“This is Doctor Diver, isn’t it?”
“Well, well—Mr. Dumphry, isn’t it?”
“Royal Dumphry. I had the pleasure of having dinner one night in that lovely garden of yours.”
“Of course.” Trying to dampen Mr. Dumphry’s enthusiasm, Dick went into impersonal chronology. “It was in nineteen—twenty-four—or twenty-five—”
He had remained standing, but Royal Dumphry, shy as he had seemed at first, was no laggard with his pick and spade; he spoke to Francisco in a flip, intimate manner, but the latter, ashamed of him, joined Dick in trying to freeze him away.
“Doctor Diver—one thing I want to say before you go. I’ve never forgotten that evening in your garden—how nice you and your wife were. To me it’s one of the finest memories in my life, one of the happiest ones. I’ve always thought of it as the most civilized gathering of people that I have ever known.”
Dick continued a crab-like retreat toward the nearest door of the hotel.
“I’m glad you remembered it so pleasantly. Now I’ve got to see—”
“I understand,” Royal Dumphry pursued sympathetically. “I hear he’s dying.”
“Who’s dying?”
“Perhaps I shouldn’t have said that—but we have the same physician.”
Dick paused, regarding him in astonishment. “Who’re you talking about?”
“Why, your wife’s father—perhaps I—”
“My WHAT?”
“I suppose—you mean I’m the first person—”
“You mean my wife’s father is here, in Lausanne?”
“Why, I thought you knew—I thought that was why you were here.”
“What doctor is taking care of him?”
Dick scrawled the name in a notebook, excused himself, and hurried to a telephone booth.
It was convenient for Doctor Dangeu to see Doctor Diver at his house immediately.
Doctor Dangeu was a young Génevois; for a moment he was afraid that he was going to lose a profitable patient, but, when Dick reassured him, he divulged the fact that Mr. Warren was indeed dying.
“He is only fifty but the liver has stopped restoring itself; the precipitating factor is alcoholism.”
“Doesn’t respond?”
“The man can take nothing except liquids—I give him three days, or at most, a week.”
“Does his elder daughter, Miss Warren, know his condition?”
“By his own wish no one knows except the man-servant. It was only this morning I felt I had to tell him—he took it excitedly, although he has been in a very religious and resigned mood from the beginning of his illness.”
Dick considered: “Well—” he decided slowly, “in any case I’ll take care of the family angle. But I imagine they would want a consultation.”
“As you like.”
“I know I speak for them when I ask you to call in one of the best- known medicine men around the lake—Herbrugge, from Geneva.”
“I was thinking of Herbrugge.”
“Meanwhile I’m here for a day at least and I’ll keep in touch with you.”
That evening Dick went to Señor Pardo y Cuidad Real and they talked.
“We have large estates in Chili—” said the old man. “My son could well be taking care of them. Or I can get him in any one of a dozen enterprises in Paris—” He shook his head and paced across the windows against a spring rain so cheerful that it didn’t even drive the swans to cover, “My only son! Can’t you take him with you?”
The Spaniard knelt suddenly at Dick’s feet.
“Can’t you cure my only son? I believe in you—you can take him with you, cure him.”
“It’s impossible to commit a person on such grounds. I wouldn’t if I could.”
The Spaniard got up from his knees.
“I have been hasty—I have been driven—”
Descending to the lobby Dick met Doctor Dangeu in the elevator.
“I was about to call your room,” the latter said. “Can we speak out on the terrace?”
“Is Mr. Warren dead?” Dick demanded.
“He is the same—the consultation is in the morning. Meanwhile he wants to see his daughter—your wife—with the greatest fervor. It seems there was some quarrel—”
“I know all about that.”
The doctors looked at each other, thinking.
“Why don’t you talk to him before you make up your mind?” Dangeu suggested. “His death will be graceful—merely a weakening and sinking.”
With an effort Dick consented.
“All right.”
The suite in which Devereux Warren was gracefully weakening and sinking was of the same size as that of the Señor Pardo y Cuidad Real—throughout this hotel there were many chambers wherein rich ruins, fugitives from justice, claimants to the thrones of mediatized principalities, lived on the derivatives of opium or barbitol listening eternally as to an inescapable radio, to the coarse melodies of old sins. This corner of Europe does not so much draw people as accept them without inconvenient questions. Routes cross here—people bound for private sanitariums or tuberculosis resorts in the mountains, people who are no longer persona gratis in France or Italy.
The suite was darkened. A nun with a holy face was nursing the man whose emaciated fingers stirred a rosary on the white sheet. He was still handsome and his voice summoned up a thick burr of individuality as he spoke to Dick, after Dangeu had left them together.