk and of
thought, and there was no time for wrangling. Douglas Stone drew
a bistoury from his case, opened it and felt the keen straight edge
with his forefinger. Then he held the lamp closer to the bed. Two
dark eyes were gazing up at him through the slit in the yashmak.
They were all iris, and the pupil was hardly to be seen.
"You have given her a very heavy dose of opium."
"Yes, she has had a good dose."
He glanced again at the dark eyes which looked straight at his
own. They were dull and lustreless, but, even as he gazed, a
little shifting sparkle came into them, and the lips quivered.
"She is not absolutely unconscious," said he.
"Would it not be well to use the knife while it will be
painless?"
The same thought had crossed the surgeon's mind. He grasped
the wounded lip with his forceps, and with two swift cuts he took
out a broad V-shaped piece. The woman sprang up on the couch with
a dreadful gurgling scream. Her covering was torn from her face.
It was a face that he knew. In spite of that protruding upper lip
and that slobber of blood, it was a face that he knew, She kept on
putting her hand up to the gap and screaming. Douglas Stone sat
down at the foot of the couch with his knife and his forceps. The
room was whirling round, and he had felt something go like a
ripping seam behind his ear. A bystander would have said that his
face was the more ghastly of the two. As in a dream, or as if he
had been looking at something at the play, he was conscious that
the Turk's hair and beard lay upon the table, and that Lord Sannox
was leaning against the wall with his hand to his side, laughing
silently. The screams had died away now, and the dreadful head had
dropped back again upon the pillow, but Douglas Stone still sat
motionless, and Lord Sannox still chuckled quietly to himself.
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