The coachman, at her request, drove out to Fifth Avenue, then down that avenue to Tenth Street, where he opened the door and set her down, receiving orders to wait there for her return. The young girl tripped up from the corner, a few doors on the left hand side, past a church, and entered the front-yard railing of one of two or three unpretending three-story brick-houses standing together. It was now past dusk and the street-lamps were lighted; and looking in at the basement windows of this house, Joe saw that no curtains were drawn, that the gas was burning within, over a table and under a shade; and that at the table sat a man with head bent down and fingers busy at some kind of mechanical contrivance.
"That will do," she muttered to herself. "The Doctor is in, as I believed he might be at this hour, and I shall have no occasion to disturb the people up-stairs."
Passing under the steps she reached the closed door, and instead of ringing, banged half a dozen times against the panels with her hand, very slowly and tragically, as the ghost in "Don Giovanni" might ask to be admitted, provided it had any occasion for using the door. Immediately there was a shuffle inside, and directly the door opened and a tall figure stood in the doorway. There was enough light from the street-lamp to make the young girl's face and figure pretty plainly visible, and the moment he saw her the occupant said:
"I thought so—mischief! I thought I knew that knock! No one else ever takes such liberties with my office-door. What do you want now? But come in, before you forget it!" and seizing both her hands with a playful gesture, he dragged her within the door, closed it, pulled her through the side-door into the front basement which formed the office, drew up a clumsy cushioned operating-chair near the table, sat her down in it, then cast himself into a chair immediately in front of her, threw one leg over the other and his hands behind his head, and said:
"Now I am resigned and prepared. Out with it!"
Had Josephine Harris not been familiar with the place and its occupant, as it was quite evident that she was, she would have looked twice at the one and several times at the other. That little basement-room was not only the office in which Doctor LaTurque received professional calls, but it was also the sanctum in which were prepared most of the oddly-trenchant articles in the Scimetar, a quarterly medical and critical publication with a habit cutting as its name and a reputation dangerous enough to suit the most sensational fancy. Few persons connected with the practice of medicine in or about the great city, who had not first or last suffered some incision from the trenchant blade of the Scimetar, wielded by the wiry arm of the Doctor; and few humbugs but he had pricked and exposed, by the same means or in personal conversation, while he was himself the greatest humbug of all. Others habitually humbugged others: he humbugged himself, or tried to do so, insisting to himself that he was a hard man, an iron man, a brute, a skeptic, and everything that was ugly and detestable; while in fact he had the warm heart of an unspoiled child, and a faith in everything good, that was really part of his being—all combined with the vigor of the experienced surgeon and the close study of the untiring student. He used hard words—rough ones, sometimes, and tried to make himself believe that they were the emanations of a hard disposition; while every rough word was really made under protest from his nature, and few men on the whole earth were more ready to do an act of genuine kindness. It is not for us to say that there was not some intentional affectation of singularity underlying his manner; for he evidently loved notice if not notoriety; and other means than the white coat and disarranged trowsers of the Tribune Philosopher have sometimes been adopted to secure the same end.
Certainly Dr. LaTurque was not remarkably choice in the style of his "den," if he had handsomely furnished apartments in the house above, and if his windows did look out on Fifth Avenue. The ceilings were low, the walls plain, the furniture was very common, and yet a little odd, as became the place. The floor was oil-clothed; a table covered with dark cloth stood in the middle of the room; an old-fashioned secretary, with books piled on either end, stood against the wall on the right as the visitor entered, with a globe half hidden behind it; on the wall opposite hung the print of a muscular Apollo (muscular, because it was drawn anatomically, with no flesh covering the integuments); on either end of the mantel stood a small statue; in the centre was an impudent placard of bronze on japanned tin, announcing that no complimentary visits could possibly be received in that room, while the occupant, if there, was ready to falsify the announcement at any moment; on a small table between the windows, under a glass globe, lay the cast in plaster of a marvellously handsome male Italian face; two or three small pictures, commonly framed, hung over secretary and mantel; in the corner between the mantel and the window stood a stuffed eagle on a low table covered with the suggestive appliances of a fractured leg; and just behind it, on a bit of rug, nestled a disabled pigeon from his pet flock on the roof, that had come down, with excellent judgment, to be nursed and tended by the surgeon.
In the midst of this odd assemblage Dr. LaTurque was himself not by any means the least remarkable object. He was certainly a singular-looking man, and had a fancy (or pretended to have a fancy) that he was a very homely one. He was not so, however, to any eye of taste—only striking. In figure he was tall and rather thin, but the same epithet we have applied to his arm may be used for the whole man—wiry. He seemed capable of strong nervous effort and of great endurance; and one could see that something more than fifty years had not diminished the locomotive will or power. In the too large and too aquiline nose (literally a beak)—in the iron-gray moustache, imperial, and heavy brown hair—in the thin cheeks and keen gray eye,—there was a marvellous reminder of the portraits of Louis Napoleon, and at the same time another and a stronger suggestion. There is no close observer of physiognomy but has remarked bird, beast and even reptile reproduced in the faces of different men—one being a human lion, another a human bear, a third a human hyena, and still a fourth a human serpent. It scarcely seemed that it could have been by chance that the gray eagle stood stuffed in the corner; for the observer just as naturally detected the eagle in that human face, as he could ever have detected either of the others named, in different physiognomies, and the dead bird seemed the totem of the living man.
"Well, battle and murder and sudden death!" said the medical Laurence Boythorn, when he had forced the young girl down into a seat. "What is it you want? Who is married or dead, or whom do you intend to kill, or what is it?"
"Are you sober?" asked the young girl, looking into his eyes very gravely.