“Yes, nice little heiress, Claude,” he said again. “Wonder who’ll get her—Christopher the salmon fisher, or our new yachting friend? I think I should back Glyddyr.”
He smoked on, and thought seriously for some time about his other patient, and after a time he emitted a cloud of smoke which he had retained in his mouth, as he turned himself with a jerk from one side of his great easy chair to the other.
“No,” he said, “impossible to have done more. The Royal College of Surgeons couldn’t save him.”
He smoked on in silence, sipping his coffee from time to time, gazing the while at Gartram, upon whom the light shone faintly, just sufficient to show his stern-looking, deeply-marked face.
“Yours is a good head, my dear patient,” he mused. “Well-cut features, and a look of firm determination in your aspect, even when your eyes are closed. You miss something there, for you have keen, piercing eyes, but for all that you look like what you are, a stubborn, determined Englishman, who will have his own way over everything so long as his works will make him go. When they run down, he comes to me for help, and I am helping him. Yes, you were sure to get on and heap up money, and build grand houses, and slap your pocket-book and say: ‘I am a rich man,’ and ‘I laugh at and deride the whole world,’ and so you do, my dear sir, all but the doctor, who, once he has you, has you all his life, and can do what he likes with you. I have you hard, Norman Gartram, and I am licenced; I have you completely under me, and so greatly am I in possession of you, that I could this night say to you die, and you would die; or I could bid you live, and you would live. A simple giving or a simple taking. A movement with the tactus eruditus of a physician, and then the flag would be down, the King of the Castle would be gone, and a new king would reign in the stead—or queen,” he added, with a laugh.
“Ah, you people trust us a great deal, and we in return trust you—a very long time often before we can get paid. Not you, my dear Gartram, you always were a hard cash man. But you people trust us a great deal, and our power is great.
“And ought not to be abused,” he said hastily. “No, of course not. No one ought to abuse those who trust. Capital coffee this,” he added, as he partook of more. “Grand thing to keep a man awake.
“Humph! Tired. Ours is weary work,” and he yawned.
“I believe I should have been a clever fellow,” mused the doctor, “if I had not been so confoundedly lazy. There’s something very interesting in these cases. In yours, for instance, my fine old fellow, it sets one thinking whether I could have treated you differently, and whether I could do anything to prevent the recurrence of these fits.”
He smoked on in silence, and then shook his head.