



Produced by Al Haines









[Illustration: Cover art]





[Frontispiece:  He could picture in the next box Cydonia's golden head
at just the same angle and in between the narrow velvet curtains barely
separating the pair.  _See page 93_.]






THE MAN WITH

THE DOUBLE HEART



BY

MURIEL HINE

(MRS. SIDNEY COXON)




LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD

NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY

TORONTO: BELL & COCKBURN : : MCMXIV




COPYRIGHT, 1914

BY JOHN LANE COMPANY



J. J. Little & Ives Company

New York, U. S. A.




TO

MY MOTHER




  Some starlit garden grey with dew
  Some chamber flushed with wine and fire
  What matters where, so I and you
        Are worthy our desire?
                          --_W. L. Henley_.




THE MAN WITH

THE DOUBLE HEART




PART I

  "Flower o' the broom
  Take away love and our earth is a tomb!"
        --_R. Browning_.




CHAPTER I

The hour was close on midday, but the lamps in Cavendish Square shone
with a blurred light through the unnatural gloom.

The fog, pouring down from Regent's Park above, was wedged tight in
Harley Street like a wad of dirty wool, but in the open space fronting
Harcourt House it found room to expand and took on spectral shape; dim
forms with floating locks that clung to the stunted trees and,
shuddering, pressed against the high London buildings which faded away
indistinctly into the blackened sky.

From thence ragged pennons went busily fluttering South to be caught in
the draught of the traffic in noisy Oxford Street, where hoarse and
confusing cries were blent with the rumble of wheels in all the
pandemonium of man at war with the elements.

The air was raw and sooty, difficult to breathe, and McTaggart, already
irritable with the nervous tension due to his approaching interview,
his throat dry, his eyes smarting as he peered at the wide crossing,
started violently as the horn of an unseen motor sounded unpleasantly
near at hand.

"Confound the man!" he said, in apology to himself and stepped back
quickly onto the narrow path as a shapeless monster with eyes of flame
swung past, foiled of its prey.

"A nice pace to go on a day like this!"  And here something struck him
sharply in the rear, knocking his hat forward onto the bridge of his
nose.

"What the...!" he checked his wrath with a sudden shamefaced laugh as
he found his unseen adversary to consist of the square railings.

Somewhere down Wigmore Street a clock boomed forth the hour.  A quarter
to twelve.  McTaggart counted the strokes and gave a sigh of relief not
unmixed with amusement: the secret congratulation of an unpunctual man
redeemed by an accident from the error of his ways.

Wedging his hat more firmly down on his head, he dared again the black
space before him, struck the curb on the opposite side and, one hand
against the wall, steered round the corner and up into Harley Street.

Under the first lamp he paused and hunted for the number over the
nearest door where four brass plates menaced the passer-by with that
modern form of torture that few live to escape--the inquisitorial
process known as dentistry.

Making a rapid calculation, he came to the conclusion that the house he
sought must lie at the further end of the street--London's "Bridge of
Sighs"--where breathless hope and despair elbow each other ceaselessly
in the wake of suffering humanity.

The fog was changing colour from a dirty yellow to opal, and the damp
pavement was becoming visible as McTaggart moved forward with a quick
stride that held an elasticity which it did not owe to elation.

He walked with an ease and lightness peculiar in an Englishman who,
athletic as he may be, yet treads the earth with a certain conscious
air of possessing it: a tall, well-built man, slender and very erect,
but without that balanced stiffness, the hall-mark of "drill."

A keen observer would guess at once an admixture of blood that betrayed
its foreign strain in that supple grace of his; in the olive skin, the
light feet, and the glossy black hair that was brushed close and thick
to his shapely head.

Not French.  For the Frenchman moves on a framework of wire, fretting
toward action, deadly in attack.  But the race that bred Napoleon,
subtle and resistant, built upon tempered steel that bends but rarely
breaks.

Now, as he reached the last block and the house he sought, McTaggart
paused for a second, irresolute, on the step.

He seemed to gather courage with a quick indrawn breath, and his mouth
was set in a hard line as his hand pressed the bell.

