Now it does you not a tittle of service anyway to chop dialectics with your doctor. He knows everything about your way of life; your past, your future, and your present state, and he can pepper you with phrases that seem as harmless as the alphabet, if you look at them from the point of view of a physician. Yet if the world chooses to place its own construction on them, it would not feel tempted to mistake one for an archangel. In short, your doctor is not the person you should lead into a discourse in the presence of your Aunt.
“Then I must keep my bed for at least a week?” says I.
“I should strongly advise it,” says old Paradise.
“Indeed you would, sir,” says I, sweetly; “then, Emblem, fetch me my spotted taffety. For I propose to instantly get up.”
And to the indignation of my Aunt, the dowager, who regarded the whole tribe of doctors as religiously as the Brahmins do their sacred bull, I suddenly renounced the sheets, sat on the margin of the bed, and bade Emblem draw my stockings on. In my experience this hath proved the exactest mode of routing the whole infernal faculty. Do not argue with them, for their whole art consists in contriving new and elegant diseases for persons of an uncompromising health. Therefore at this moment my Aunt, with a shake of her wintry curls at me, invited the doctor to a dish of tea downstairs, and a game of cribbage afterwards. Thus before my second stocking was drawn on they had departed, but had left behind volumes of horrid prophecies of blood poisoning, high fever, and five-and-twenty other things.
“Now lock the door, my Emblem,” says I, cheerfully, “and tell me every bit of news.”
“If I were you, my lady,” Emblem says, “I would get back to bed this instant and grow very ill indeed. For Captain Grantley is drawing a complaint up in this matter, and thinks that upon the strength of it the Government will feel compelled to arrest you for high treason and send you to the Tower.
“High what?” cries I, “send me to the where? Why, upon my soul! did any man ever speak such nonsense in his natural! As though the Government would do anything of the kind. ’Twas but a piece of mischief. I meant no harm. I’m certain I never wished to hurt the Captain, who, by the way, is much cleverer and braver than I had supposed. ’Twas but a piece of fun, I say. And if the poor lad did escape, well, he was a very pretty lad, and I am certainly not sorry. Arrest me! Send me to the Tower! Pah! the Government will do nothing of the kind. Why, Emblem, what is it that I’ve done.”
“Sure I don’t know, my lady,” says the faithful creature, beginning to whimper like a child; “you have done nothing very wicked as I can see. Of course he was a prisoner, but then there is lots of other prisoners, and plenty as big as he, and bigger if it comes to that.”
“Why, of course there is, you silly goose,” says I.