“Bosh, Deb! Why it’s only a hundred and fifty miles or so from here to Havre, and I’ll be back in a couple of days at most! It is right for me to go, and I can just manage now to get away for two or three days, for there’s nobody ill and nothing doing; and that coal merchant fellow Dobbins, who came down here to set up for surgeon, can mind my practice for me. I’ll go round and ask him this morning; he’ll jump at the offer.”
“Well, if you think you ought to go, you must I suppose; and it is better now than any other time.”
“Of course I ought, and I will to, by Gad!” The doctor being a man of resolution, although he often did make hasty resolves, quickly settled his departure; and to the intense astonishment of everybody went away from Bigton for a week as he said, although he only intended to be away two days at the most, the whilom coal merchant Dobbins driving about in the doctor’s chaise, which he seldom used himself unless the gout was very bad indeed, and making the most of his short resign until Aesculapius proper should come back to his own again.
Doctor Jolly had never stirred out of his native town, save of course on short excursions into the surrounding neighbourhood, for nearly a quarter of a century; not for twenty-five years, ever since the time when he went to London to walk the boards of Guy’s Hospital, in order to acquire his medical education; and naturally such an expedition as the present was quite an era in his life.
But the doctor did not make “any bones” about it, as the popular expression runs. He packed up his traps in a small portmanteau; and after a very affecting farewell with Deborah, who fell upon his neck and embraced him, as if she were never going to see him again, telling him, “Take care of yourself, Richard! Do take care of yourself!” to which he responded in his cheery voice, “God bless my soul! Deb, of course I will. God bless you!” he rubbed his eyes, which were glistening, with his horny fist, and blowing his nose vigorously with his bandana, the doctor went off on his travels.
He made his way safely to Havre, and got over all right with the exception of being fearfully sea-sick on the passage. Oh! the blessing of being thin! Fat men suffer the tortures of the direst days of the Inquisition when attacked by the fell mal du mer! while the Misters Slenders escaped scatheless.
He had some little difficulty with the gendarmes of the custom house and the hotel touts, the latter of whom struggled for the possession of his manly form; but he finally escaped after being taken summarily to a caravanserai, where he left his luggage, and shortly afterwards set about finding the abode of Susan and Markworth.
By some mistake or other he got carried off to the railway station, and was taken some miles on the road to Paris. A fellow countryman, however, convinced him of his mistake, and showed him how to get back again to Havre. By the time he got back, however, evening had set in, and he experienced the greatest difficulty in finding the direction of the Rue Montmartre, for, even after finding the direction in which it lay, he was still at fault. How he blessed the “frog eating race” as he called them.
As the doctor’s knowledge of French was somewhat limited,—indeed, he only knew the word oui which he pronounced “Ooo”—he found some difficulty in finding his way. However, by dint of continually bawling out in an extra stentorian voice “Roo Mount Martha,” as he called it, to every passer-by whom he met, he at length reached the street of which he was in search.
It was some time before he got to the right number, as he would persist in asking, of course in English, for “Number-o’-seven,” instead of numéro sept. But in due course he arrived at the logement of La Mère Cliquelle.