They had taken each other's hands, half laughing and quite ritually; and before they could disconnect again Michael spun them all round, like a demon spinning the world for a top. Diana felt, as the circle of the horizon flew instantaneously around her, a far aerial sense of the ring of heights beyond London and corners where she had climbed as a child; she seemed almost to hear the rooks cawing about the old pines on Highgate, or to see the glowworms gathering and kindling in the woods of Box Hill.
The circle broke--as all such perfect circles of levity must break-- and sent its author, Michael, flying, as by centrifugal force, far away against the blue rails of the gate. When reeling there he suddenly raised shout after shout of a new and quite dramatic character.
"Why, it's Warner!" he shouted, waving his arms. "It's jolly old Warner-- with a new silk hat and the old silk moustache!"
"Is that Dr. Warner?" cried Rosamund, bounding forward in a burst of memory, amusement, and distress. "Oh, I'm so sorry!
Oh, do tell him it's all right!"
"Let's take hands and tell him," said Michael Moon. For indeed, while they were talking, another hansom cab had dashed up behind the one already waiting, and Dr. Herbert Warner, leaving a companion in the cab, had carefully deposited himself on the pavement.
Now, when you are an eminent physician and are wired for by an heiress to come to a case of dangerous mania, and when, as you come in through the garden to the house, the heiress and her landlady and two of the gentlemen boarders join hands and dance round you in a ring, calling out, "It's all right! it's all right!" you are apt to be flustered and even displeased.
Dr. Warner was a placid but hardly a placable person.
The two things are by no means the same; and even when Moon explained to him that he, Warner, with his high hat and tall, solid figure, was just such a classic figure as OUGHT to be danced round by a ring of laughing maidens on some old golden Greek seashore-- even then he seemed to miss the point of the general rejoicing.
"Inglewood!" cried Dr. Warner, fixing his former disciple with a stare, "are you mad?"
Arthur flushed to the roots of his brown hair, but he answered, easily and quietly enough, "Not now. The truth is, Warner, I've just made a rather important medical discovery--quite in your line."
"What do you mean?" asked the great doctor stiffly--"what discovery?"
"I've discovered that health really is catching, like disease," answered Arthur.
"Yes; sanity has broken out, and is spreading," said Michael, performing a ~pas seul~ with a thoughtful expression.
"Twenty thousand more cases taken to the hospitals; nurses employed night and day."
Dr. Warner studied Michael's grave face and lightly moving legs with an unfathomed wonder. "And is THIS, may I ask," he said, "the sanity that is spreading?"
"You must forgive me, Dr. Warner," cried Rosamund Hunt heartily.
"I know I've treated you badly; but indeed it was all a mistake.
I was in a frightfully bad temper when I sent for you, but now it all seems like a dream--and and Mr. Smith is the sweetest, most sensible, most delightful old thing that ever existed, and he may marry any one he likes--except me."
"I should suggest Mrs. Duke," said Michael.
The gravity of Dr. Warner's face increased. He took a slip of pink paper from his waistcoat pocket, with his pale blue eyes quietly fixed on Rosamund's face all the time.
He spoke with a not inexcusable frigidity.
"Really, Miss Hunt," he said, "you are not yet very reassuring.
You sent me this wire only half an hour ago: `Come at once, if possible, with another doctor. Man--Innocent Smith--gone mad on premises, and doing dreadful things. Do you know anything of him?'
I went round at once to a distinguished colleague of mine, a doctor who is also a private detective and an authority on criminal lunacy; he has come round with me, and is waiting in the cab. Now you calmly tell me that this criminal madman is a highly sweet and sane old thing, with accompaniments that set me speculating on your own definition of sanity.
I hardly comprehend the change."
"Oh, how can one explain a change in sun and moon and everybody's soul?" cried Rosamund, in despair. "Must I confess we had got so morbid as to think him mad merely because he wanted to get married; and that we didn't even know it was only because we wanted to get married ourselves?
We'll humiliate ourselves, if you like, doctor; we're happy enough."
"Where is Mr. Smith?" asked Warner of Inglewood very sharply.
Arthur started; he had forgotten all about the central figure of their farce, who had not been visible for an hour or more.
"I--I think he's on the other side of the house, by the dustbin," he said.
"He may be on the road to Russia," said Warner, "but he must be found."
And he strode away and disappeared round a corner of the house by the sunflowers.
"I hope," said Rosamund, "he won't really interfere with Mr. Smith."
"Interfere with the daisies!" said Michael with a snort.
"A man can't be locked up for falling in love--at least I hope not."
"No; I think even a doctor couldn't make a disease out of him.
He'd throw off the doctor like the disease, don't you know?
I believe it's a case of a sort of holy well. I believe Innocent Smith is simply innocent, and that is why he is so extraordinary."
It was Rosamund who spoke, restlessly tracing circles in the grass with the point of her white shoe.
"I think," said Inglewood, "that Smith is not extraordinary at all.
He's comic just because he's so startlingly commonplace.
Don't you know what it is to be all one family circle, with aunts and uncles, when a schoolboy comes home for the holidays?
That bag there on the cab is only a schoolboy's hamper.
This tree here in the garden is only the sort of tree that any schoolboy would have climbed. Yes, that's the thing that has haunted us all about him, the thing we could never fit a word to.
