Gillie had been shorn of his blue tights and brass buttons, poor Mrs Stoutley having found it absolutely necessary, on her return home, to dismiss all her servants, dispose of all her belongings, and retire into the privacy of a poor lodging in a back street. Thus the spider had come to be suddenly thrown on the world again, but Captain Wopper had retained him, he said, as a mixture of errand-boy, cabin-boy, and powder-monkey, in which capacity he dwelt with his mother during the night and revolved like a satellite round the Captain during the day. A suit of much more appropriate pepper-and-salt had replaced the blue tights and buttons. Altogether, his tout-ensemble was what the Captain styled “more ship-shape.”
We have said that Mrs Stoutley and her family had made a descent in life. As poor Lewis remarked, with a sad smile, they had quitted the gay and glittering heights, and gone, like a magnificent avalanche, down into the moraine. Social, not less than physical, avalanches multiply their parts and widen their course during descent. The Stoutleys did not fall alone. A green-grocer, a shoemaker, and a baker, who had long been trembling, like human boulders, on the precipice of bankruptcy, went tumbling down along with them, and found rest in a lower part of the moraine than they had previously occupied.
“It’s a sad business,” said Lewis to Dr Lawrence one morning; “and if you continue to attend me, you must do so without the most distant prospect of a fee.”
“My dear fellow,” returned Lawrence, “have you no such thing as gratitude in your composition?”
“Not much, and, if I had ever so much, it would be poor pay.”
“Poor, indeed, if regarded as one’s only source of livelihood,” rejoined Lawrence, “but it is ample remuneration from a friend, whether rich or poor, and, happily, capable of being mixed with pounds, shillings and pence without deterioration. In the present case, I shall be more than rejoiced to take the fee unmixed, but, whether fee’d or not fee’d, I insist on continuing attendance on a case which I have a right to consider peculiarly my own.”
“It would have been a bad case, indeed, but for you,” returned Lewis, a flush for a moment suffusing his pale cheek as he took his friend’s hand and squeezed it. “I am thoroughly convinced, Lawrence, that God’s blessing on your skill and unwearied care of me at the time of the accident is the cause of my being alive to thank you to-day. But sit down, my dear fellow, and pray postpone your professional inquiries for a little, as I have something on my mind which I wish to ask you about.”
Lawrence shook his head. “Business first, pleasure afterwards,” he said; “professional duties must not be postponed.”
“Now,” said Lewis when he had finished, “are you satisfied? Do you admit that even an unprofessional man might have seen at a glance that I am much better, and that your present draft on my gratitude is a mere swindle?”
“I admit nothing,” retorted the other; “but now, what have you got to say to me?”