The physician then took his seat by the bedside of his patient, and requested all except a maid-servant to leave the chamber.
Mrs. Fairfax and Frank went out, taking the little girl with them, and leaving the doctor with the invalid.
After the lapse of an hour, the physician came out and went down stairs. Captain Fairfax was waiting for him in the hall, and drew him into the parlor, anxiously requesting to know his opinion. Perhaps he was really sanguine, and hoped the doctor’s verdict might set his fears at rest. At any rate he insisted upon knowing the precise state of the case. The doctor gravely motioned him to sit down, and then took a seat himself. He said that his patient was not sinking so much under any local disease as under a general atrophy, for which, considering the circumstances, he could not possibly account—for, if he had met precisely such a case in the very lowest walks of life, he should at once have declared that the patient had been brought to this state by the want of proper and sufficient food—that, in short, she was dying of a slow starvation. A deep groan broke from the lips of Francis Fairfax, and he started up, covered his face with his hands, and walked the floor in rapid strides. Suddenly he stopped before the physician, with a countenance convulsed with grief and remorse, with all pride and hesitation gone, and exclaimed, in thrilling tones—
“Doctor! suppose her case—my wife’s case had been as you would have surmised, finding it any where else!—suppose that for months past she has been starving—Great God—starving!—Now that the cause of this utter failure of the vital powers is removed—now that she has every thing that wealth, that the most devoted affection can give her, may she not recruit and live? Oh! tell me?”
The physician answered sternly—
“I do not know, sir! This tampering with the laws of life—this pursuing it to the very edge of death is not safe. Is she inclined to take food at all?”
“No—only a little gruel, and that mechanically, without appetite.”
“Exactly—a few days fasting makes one ravenous, but a long, partial starvation so exhausts the victim, that he loses all inclination for food, as well as all power to assimilate it.” The doctor spoke severely.
“Sir! I forgive your sternness and your evident suspicions, perhaps they are partially just. If they were otherwise, God knows I am so stricken that I have scarcely manhood enough left to resent them—but oh! tell me—do not evade the question. Can she be restored? and how?”
“Captain Fairfax, I told you that she was sinking, not so much under any local disorder as under general atrophy—and yet she has a local disease superinduced by this same slow starvation. Upon examination by the stethoscope, I find tubercles forming upon the left lung. There is also morbid action of the heart. You know how it is with phthisis! With proper care, and under favorable circumstances, the patient may live for years, perhaps for many years, and die at length in old age of something else.”