“Like a pig. I gave my poor mother quite a shock when she came in one morning and found me as if I’d just come out of the mill-stream. I save pounds on Turkish baths.”
Gaisford nodded and put a number of questions which Eric seemed to answer adequately. They did not appear to lead anywhere, but some of them were new to his experience. At the end, the stethoscope was produced again.
“Anything the matter?,” Eric repeated, for the doctor was frowning. The examination, too, was unusually long.
“Well, yes. It’s what I’ve feared ever since I’ve known you. We’ve caught it in time, but you’ll have to be rather careful. There are four of you, aren’t there? What are your brothers and sisters like? You can put on that dressing-gown; I don’t want you to catch cold.”
Eric weighed the question as he slipped his arms into the sleeves. God was enjoying himself....
“Let’s come back to that,” he suggested. “What is it? Heart?”
“That’s been a bit tired for years.”
“Lungs, then?... I see. Well, I’m not a child, Gaisford. How long do you give me? Six months? A year?”
The doctor changed his spectacles and tipped Eric’s clothes from an arm-chair. He could be exasperatingly slow when he liked; and he always liked to be slow, when his patients shewed signs of becoming unnerved.
“Forty, if you do what I tell you,” he announced at length. “If you don’t, you’ll get rapidly worse. By the way, it’s chiefly in books that a doctor says you’ve three weeks and two days to live; science isn’t quite so exact as that, and doctors aren’t such damned fools... No! I’ll tell you. This might have come at any time, because you’ve been on the delicate side ever since I’ve known you. Now you’re a little bit touched. It’s a bore, but it’s nothing to be frightened about. I shan’t let you live in this country, of course, and I shall cut down your work; but that doesn’t matter, because you’re indecently rich for your age. And I can give you a choice of places to live in—California, South Africa, the Riviera—”