The doctor bowed reverentially, crossed his white hands on his waistcoat, and looked like a saint ready for martyrdom.
Kate frankly held out her hand in token of perfect cordiality, and her honest smile suited the action well.
‘Tell Miss Betty that our sick charge shall not be neglected, but that we want her here herself to help us.’
‘I shall report your message word for word,’ said he, as he withdrew.
As the doctor drove back to Dublin, he went over a variety of things in his thoughts. There were serious disturbances in the provinces; those ugly outrages which forerun long winter nights, and make the last days of October dreary and sad-coloured. Disorder and lawlessness were abroad; and that want of something remedial to be done which, like the thirst in fever, is fostered and fed by partial indulgence. Then he had some puzzling cases in hospital, and one or two in private practice, which harassed him; for some had reached that critical stage where a false move would be fatal, and it was far from clear which path should be taken. Then there was that matter of Miss O’Shea herself, who, if her nephew were to die, would most likely endow that hospital in connection with the Bleeding Heart, and of which he was himself the founder; and that this fate was by no means improbable, Sir X. persuaded himself, as he counted over all the different stages of peril that stood between him and convalescence. ‘We have now the concussion, with reasonable prospect of meningitis; and there may come on erysipelas from the scalp wounds, and high fever, with all its dangers; next there may be a low typhoid state, with high nervous excitement; and through all these the passing risks of the wrong food or drink, the imprudent revelations, or the mistaken stimulants. Heigh-ho!’ said he at last, ‘we come through storm and shipwreck, forlorn-hopes, and burning villages, and we succumb to ten drops too much of a dark-brown liquor, or the improvident rashness that reads out a note to us incautiously!
‘Those young ladies thought to mystify me,’ said he aloud, after a long reverie. ‘I was not to know which of them was in love with the sick boy. I could make nothing of the Greek, I own, for, except a half-stealthy regard for myself, she confessed to nothing, and the other was nearly as inscrutable. It was only the little warmth at last that betrayed her. I hurt her pride, and as she winced, I said, “There’s the sore spot—there’s mischief there!” How the people grope their way through life who have never studied physic nor learned physiology is a puzzle to me! With all its aid and guidance I find humanity quite hard enough to understand every day I live.’
Even in his few hours’ visit—in which he remarked everything, from the dress of the man who waited at dinner, to the sherry decanter with the smashed stopper, the weak ‘Gladstone’ that did duty as claret, and the cotton lace which Nina sported as ‘point d’Alençon,’ and numberless other shifts, such as people make who like to play false money with Fortune—all these he saw, and he saw that a certain jealous rivalry existed between the two girls; but whether either of them, or both, cared for young O’Shea, he could not declare; and, strange as it may seem, his inability to determine this weighed upon him with all the sense of a defeat.