He always looked back on those dreary months as on a long nightmare. Spring, summer, autumn, and another Christmas!
His eye got worse and worse, and so interfered with the sight of the other that he had no peace till it was darkened wholly. He tried another doctor—Monsieur Goyers, professor at the liberal university of Ghent—who consulted with Dr. Noiret about him one day in Brussels, and afterwards told him that Noiret of Louvain, whom he described as a miserable Jesuit, was blinding him, and that he, this Goyers of Ghent, would cure him in six weeks.
"Mettez‑vous au régime des viandes saignantes!" had said Noiret; and Barty had put himself on a diet of underdone beef and mutton.
"Mettez‑vous au lait!" said Goyers—so he metted himself at the milk, as he called it—and put himself in Goyers's hands; and in six weeks got so much worse that he went back to Noiret and the regimen of the bleeding meats, which he loathed.
Then, in his long and wretched désœuvrement, his melancholia, he drifted into an indiscreet flirtation with a beautiful lady—he (as had happened before) being more the pursued than the pursuer. And so ardent was the pursuit that one fine morning the beautiful lady found herself gravely compromised—and there was a bother and a row.
"Amour, amour, quand tu nous tiens,
On peut bien dire 'Adieu Prudence!'"
"Amour, amour, quand tu nous tiens,
On peut bien dire 'Adieu Prudence!'"
All this gave Lady Caroline great distress, and ended most unhappily—in a duel with the lady's husband, who was a Colonel of Artillery, and meant business!
They fought with swords in a little wood near Laeken. Barty, who could have run his fat antagonist through a dozen times during the five minutes they fought, allowed himself to be badly wounded in the side, just above the hip, and spent a month in bed. He had hoped to manage for himself a slighter wound, and catch his adversary's point on his elbow.
Afterwards, Lady Caroline, who had so disapproved of the flirtation, did not, strange to say, so disapprove of this bloody encounter, and thoroughly approved of the way Barty had let himself be pinked! and nursed him devotedly; no mother could have nursed him better—no sister—no wife! not even the wife of that Belgian Colonel of Artillery!