THE BLUE WONDER.
He took up his hat, but he did not run. The little domestic dialogue still weighed on his spirits. He thought only of the small number of his patients, and the exhausted state of his exchequer. He drew his hat over his brow, and looked straight before him like a rhymester: on his way he saluted neither right nor left, and had nearly run down the superintendent-general,—a man looked upon by most people as one of the brightest shining lights in the church.
When he arrived at his dearly-beloved aunt's, he did not, indeed, find her on her death-bed; but she had mounted her spectacles, and was seated before a large book, from which she had opened at Reflections on Death, and from which she was devoutly reading sundry Prayers for the Dying. She looked wretchedly; but it would have been difficult to say when her face looked anything else. Round her head she had tied one handkerchief; and another, which passed over her head, was fastened under her chin.
"What is the matter with you?" asked the learned Doctor Falcon, as he laid his hat and stick aside.
"The Lord knows," sighed Miss Bugle in a soft and plaintive tone; "I have suffered much for several days. I feel as if my hour were come; and that would be terrible."
The doctor thoughtfully felt her pulse, and said unconsciously, half to himself, "It fills, with a vengeance!" All the good man's thoughts were at home with Susan.
"I thought as much," sighed the terrified virgin. "Do you think there is danger, my dear Falcon?"
"Not at your years," replied the doctor, scarcely knowing what he said.
"Well, that is some consolation," replied the lady in a more cheerful tone; "in fact, I am in my best years; my strength unbroken. My constitution must bring me through. Don't you think so, dear Falcon? Only, no expensive medicines, if they can be done without. Since bark, rhubarb, and mixtures have been turned into colonial produce, there's no enduring them. The Lord be merciful to us! but really, my dear Falcon, I am not at all well."
Our worthy aunt now gave the reins to her tongue; spoke, as she was wont to do, of a thousand different things, none of them in any way connected with her indisposition. The doctor, meanwhile, hummed a tune, and beat the devil's tattoo upon the table, without listening to a word of what the good lady was saying. At length he was beginning to lose patience.
"What then is the matter with you?" he exclaimed.
"Oh, my appetite! I have not relished a spoonful of soup these two days. And then my head aches as if it would burst."
"Something you have eaten has, perhaps, disagreed with you, aunt; some philosophical pâté de foie gras may be in fault."
"Gracious Heaven! no, Falcon, the stomach cannot be in fault. I live so simply, so frugally. Seriously, I don't think I have for several weeks eaten anything likely to disagree with me. But sometimes I have a tooth-ache, sometimes qualmishness, heartburn, vomitings—Good Heavens! do look at me, Falcon, and don't keep drumming upon the table so; look how pale I am,—how my eyes are sunk in my head: oh dear! I am certainly very unwell."
"Well, what do I care?" said the doctor in a peevish tone: his mind entirely occupied by the condition of his Susan: "you're in the family way, that's all."
"Merciful Heaven!" screamed the chaste virgin, in a voice that might have been heard three streets off. Merciful Heaven! that would be a blue wonder indeed!"
A cold sweat came over the doctor as he heard these animated tones from the maiden lips of Miss Sarah Bugle. He immediately recollected that, what with ill-humour, and what with absence of mind, he had been betrayed into a superlatively foolish speech, and one that no chaste virgin was ever likely to forgive; particularly a maid who had triumphantly preserved her painful dignity unimpaired to her fiftieth year; one who never pardoned in another damsel even a gentle pressure of the hand; one who was neither more nor less than an immaculate personification of purity and sanctity; one who was, in short, that virgin of virgins, Miss Sarah Bugle!
"I will let the storm vent itself, and seek safety in flight, before the neighbours come pouring in, to see what's the matter," thought the terrified doctor, as he opened the door and rushed into the street.