Then he raised his eyes to the knocker above, and with the slight
action his whole face changed.

For, instead of being black beneath their dark brows, the man's eyes
were blue, an intense, fiery blue; with the clear depths and the temper
touch that one sees nowhere else save in the strong type of the hardy
mountain race.  They were not the blue of Ireland, with her
half-veiled, sorrowful mirth; nor the placid blue of England, that mild
forget-me-not.  They were utterly unmistakable; they brought with them
a breath of heather-gloried solitude and the deep and silent lochs.

Here was a Scot--a hillsman from the North; no need of his name to cry
aloud the fact.

And yet...

The door was opened, and at once the imprisoned fog finding a new
outlet drove into the narrow hall.

A tall, bony parlour maid was staring back at him as, mechanically,
McTaggart repeated the great man's name.

"You have an appointment, sir?"  Her manner seemed to imply that her
dignity would suffer if this were not the case.

Satisfied by his answer, she ushered him into a room where a gas fire
burned feebly with an apologetic air, as though painfully conscious of
its meretricious logs.  Half a dozen people, muffled in coats and furs,
were scattered about a long dining table, occupied in reading
listlessly the papers, to avoid the temptation of staring at each
other.  The place smelt of biscuits, of fog and of gas, like an unaired
buffet in a railway station.

McTaggart, weighed down by a sense of impending doom, picked up a
"Punch" and retired to the window, ostensibly to amuse himself, in
reality to rehearse for the hundredth time his slender stock of
"symptoms." The clock ticked on, and a bleak silence reigned, broken at
intervals by the sniff of a small boy, who, accompanied by a parent and
a heavy cold in the head, was feasting his soul on a volume of the
"Graphic."

Something familiar in the cartoon under his eyes drew McTaggart away
from his own dreary thoughts.

"I mustn't forget to tell him..." he was saying to himself, when he
realized that the paper he held was dated five months back!  He felt
immediately quite unreasonably annoyed.  A sudden desire to rise up and
go invaded his mind.  In his nervous state the excuse seemed amply
sufficient.  A "Punch" five months old!... it was a covert insult.

A doctor who could trade on his patient's credulity--pocketing his
three guineas, don't forget that!--and offer them literature but fit to
light the fire...

A "Punch" Five Months Old!... he gathered up his gloves.

But a noiseless step crossed the room, a voice whispered his name.

"Mr. McTaggart?  This way, please."

He found himself following the bony parlour maid, past the aggressive
eyes of the still-waiting crowd, out into the hall and down a
glass-roofed passage.

"Now I'm in for it..." he said silently...  "Oh!... _damn_!"  He put
on his most truculent air.

The maid tapped at a door.

"Come in," said a sharp voice.

McTaggart entered and stood still for a moment, blinking on the
threshold, irresolute.

For the scene was unexpected.  Despite the heavy fog that filtered
through the windows with its insidious breath, a hint of Spring was
there in the fresh white walls, the rose-covered chintzes and the
presence of flowers.

The place seemed filled with them.  An early bough of blossom, the
exquisite tender pink of the almond in bloom, stood against a mirror
that screened a recess; and the air was alive with the scent of
daffodils, with subtle yellow faces, like curious Chinamen, peering
over the edge of a blue Nankin bowl.

In the centre of the room a man in a velvet coat was bending over a
mass of fresh violets, adding water carefully to the surrounding moss
out of a copper jug that he held in his hands.

McTaggart stared at him; at the lean, colourless face under its untidy
thatch of coarse, gray hair; at the spare figure, the long, steady
hands and the loose, unconventional clothes that he wore.  He might
have been an artist of Rossetti's day in that shabby brown coat and
soft faded shirt.  But the great specialist--whose name carried weight
wherever science and medicine were wont to foregather.  Had he made a
mistake?  It seemed incredible.

The doctor gave a parting touch to an overhanging leaf and wheeled
round to greet his patient with a smile.

"I can't bear to see flowers die from lack of care, and this foggy
weather tries