The Incident of Dr. Reyes

That autumn the reward for the death of Congressman Whitfield ran to hundreds of thousands, for the city resented the thing as a public injury. But Marsh had disappeared out of the ken of the police as though he had never existed. Much of his past was unearthed, indeed, and all of it disreputable. A pawnbroker on Baxter Court told how Marsh had come in one winter evening with a brindled dog on a length of rope, a thin thing that would not follow him, and had asked what such an animal was worth. Told it was worth nothing, he had looped the rope over a hook by the door and drawn it short, and had then walked out and stood on the step with his hands in his pockets until the scraping and kicking behind him stopped. The pawnbroker's statement to the police ran that the beast had not once cried out, and that he had heard the sound of it most nights since. But of Marsh's present whereabouts, not a whisper. From the morning he had left the lodging across the bridge after the murder he was simply blotted out, and gradually Kessler began to recover from the heat of his alarm and grow quieter with himself. The death of Whitfield was, to his way of thinking, more than paid for by the disappearance of Marsh. Now that the evil influence was withdrawn, a new life began for Adrian Voss. He came out of his seclusion, renewed relations with his friends, became once more their familiar entertainer. And while he had always been known for his philanthropies, he was now no less distinguished for his piety of a kind, endowed lectures, hospital wings, a center for the ethics of science with his name on the lintel. He was busy, he was much in the open air, he did good. His face seemed to open and brighten, and Kessler, who had watched it shut against him all that autumn, would have said he had not looked so well in ten years. And for more than two months the institute's founder was at peace.

On the eighth of January Kessler dined at Voss's with a small party. Reyes had been there too, and the face of the host had gone from one to the other of them as in the old days when the trio had been inseparable. On the twelfth, and again on the fourteenth, the door was shut against the lawyer. "The doctor is confined to the house," said Doyle, "and sees no one." On the fifteenth Kessler tried once more and was refused again. Having been used for the past two months to see his friend almost daily, he found the return of solitude weigh upon his spirits. The fifth night he had Gorman in to dine. The sixth he betook himself to Louisburg Square.

There at least he was not denied admittance. But when he came in, he was shocked at the change in the doctor's appearance. She had her death warrant written legibly on her face. The rosy woman had grown pale; the flesh had fallen away; she was visibly balder and older; and yet it was less these tokens of a swift physical decay that arrested the lawyer's notice than a look in the eye and a quality of manner that testified to some deep-seated terror of the mind. It was unlikely that a physician should fear death, and yet that was what Kessler was tempted to suspect. "Yes," he thought. "She is a doctor. She must know her own state, that her days are counted, and the knowledge is more than she can bear." And yet when he remarked on her looks, it was with an air of great firmness that Reyes declared herself a doomed woman.

The house on Louisburg Square had always smelled of coffee and old paper. Now it smelled of neither. A hired nurse came to the door and would not say who had engaged her, and Reyes received him in a chair by the window with a blanket over her knees, though the room was warm. On the table at her elbow lay a journal open to a page of notes, and he saw that the handwriting wandered and shrank as it went down the page, as if the pen were being carried by a current.

"I have had a shock," she said, "and I shall never recover. It is a question of weeks. Well, life has been pleasant. I liked it. Yes, sir, I used to like it. I sometimes think that if we knew all, we should be more glad to get away."

"A shock," Kessler repeated. "Of what kind? Surgery? Grief?" She looked at him then and held his eye for a moment, and looked down at her hands, and he understood that she was weighing how much of the truth he could carry. He had seen witnesses do the same thing on the stand. He had never seen Alma Reyes do it.

"Voss is ill, too," observed Kessler. "Have you seen him?"

But Reyes's face changed, and she held up a trembling hand. "I wish to see or hear no more of Adrian Voss," she said in a loud, unsteady voice. "I am quite done with that person. I beg you will spare me any allusion to one whom I regard as dead."

"Tut, tut," said Kessler, and then, after a considerable pause, "Can't I do anything? We are three very old friends, Alma. We shall not live to make others."

"Nothing can be done," returned Reyes. "Ask himself."

"He will not see me," said the lawyer.

