“Doctor,” we replied, “a great misfortune has happened.”
“A great misfortune! Mr. Mackenzie is not dead?”
“No;—he is not dead. Perhaps it would have been better that he had died long since. He has destroyed your manuscript.” The Doctor’s face fell, and his hands at the same time, and he stood looking at us. “I need not tell you, Doctor, what my feelings are, and how great my remorse.”
“Destroyed it!” Then we took him by the hand and led him to the table. He turned first upon the appetising and comparatively uninjured third volume, and seemed to think that we had hoaxed him. “This is not destroyed,” he said, with a smile. But before I could explain anything, his hands were among the fragments in the box. “As I am a living man, they have burned it!” he exclaimed. “I—I—I——” Then he turned from us, and walked twice the length of the room, backwards and forwards, while we stood still, patiently waiting the explosion of his wrath. “My friend,” he said, when his walk was over, “a great man underwent the same sorrow. Newton’s manuscript was burned. I will take it home with me, and we will say no more about it.” I never thought very much of the Doctor as a divine, but I hold him to have been as good a Christian as I ever met.
But that plan of his of saying no more about it could not quite be carried out. I was endeavouring to explain to him, as I thought it necessary to do, the circumstances of the case, and he was protesting his indifference to any such details, when there came a knock at the door, and the boy who waited on us below ushered Mrs. Grimes into the room. As the reader is aware, we had, during the last two months, become very intimate with the landlady of the Spotted Dog, but we had never hitherto had the pleasure of seeing her outside her own house. “Oh, Mr. ----” she began, and then she paused, seeing the Doctor.
We thought it expedient that there should be some introduction. “Mrs. Grimes,” we said, “this is the gentleman whose invaluable manuscript has been destroyed by that unfortunate drunkard.”
“Oh, then you’re the Doctor, Sir?” The Doctor bowed and smiled. His heart must have been very heavy, but he bowed politely and smiled sweetly. “Oh, dear,” she said, “I don’t know how to tell you!”
“To tell us what?” asked the Doctor.
“What has happened since?” we demanded. The woman stood shaking before us, and then sank into a chair. Then arose to us at the moment some idea that the drunken woman, in her mad rage, had done some great damage to the Spotted Dog,—had set fire to the house, or injured Mr. Grimes personally, or perhaps run a muck amidst the jugs and pitchers, window glass, and gas lights. Something had been done which would give the Grimeses a pecuniary claim on me or on the Doctor, and the woman had been sent hither to make the first protest. Oh,—when should I see the last of the results of my imprudence in having attempted to befriend such a one as Julius Mackenzie! “If you have anything to tell, you had better tell it,” we said, gravely.
“He’s been, and——”