And there, unconscious, Simon MacTaggart slept, pale as parchment, fallen in at the jaw, twitching a little now and then at the corners of the mouth, otherwise inert and dead. Never before had his master seen him off his guard—never, that is to say, without the knowledge that he was being looked at—and if his Grace had expected that he should find any grosser man than he knew revealed, he was mistaken. 'Twas a child that slept—a child not unhappy, at most only indifferent to everything with that tremendous naïveté of the dead and of the soundly sleeping—that great carelessness that comes upon the carcass when the soul's from home. If he had sinned a million times,—let the physiognomists say what they will!—not a line upon his face betrayed him, for there the ideals only leave their mark, and his were forever impeccable.
His coat hung upon the back of a chair, and his darling flageolet had fallen out of the pocket and lay upon the floor. Argyll picked it up and held it in his hand a while, looking upon it with a little Contempt, and yet with some kindness.
“Fancy that!” he said more to himself than to the apothecary; “the poor fellow must have his flageloet with him even upon an affair of this kind. It beats all! My dear man of moods! my good vagabond! my windlestraw of circumstance! constant only to one ideal—the unattainable perfection in a kind of roguish art. To play a perfect tune in the right spirit he would sacrifice everything, and yet drift carelessly into innumerable disgraces for mere lack of will to lift a hand. I daresay sometimes Jean is in the rights of it after all—his gifts have been his curse; wanting his skill of this simple instrument that was for ever to himself and others an intoxication, and wanting his outward pleasing form, he had been a good man to the very marrow. A good man! H'm! Ay! and doubtless an uninteresting one. Doctor! doctor! have you any herb for the eyesight?”
“Does your Grace have a dimness? I know a lotion—”
“Dimness! faith! it is the common disease, and I suffer it with the rest. Sometimes I cannot see the length of my nose.”
“The stomach, your Grace; just the stomach,” cried the poor leech. “My own secret preparation—”
“Your own secret preparation, doctor, will not, I am sure, touch the root of this complaint or the devil himself is in it. I can still see—even at my age—the deer on Tom-a-chrochair, and read the scurviest letters my enemies send me, but my trouble is that I cannot understand the flageolet.”
“The flageolet, your Grace,” said MacIver bewildered. “I thought you spoke of your eyesight.”
“And so I did. I cannot see through the mysteries of things; I cannot understand why man should come into the world with fingers so apt to fankle that he cannot play the finest tunes all the time and in the best of manners. These, however, are but idle speculations, beyond the noble jurisdiction of the chymist. And so you think our patient will make a good recovery?”
“With care, your Grace; and the constant use of my styptic, a most elegant nostrum, your Grace, that has done wonders in the case of a widow up the glen.”