"You will excuse me," said Lefevre; "but I must perform a very delicate operation."
"To be sure," said the old lord; "and you want me to go. How stupid of me! I kept waiting for my daughter to wake up; but I see that, of course, you have to rouse her. It did not occur to me what that machine meant. Something magneto-electric—eh? Forgive one question, Lefevre. I can see you look anxious: is Mary's condition very serious?—most serious? I can bear to be told the complete truth."
The doctor was touched by the old gentleman's emotion. He took his hand. "It is serious," said he—"most serious, for this reason, that I cannot account for her obstinate lethargy; but I think there is no immediate danger. If necessity arises, I shall send for you again."
"To the House," said Lord Rivercourt. "I shall be sitting out a debate on our eternal Irish question."
Lefevre was left seriously discomposed, but at once he sent for the house-physician, summoned the Sister and the nurse, and set about his third attempt to revive his patient. He got the bed turned north and south. He carefully explained to the two women what was demanded of them, and applied them to their task; but, whatever the cause, the failure was completer than before: there was not even a tremor of muscle in the unconscious lady, and the doctor was suffused with alarm and humiliation. Failure!—failure!—failure! Such a concatenation had never happened to him before!
But failure only nerves the brave and capable man to a supreme effort for success. Still self-contained, and apparently unmoved, the doctor gave directions for some liquid nourishment to be artificially administered to his patient, said he would return after dinner, and went his way. The society of friends or acquaintances was distasteful to him then; the thought even of seeing his own familiar dining-room and his familiar man in black, whose silent obsequiousness he felt would be a reproach, was disagreeable. All his thought, all his attention, all his faculties were drawn tight to this acute point—he must succeed; he must accomplish the task he had set himself: life at that hour was worth living only for that purpose. But how was success to be compelled?
He walked for a while about the streets, and then he went into a restaurant and ordered a modest dinner. He broke and crumbled his bread with both hands, his mind still intent on that one engrossing, acute point. While thus he sat he heard a voice, as in a dream, say, "The very doctor you read about. That's the second curious case he's got in a month or so.... Oh yes—very clever; he treats them, I understand, in the same sort of way as the famous Dr Charbon of Paris would.... I should say so; quite as good, if not better than Charbon. I'd rather have an English doctor any day than a French.... His name's in the paper—Lefevre." Then the doctor woke to the fact that he was being talked about. He perceived his admirers were sitting at a table a little behind him, and he judged from what had been said that his fresh case was already being made "copy" of in the evening papers. The flattering comparison of himself with Dr Charbon had an oddly stimulating effect upon him, notwithstanding that it had been uttered by he knew not whom,—a mere vox et præterea nihil. He disclaimed to himself the truth of the comparison, but all the same he was encouraged to bend his attention with his utmost force to the solution of his difficult problem—what to do to rouse his patient?
He sat thus, amid the bustle and buzz of the restaurant, the coming and going of waiters, completely abstracted, assailing his difficulty with questions on this side and on that,—when suddenly out of the mists that obscured it there rose upon his mental vision an idea, which appealed to him as a solution of the whole, and, more than that, as a secret that would revolutionise all the treatment of nervous weakness and derangement. How came the idea? How do ideas ever come? As inspirations, we say, or as revelations; and truly they come upon us with such amazing and inspiriting freshness, that they may well be called either the one or the other. But no great idea had ever yet an epiphany but from the ferment of more familiar small ideas,—just as the glorious Aphrodite was born of the ferment and pother of the waves of the sea. Lefevre's new idea clothed itself in the form of a comparative question—Why should there not be Transfusion of Nervous Force, Ether, or Electricity, just as there is Transfusion of Blood?
He pushed his dinner away (he could scarcely have told what he had been eating and drinking), called for his bill, and returned with all speed to the hospital. He entered his female ward just as evening prayers were finished, before the lights were turned out and night began for the patients. He summoned his trusted assistant, the house-physician, again.
"I am about to attempt," said he, "an altogether new operation: the patient has remained just as I left her, I suppose?"