“Bro—— what, sir?”
“Bromide of potassium. I have to take it every night. I must. My nerves are in such a state, I can’t sleep without it; and this gentleman, knowing that, has let me come away without it. I sha’n’t go to bed. I’ll sit up all night. If I go to bed I shall go mad, because I sha’n’t be able to go to sleep. Go to bed, all of you. I’ll go out for a walk. There’s a forest near here; I can roam about that all night. I must do something, for I can’t go to sleep without my bromide of potassium.”
“Oh,” I said, “perhaps the country air will make you sleep.”
“No, it won’t,” he said; and he began to put on his hat and coat. “I must go and walk about the forest all night. If I get tired I can hang myself to the branch of a tree.”
“Oh, please don’t do that,” I said, for I knew I shouldn’t sleep a wink thinking of him roaming about the forest in his excited state.
“Oh, very well,” he said, taking off his hat and coat and flinging them down on the floor, “then perhaps you’ll tell me what I am to do. I won’t go to bed and lie awake all night. It’s too awful.”
The Swedish gentleman, who was looking awfully worried, let him go on, and, when he’d done, he said quietly—
“Don’t put yourself out like that, sir; you’ll only be ill all day to-morrow. Let me go to a chemist’s.”
I was just going to say that there wasn’t a chemist’s in the village, and the doctor lived a mile and a half away, when I saw that the Swedish gentleman was trying to make signs to me not to say anything, so I held my tongue.
At first Mr. Saxon refused. He said he wasn’t going to have a respectable chemist dragged out of his warm bed at that time of night because he was surrounded with idiots; but the Swedish gentleman quieted him a bit, and then beckoned me to come outside.