“I mean,” said the Colonel, “that I have little to offer you beyond the guesses and surmises of club talk. It will be for your own intelligence to penetrate through the obscurity afterwards. You understand me?”
“I believe I understand you,” said Upton, slowly, and with the same quiet smile. Now, this cold, semi-sarcastic manner of Upton was the one sole thing in the world which the honest Colonel could not stand up against; he always felt as though it were the prelude to something cutting or offensive,—some sly impertinence that he could not detect till too late to resent,—some insinuation that might give the point to a whole conversation, and yet be undiscovered by him till the day following. Little as Harcourt was given to wronging his neighbor, he in this instance was palpably unjust; Upton's manner being nothing more than the impress made upon a very subtle man by qualities very unlike any of his own, and which in their newness amused him. The very look of satire was as often an expression of sorrow and regret that he could not be as susceptible—as easy of deception—as those about him. Let us pardon our worthy Colonel if he did not comprehend this; shrewder heads than his own had made the same mistake. Half to resent this covert slyness, half to arouse himself to any conflict before him, he said, in a tone of determination, “It is only fair to tell you that you are yourself to blame for anything that may have befallen poor Glencore.”
“I to blame! Why, my dear Harcourt, you are surely dreaming.”
“As wide awake as ever I was. If it had not been for a blunder of yours,—an unpardonable blunder, seeing what has come of it,—sending a pack of trash to me about salt and sulphur, while you forwarded a private letter about Glencore to the Foreign Office, all this might not have happened.”
“I remember that it was a most disagreeable mistake. I have paid heavily for it, too. That lotion for the cervical vertebrae has come back all torn, and we cannot make out whether it be a phosphate or a prot'-oxide of bismuth. You don't happen to remember?”
“I?—of course I know nothing about it. I'd as soon have taken a porcupine for a pillow as I 'd have adventured on the confounded mixture. But, as I was saying, that blessed letter, written by some Princess or other, as I understand, fell into the King's hands, and the consequence was that he sent off immediately to Glencore an order to go down to him at Brighton. Naturally enough, I thought he 'd not go; he had the good and sufficient pretext of his bad health to excuse him. Nobody had seen him abroad in the world for years back, and it was easy enough to say that he could not bear the journey. Nothing of the kind; he received the command as willingly as he might have done an invitation to dinner fifteen years ago, and talked of nothing else for the whole evening after but of his old days and nights in Carlton House; how gracious the Prince used to be to him formerly; how constantly he was a guest at his table; what a brilliant society it was; how full of wit and the rest of it; till, by Jove, what between drinking more wine than he was accustomed to take, and the excitement of his own talking, he became quite wild and unmanageable. He was not drunk, nor anything like it, it was rather the state of a man whose mind had got some sudden shock; for in the midst of perfectly rational conversation, he would fall into paroxysms of violent passion, inveighing against every one, and declaring that he never had possessed one true-hearted, honest friend in his life.
“It was not without great difficulty that I got him back to my lodgings, for we had gone to dine at Richmond. Then we put him to bed, and I sent for Hunter, who came on the instant. Though by this time Glencore was much more calm and composed, Hunter called the case brain fever; had his hair cut quite close, and ice applied to the head. Without any knowledge of his history or even of his name, Hunter pronounced him to be a man whose intellect had received some terrible shock, and that the present was simply an acute attack of a long-existent malady.”
“Did he use any irritants?” asked Upton, anxiously.
“No; he advised nothing but the cold during the night.”
“Ah! what a mistake,” sighed Upton, heavily. “It was precisely the case for the cervical lotion I was speaking of. Of course he was much worse next morning?”