She thought, “Oh, I must just show them all the paper, before I go with it;” and so after a little buzz about dinner and things with Sarah, mounted the stairs, and arrived among them singularly apropos, as it happened.
Men like Sampson, who make many foes, do also make stauncher friends than ever the Hare does, and are faithful friends themselves. The boisterous doctor had stuck to the Dodds in all their distresses; and if they were ever short of money, it certainly was not his fault: for almost his first word, when he found them in a lodging, was, “Now, ye'll be wanting a Chick. Gimme pen and ink, and I'll just draw ye one; for a hundre.” This being declined politely by Mrs. Dodd, he expostulated. “Mai—dear—Madam, how on airth can ye go on in such a place as London without a Chick?”
He returned to the charge at his next visit and scolded her well for her pride. “Who iver hard of refusing a Chick? a small inoffensive chick, from an old friend like me? Come now, behave! Just a wee chick, I'll let y' off for fifty.”
“Give us your company and your friendship,” said Mrs. Dodd; “we value them above gold: we will not rob your dear children, while we have as many fingers on our hands as other people.”
On the present occasion Dr. Sampson, whose affectionate respect for the leading London physicians has already displayed itself, was inveighing specially against certain specialists, whom, in the rapidity of his lusty eloquence, he called the Mad Ox. He favoured Julia and Edward with a full account of the maniform enormities he had detected them in during thirty years' practice; and so descended to his present grievance. A lady, an old friend of his, was being kept in a certain asylum month after month because she had got money and relations, and had once been delirious. “And why was she delirious? because she had a brain fever, she got well in a fortnight.” This lady had thrown a letter over the wall addressed to him; somebody had posted it: he had asked the Commissioners to let him visit her; they had declined for the present. “Yon Board always sides with the strong against the weak,” said he. So now he had bribed the gardener, and made a midnight assignation with the patient; and was going to it with six stout fellows to carry her off by force. “That is my recipe for alleged Insanity,” said he. “The business will be more like a mejaeval knight carrying off a namorous nun out of a convint, than a good physician saving a pashint from the Mad Ox. However, Mrs. Saampson's in the secret; I daunt say sh' approves it; for she doesn't. She says, 'Go quietly to the Board o' Commissioners.' Sis I, 'My dear, Boards are a sort of cattle that go too slow for Saampson, and no match at all for the Mad Ox.'”
At this conjuncture, or soon after, Mrs. Dodd came in with her paper in her hand, a little flurried for once, and after a hasty curtsey, said—
“Oh, Doctor Sampson, oh, my dears, what wickedness there is in the world! I'm going to Whitehall this moment; only look at what was pinned on my parasol at Drayton House.”
The writing passed from hand to hand, and left the readers looking very gravely at one another. Julia was quite pale and horror-stricken. All were too deeply moved, and even shocked, to make any commonplace comment; for it looked and read like a cry from heart to hearts.
“If you are a Christian, if
you are human, pity a sane
man here confined in, fraud,
and take this to the Board of
Lunacy at Whitehall. Torn
by treachery from her I love,
my letters all intercepted, pens
and paper kept from me, I
write this with a toothpick
and my blood on a rim of
'The Times.' Oh God, direct
it to some one who has suf-
fered, and can feel for an-
other's agony.”
Dr. Sampson was the first to speak. “There,” said he, under his breath: “didn't I tell you? This man is sane. There's sanity in every line.”