“I’m delighted to hear it!” cried Sir Robert. It was really so great a relief to him that he put out his hand in sudden cordiality. “I will never forget my obligations to you, Macalister. You have given me the greatest relief. When the turn has really come, there is nothing, I’ve always heard, but great care wanted—care and good food and good air.”
“That was just what I wanted to speak to you about, Sir Robert,” said the doctor, with one of those little unnecessary coughs that mean mischief. “Good air there is—she could not have better; and good food, for I’ve always heard your housekeeper is great on that; and good nursing—well, yon woman, that is, your niece’s maid, Bauby or Beenie, or whatever they call her, is little more than a fool, but she’s a good-hearted idiot, and sticks to what she’s told—when there’s nobody to tell her different. So we may say there’s good care. But when that’s said, though it’s a great deal, every thing is not said.”
“Ay,” said Sir Robert, “and what may there be beyond that?” He had become suspicious after his experiences, though it did not seem possible that from such a quarter there should come any second attack.
“I’m very diffident,” said the doctor in his strong Northern accent, with his ruddy, weather-beaten countenance cast down in his embarrassment, “of mentioning any thing that’s not what ye might call strictly professional, or taking advantage of a medical man’s poseetion. But when a man has a bit tender creature to deal with, like a flower, and that has just come through a terrible illness, the grand thing to ask will be, Sir Robert, not if she has good food and good nursing, which is what is wanted in most cases, but just something far more hard to come by—if she’s wanting to live——”
“Wanting to live!” cried Sir Robert. “What nonsense are you speaking? A girl of that age!”
“It’s just precisely that age that fashes me. Older folk have got more used to it: living’s a habit with the like of us. We just find we must go on, whatever happens; but a young lass is made up of fancies and veesions. She says to herself: ‘I would like better a bonnie green turf in the kirkyard than all this fighting and striving,’ and just fades away because she has no will to take things up again. I’ve seen cases like that before now.”
“And what’s my part in all this?” cried Sir Robert. “You come to me with your serious face, as if I had some hand in it. What can I do?”
“Well, Sir Robert,” said the doctor, “that is what I cannot tell. I’m not instructed in your affairs—nor do I wish to be; but if there is any thing in this young lady’s road that crosses her sorely—the state of the brain that made this attack so dangerous evidently came from some mental shock—if it’s within the bounds of possibility that you can give in to her, do so, Sir Robert. I am giving you a doctor’s advice—not a private man’s that has nothing ado with it. If you can give her her own way, which is dear to us all, and more especially to women folk, give it to her, Sir Robert! It will be her best medicine. Or if you cannot do that, let her think you will do it—let her think you will do it! It’s lawful to deceive even in a case like this—to save her life.”
“You are trying to make me think, doctor, that my niece has been pretending to be ill all this time in order to get her own way.”
“You may think that if you like, Sir Robert. It’s a pretending that has nearly cost you a funeral, and I will not say may not do so yet—but me, out of my own line, my knowledge is very imperfect. You know your own affairs best. But you cannot say I have not warned you of the consequences,” Dr. Macalister said.