It was a fortnight before the squire came round again, and then he was the wreck of his former self.
Weak and ill, he would wander about in the air for an hour or two a day, leaning on his wife’s arm, and uttering never a sound.
Ruth, too, had changed. Her beautiful face was deeply lined, and her eyes were sunken. ‘She’s fretting about the master,’ said the servants. They did not know that she was crushing down in her heart the ghastly secret that chance had revealed to her.
Under that awful knowledge, slowly but surely her heart was breaking. And yet knowing all—having heard every awful word that had fallen from this man in his delirium—she loved him still, loved him as fondly as ever, and would have laid down her life to save him from one moment’s pain.
Slowly the squire mended. He grew less feeble, and could get about alone again. He seemed like a man recovering from a terrible dream. But the doctors were very careful with him. They had heard a good deal that he had said, and put it down to some terrible story in a book or a newspaper having made a great impression on him when he was in a low, nervous state. So he was forbidden on any account to see a paper yet and none were brought into the house. He was glad of the prohibition. Had he seen a newspaper, the first thing he would have done would have been to search for a paragraph among the old ones in which there was something about the dead body of an old man being found in the Serpentine.
CHAPTER LVIII.
DR. OLIVER BIRNIE’S NEW PATIENT.
Dr. Oliver Birnie’s consulting-room was generally pretty full in the morning, and always with paying patients. He had long since passed the ‘super’ stage of the profession. Lest any intelligent reader should be unacquainted with this phase of medical practice, let me explain that it is the custom when young doctors are anxious to work up a reputation for being fashionable for them to engage a few supers—that is, to give advice gratis to a few selected persons, on condition that they come once or twice a week and help to make a crowd in the waiting-room.
A doctor’s house, like a theatre, must be crowded if the proprietor would have a success. An empty waiting-room is like an empty pit; it dispirits the clientèle. Let a patient have to wait a couple of hours, and he considers the doctor a great man; let him find himself alone, and be shown in directly, and he imagines that the medical man can’t be clever or he would be busier.
Dr. Birnie was at home for consultation till twelve, and his rooms were generally crowded with genuine patients. They were, naturally, well-dressed, well-to-do people, for his fee was high. One morning, as the ladies and gentlemen at Dr. Birnie’s sat glaring at each other amid the funereal silence which generally reigns in a doctor’s waiting-room, the door opened, and a rough, hulking old man was shown in by the solemn attendant. He was about six feet, and broad in proportion, his hair and beard were grizzled, and his face was bronzed with exposure. He wasn’t a nice-looking old gentleman at all, and his get-up did not improve his appearance. He wore a thick pilot jacket, which was anything but a fit, and round his throat was twisted a dirty white comforter. He took off his hat as he entered the room, and sidled awkwardly to a chair, sitting on the extreme edge, and eyeing the company nervously. At first the ladies and gentlemen wondered what such a huge, powerful fellow could possibly want with a doctor. They imagined he must be a navvy, or something of the sort, and they felt it was like his impudence to come and sit down in their presence. But presently the great frame was racked, the fierce face became crimson, and the silence of the waiting-room was broken by the violent coughing of the new-comer.
That a man with a cough like that should need medical advice the ladies and gentlemen understood, but their astonishment was great when the door opened and the solemn attendant beckoned to this ‘navigator’ to come out.