The Best Horror Stories of Arthur Conan Doyle

The Best Horror Stories of Arthur Conan Doyle by Arthur Doyle Page A

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Authors: Arthur Doyle
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The lower part of the face was exposed, and the surgeon saw a jagged cut which zig-zagged along the border of the under lip.
    â€œYou will forgive the yashmak,” said the Turk. “You know our views about women in the East.”
    But the surgeon was not thinking about the yashmak. This was no longer a woman to him. It was a case. He stooped and examined the wound carefully.
    â€œThere are no signs of irritation,” said he. “We might delay the operation until local symptoms develop.”
    The husband wrung his hands in uncontrollable agitation.
    â€œOh Sir, sir,” he cried. “Do not trifle. You do not know. It is deadly. I know, and I give you my assurance that an operation is absolutely necessary. Only the knife can save her.”
    â€œAnd yet I am inclined to wait,” said Douglas Stone.
    â€œThat is enough,” the Turk cried, angrily. “Every minute is of importance, and I cannot stand here and see my wife allowed to sink. It only remains for me to give you my thanks for having come, and to call in some other surgeon before it is too late.”
    Douglas Stone hesitated. To refund that hundred pounds was no pleasant matter. But of course if he left the case he must return the money. And if the Turk were right and the woman died, his position before a coroner might be an embarrassing one.
    â€œYou have had personal experience of this poison?” he asked.
    â€œI have.”
    â€œAnd you assure me that an operation is needful?”
    â€œI swear it by all that I hold sacred.”
    â€œThe disfigurement will be frightful.”
    â€œI can understand the mouth will not be a pretty one to kiss.”
    Douglas Stone turned fiercely upon the man. The speech was a brutal one. But the Turk has his own fashion of talk and of thought, and there was no time for wrangling. Douglas Stone drew a bistoury from his case, opened it and felt the keen straight edge with his forefinger. Then he held the lamp closer to the bed. Two dark eyes were gazing up at him through the slit in the yashmak. They were all iris, and the pupil was hardly to be seen.
    â€œYou have given her a heavy dose of opium.”
    â€œYes, she has had a good dose.”
    He glanced again at the dark eyes which looked straight at his own. They were dull and lustreless, but, even as he gazed, a little shifting sparkle came into them, and the lips quivered.
    â€œShe is not absolutely unconscious,” said he.
    â€œWould it not be well to use the knife while it will be painless?”
    The same thought had crossed the surgeon’s mind. He grasped the wounded lip with his forceps, and with two swift cuts he took out a broad V-shaped piece. The woman sprang up on the couch with a dreadful gurgling scream. Her covering was torn from her face. It was a face that he knew. In spite of that protruding upper lip and that slobber of blood, it was a face that he knew. She kept on putting her hand up to the gap and screaming. Douglas Stone sat down at the foot of the couch with his knife and his forceps. The room was whirling round, and he had felt something go like a ripping seam behindhis ear. A bystander would have said that his face was the more ghastly of the two. As in a dream, or as if he had been looking at something at the play, he was conscious that the Turk’s hair and beard lay upon the table, and that Lord Sannox was leaning against the wall with his hand to his side, laughing silently. The screams had died away now, and the dreadful head had dropped back again upon the pillow, but Douglas Stone still sat motionless, and Lord Sannox still chuckled quietly to himself.
    â€œIt was really very necessary for Marion, this operation,” said he, “not physically, but morally, you know, morally.”
    Douglas Stone stooped forwards and began to play with the fringe of the coverlet. His knife tinkled down upon the ground, but he still held the forceps and something more.
    â€œI had long

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