It will seem from this, that Lady Scatcherd and the doctor were on very familiar terms as regarded her little domestic inconveniences.
“Tell Sir Roger I am here, will you?” said the doctor.
“You’ll take a drop of sherry before you go up?” said the lady.
“Not a drop, thank you,” said the doctor.
“Or, perhaps, a little cordial?”
“Not of drop of anything, thank you; I never do, you know.”
“Just a thimbleful of this?” said the lady, producing from some recess under a sideboard a bottle of brandy; “just a thimbleful? It’s what he takes himself.”
When Lady Scatcherd found that even this argument failed, she led the way to the great man’s bedroom.
“Well, doctor! well, doctor! well, doctor!” was the greeting with which our son of Galen was saluted some time before he entered the sickroom. His approaching step was heard, and thus the ci-devant Barchester stone-mason saluted his coming friend. The voice was loud and powerful, but not clear and sonorous. What voice that is nurtured on brandy can ever be clear? It had about it a peculiar huskiness, a dissipated guttural tone, which Thorne immediately recognised, and recognised as being more marked, more guttural, and more husky than heretofore.
“So you’ve smelt me out, have you, and come for your fee? Ha! ha! ha! Well, I have had a sharpish bout of it, as her ladyship there no doubt has told you. Let her alone to make the worst of it. But, you see, you’re too late, man. I’ve bilked the old gentleman again without troubling you.”
“Anyway, I’m glad you’re something better, Scatcherd.”
“Something! I don’t know what you call something. I never was better in my life. Ask Winterbones there.”
“Indeed, now, Scatcherd, you ain’t; you’re bad enough if you only knew it. And as for Winterbones, he has no business here up in your bedroom, which stinks of gin so, it does. Don’t you believe him, doctor; he ain’t well, nor yet nigh well.”
Winterbones, when the above illnatured allusion was made to the aroma coming from his libations, might be seen to deposit surreptitiously beneath the little table at which he sat, the cup with which he had performed them.
The doctor, in the meantime, had taken Sir Roger’s hand on the pretext of feeling his pulse, but was drawing quite as much information from the touch of the sick man’s skin, and the look of the sick man’s eye.
“I think Mr Winterbones had better go back to the London office,” said he. “Lady Scatcherd will be your best clerk for some time, Sir Roger.”
“Then I’ll be d–––– if Mr Winterbones does anything of the kind,” said he; “so there’s an end of that.”
“Very well,” said the doctor. “A man can die but once. It is my duty to suggest measures for putting off the ceremony as long as possible. Perhaps, however, you may wish to hasten it.”
“Well, I am not very anxious about it, one way or the other,” said Scatcherd. And as he spoke there came a fierce gleam from his eye, which seemed to say—”If that’s the bugbear with which you wish to frighten me, you will find that you are mistaken.”
“Now, doctor, don’t let him talk that way, don’t,” said Lady Scatcherd, with her handkerchief to her eyes.
“Now, my lady, do you cut it; cut at once,” said Sir Roger, turning hastily round to his better-half; and his better-half, knowing that the province of a woman is to obey, did cut it. But as she went she gave the doctor a pull by the coat’s sleeve, so that thereby his healing faculties might be sharpened to the very utmost.
“The best woman in the world, doctor; the very best,” said he, as the door closed behind the wife of his bosom.
“I’m sure of it,” said the doctor.
“Yes, till you find a better one,” said Scatcherd. “Ha! ha! ha! but good or bad, there are some things which a woman can’t understand, and some things which she ought not to be let to understand.”
“It’s natural she should be anxious about your health, you know.”
“I don’t know that,” said the contractor. “She’ll be very well off. All that whining won’t keep a man alive, at any rate.”
There was a pause, during which the doctor continued his medical examination. To this the patient submitted with a bad grace; but still he did submit.
“We must turn over a new leaf, Sir Roger; indeed we must.”
“Bother,” said Sir Roger.
“Well, Scatcherd; I must do my duty to you, whether you like it or not.”
“That is to say, I am to pay you for trying to frighten me.”
“No human nature can stand such shocks as these much longer.”
“Winterbones,” said the contractor, turning to his clerk, “go down, go down, I say; but don’t be out of the way. If you go to the public-house, by G––––, you may stay there for me. When I take a drop,—that is if I ever do, it does not stand in the way of work.” So Mr Winterbones, picking up his cup again, and concealing it in some way beneath his coat flap, retreated out of the room, and the two friends were alone.
“Scatcherd,” said the doctor, “you have been as near your God, as any man ever was who afterwards ate and drank in this world.”
“Have I, now?” said the railway hero, apparently somewhat startled.
“Indeed you have; indeed you have.”
“And now I’m all right again?”
“All right! How can you be all right, when you know that your limbs refuse to carry you? All right! why the blood is still beating round your brain with a violence that would destroy any other brain but yours.”
“Ha! ha! ha!” laughed Scatcherd. He was very proud of thinking himself to be differently organised from other men. “Ha! ha! ha! Well, and what am I to do now?”
The whole of the doctor’s prescription we will not give at length. To some of his ordinances Sir Roger promised obedience; to others he objected violently, and to one or two he flatly refused to listen. The great stumbling-block was this, that total abstinence from business for two weeks was enjoined; and that it was impossible, so Sir Roger said, that he should abstain for two days.
“If you work,” said the doctor, “in your present state, you will certainly have recourse to the stimulus of drink; and if you drink, most assuredly you will die.”
“Stimulus! Why do you think I can’t work without Dutch courage?”
“Scatcherd, I know that there is brandy in the room at this moment, and that you have been taking it within these two hours.”
“You smell that fellow’s gin,” said Scatcherd.
“I feel the alcohol working within your veins,” said the doctor, who still had his hand on his patient’s arm.
Sir Roger turned himself roughly in the bed so as to get away from his Mentor, and then he began to threaten in his turn.
“I’ll tell you what it is, doctor; I’ve made up my mind, and I’ll do it. I’ll send for Fillgrave.”
“Very well,” said he of Greshamsbury, “send for Fillgrave. Your case is one in which even he can hardly go wrong.”
“You think you can hector me, and do as you like because you had me under your thumb in other days. You’re a very good fellow, Thorne, but I ain’t sure that you are the best doctor in all