"I am not surprised at that," was the reply. "Some day, Kessler, after I am dead, you may perhaps come to learn the right and wrong of this. I cannot tell you. In the meantime, if you can sit and talk with me of other things, for God's sake stay and do so. But if you cannot keep clear of that accursed topic, then in God's name go, for I cannot bear it."

As soon as he got home, Kessler sat down and wrote to Voss, complaining of his exclusion from the house and asking the cause of this unhappy break with Reyes. The next day brought him a long answer, often very pathetically worded, and sometimes darkly mysterious in drift. The quarrel with Reyes was incurable. "I do not blame our old friend," Voss wrote, "but I share her view that we must never meet. I mean from henceforth to lead a life of extreme seclusion. You must not be surprised, nor must you doubt my friendship, if my door is often shut even to you. You must suffer me to go my own dark way. I have brought on myself a punishment and a danger that I cannot name. If I am the chief of sinners, I am the chief of sufferers also. I could not have thought this earth contained a place for sufferings and terrors so unmanning. And you can do but one thing, Kessler, to lighten this destiny: respect my silence." Kessler was amazed. The dark influence of Marsh had been withdrawn; the doctor had returned to his old tasks and amities; a week ago the prospect had smiled with every promise of a cheerful and honored age. And now, in a moment, friendship, peace of mind, and the whole tenor of his life were wrecked. So great and unprepared a change pointed to madness. But in view of Reyes's manner and words, there must lie some deeper ground beneath it.

A week afterward Reyes took to her bed, and in something less than a fortnight she was dead. The funeral was on a Thursday morning at a church on Pinckney Street. Kessler stood at the back until the bearers were ready and then went forward, because he had been asked to speak. He got through four sentences about her work and stopped, and stood holding the rest of the page until someone came up and took him by the elbow and led him back to his seat. At the graveside he kept his hat on after the other men had removed theirs, and nobody told him. When it was over he shook hands with the nurses from her ward and could not have named one of them by the time he reached his car. The night after the funeral, he locked the door of his study and, sitting by the light of a melancholy candle, drew out and set before him an envelope addressed in the hand and sealed with the seal of his dead friend. "Private: for the hands of Walter Kessler alone, and in case of his predecease, to be destroyed unread," so it was emphatically superscribed, and the lawyer dreaded to look at the contents. "I have buried one friend today," he thought. "What if this should cost me another?" Then he condemned the fear as disloyalty and broke the seal. Within there was another enclosure, likewise sealed, and marked on the cover: "Not to be opened till the death or disappearance of Adrian Voss." Kessler could not trust his eyes. Yes, it was disappearance. Here again, as in the mad will he had long ago restored to its author, here again were the idea of a disappearance and the name of Adrian Voss bracketed together. But in the will that idea had sprung from the sinister suggestion of the man Marsh; it had been set there with a purpose all too plain and horrible. Written by the hand of Alma Reyes, what could it mean? A great curiosity came on the trustee to disregard the prohibition and dive at once to the bottom of these mysteries. But professional honor and faith to his dead friend were stringent obligations, and the packet slept in the innermost corner of his private safe.

It is one thing to mortify curiosity, another to conquer it, and it may be doubted whether from that day forth Kessler desired the society of his surviving friend with the same eagerness. He thought of Voss kindly, but his thoughts were disquieted and fearful. He went to call, indeed, but he was perhaps relieved to be denied admittance. Perhaps in his heart he preferred to speak with Doyle on the doorstep, surrounded by the air and sounds of the open city, rather than be admitted into that house of voluntary bondage and sit and speak with its inscrutable recluse. Doyle had, indeed, no very pleasant news to communicate. The doctor, it appeared, now confined himself more than ever to the cabinet over the lab, where he would sometimes even sleep. "He goes on badly, sir," said Doyle. "A tray went up at seven and came down at noon with the food not touched. I carried up the journals on Tuesday as I always do and he sent them back unopened. When I go in he is sitting in the one chair with his face to the wall, and he does not turn it round." "Does he speak to you?" asked Kessler. "He answers, sir. He does not begin." Kessler grew so used to the unvarying character of these reports that he fell off little by little in the frequency of his visits.