But Mr. Biron was impervious to sneers. He walked up and down the room in feverish anxiety until the arrival of the doctor, whom he interrogated at once with as much solicitude as if he had been a young beauty on the eve of her first ball.
The doctor, a stolid, hard-working country practitioner, with a dull red face and dull black eyes, showed Theodore much less mercy than Bram had done. He knew his patient well, having been called in to him on several occasions when that gentleman’s excesses had brought on the attacks of dyspepsia to which he was subject; and the more he saw of him the less he liked him. Theodore’s anxiety about his appearance he treated with cruel bluntness.
“No, you’ll never be the same man again to look at, Mr. Biron,” he said quite cheerfully. “And you may be thankful if we can save you the sight of the left eye.”
“You think the scar will never go away? Nor the hair grow again?” asked Theodore piteously.
“The scar won’t go away certainly. But that’s not much to trouble about at your time of life, I should think,” returned the doctor bluntly. “There’s a greater danger than that to concern ourselves with. Unless you are very careful, you will have erysipelas. You must get that little daughter of yours to nurse you very carefully. Where is she?”
Theodore burst out fretfully with a new grievance—
“My daughter! She’s not here to nurse me. I’ve no one to nurse me now. She’s gone away, gone away and left me all by myself!”
The doctor stared at him with the unpleasant fixity of eyes which have to look hard before they see much.
“You told her to go, I suppose?” said he at last, abruptly.
Taken by surprise, Theodore, to the horror of Bram, who was standing in the background, confessed—