Читать книгу Abraham's Bosom - Basil King - Страница 3

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BECAUSE he was unaccustomed to doctors, and thought it the right thing to say, he asked the physician to name his malady frankly.

"I wish you'd tell me. I can stand it, you know."

In the bottom of his heart he was sure there was nothing to be afraid of. He was only sixty, which in the twentieth century is young, and as hale as he had been at thirty. This weakness, this sudden pain, this sense of suffocation, from which he had been suffering for the past few months, might be the beginning of a new phase in his life, the period commonly known as that of breaking up; but even so, he had good years still before him.

He could wait for the doctor's answer, then, without undue anxiety, turning toward him an ascetic, clean-cut profile stamped with a lifetime of high, kind, scholarly meditations.

The doctor tilted slightly backward in his chair, fitting his finger tips together, before he spoke. Any telltale expression there might have been in his face was concealed by a scraggy beard and mustache that grew right up to the edges of a lipless mouth.

"It's what is called Hutchinson's disease," he said at last. "I've known a few cases of it; but it's rather rare"—he added, as if reluctantly—"and obscure."

"But I've heard of it. Wasn't it," the patient continued, after a second's thinking, "the trouble with poor Ned Angel?"

"You mean the organist chap at Saint Thomas's—the near-sighted fellow with a limp—the one you had to get rid of?"

A sharp hectic spot like a splash of red paint came out in each of the clergyman's wax-like cheeks.

"That's the man. It—it carried him off in less than two months."

The doctor was used to embarrassing situations.

"I believe it did," he responded in a tone that seemed to make the fact of slight importance. "I remember hearing that he put up no fight; that he didn't want to live. You knew him better than I did—"

"I knew him very well indeed; and a sweeter soul never breathed." There seemed to be something that the rector of St. Thomas's was anxious to explain. "He'd played our organ and trained our choir for forty years—ever since the church was a little mission chapel, none too sure of its future. He was a chemist by profession, you may remember, and he'd done our work entirely without salary. But you know what American churches are. Once we'd become big and wealthy we had to have the best music money could provide; and so poor Angel had to go."

"And it killed him."

"No; I don't think so. People say it did; but I don't agree with them. It nearly killed me when I had to tell him—the parish put it up to me; but as for him he simply seemed to feel that his life on earth was over. He had fought his good fight and finished his course. That was the impression he made on me. He wasn't like a man who has been killed; he was rather like one who has been translated. He just—was not. All the same it's been a good deal on my mind; on my conscience, I might say—"

But the doctor had other patients in the waiting-room and was obliged to think of them.

"Quite so; and, therefore, you see that in his case there were contributing causes; whereas in yours—"

It was the patient's turn to interrupt:

"And for this Hutchinson's disease, is there any cure?"

In spite of his efforts to seem casual the doctor's voice fell.

"None that science knows of—as yet. But able men have taken it up as a specialty—"

"And its progress is generally rapid, isn't it?"

"Since you ask the question, I can only say, yes—generally. That doesn't mean, however, that in the case of a man of temperate life, like you—"

But Berkeley Noone had heard enough. He listened to what the doctor had to say in the way of advice; he promised to carry out all orders; but he was sure his death sentence had been pronounced. He took it as most men take death sentences—calmly as far as the eye could see, but with an inner sense of being stunned. Getting himself out of the office without betraying the fact that he knew he had heard his doom he roamed the city aimlessly.

By degrees he was able to think, though thinking led no farther than to the overwhelming knowledge that he was to be cut off. Cut off in his prime were the words he used. He had never been more vigorous than in the past few years—except for those occasional spasms that latterly had come and gone, and left him troubled and wondering. They had not, however, interfered with his work, seeing that he had preached and lectured and visited his parishioners and written books as usual. Moreover, he had fulfilled his duties with a power and an authority for which no younger man would have had the experience. For another ten years, he had been reckoning, he could go on at the same pace; and now the ten years were not coming!