“It’s all right!” he said, cheerfully. His voice quite sang with sweetness. He came and stood a moment by the window, breathing hard. His face was gray, but his eyes smiled, and there was something boyish in his aspect. He looked from one woman to the other sunnily.
“Bless me—you ought never to let yourselves go like that! He’ll pull through all right.”
The younger woman continued to look at him silently, but the elder, with a long quivering sigh, fainted.
“Best thing she could possibly do,” said the Doctor, his fingers on her pulse. “Get her to bed as soon as you can,—and have these prescriptions sent out. I’ll come back later. He’ll sleep hours now.”
He ran down-stairs, consulting his visiting-list as he ran, and jumped into the brougham, calling an address as he pulled the door to with a slam. This time, however, he did not take out his papers, but sat with an unlighted cigar between his lips, gazing intently at nothing.
In the course of the next few hours he looked over an assortment of ailing babies, soothed as many distracted mothers, ordered to a gay watering-place one young girl whom he was obliged to treat for chronic headache—chronic heartache not being professionally recognizable,—administered the pathetically limited alleviations of his art to a failing cancer-patient (she happened to be a rich woman, going with the fortitude of the poor down the road to the great Darkness), and so, looking in on various pneumonias and fevers, broken souls and bruised bodies, by the way, brought up at last at the hospital to see how yesterday’s operation was going on. It was going on in so very mixed a manner that he telephoned he should not return to lunch—prophesying long after the event.
It was turning dusk when he started on his second round of visits homeward, stopping on the outskirts to rebandage, in one of the tenements, a child’s broken arm. He had not returned his footman’s salutation that morning, but had carried in his subconsciousness all day this visit to the footman’s child. In one manner or another that inconvenient locality had been compassed in his circuit for the past three weeks. From it he passed to his daily ordeal, another rich patient, a nervous wreck, whose primary ailment—the lack of anything to do—had passed into the advanced stages of an inability to do anything, with its sad Nemesis of melancholia—the registered protest of the dying soul. It was a case which took more out of the Doctor than all his day’s practice put together; he always came from it in a misery of doubts.
The dusk was becoming the dark when he set his foot wearily on the carriage step once more, and with his hand on the carriage door paused suddenly. He was sick of sickness, mortally tired of mortality! For the first time in the whole day he hesitated; an odd, irresolute look came into his face; he pulled out his watch, glanced, and changing his first-given address for another, threw himself back on the cushions with closed eyes. He did not open them again until the carriage, rolling through many streets, came to a halt under some quiet trees, before an apartment-house. There were yellow daffodils between white curtains—very white and high up. As he stepped out, the Doctor glanced involuntarily towards them, and a half-breath of relief escaped him, instantly quenched in a nervous frown and jump as his arm was seized by a firm gloved hand.
“Doctor,—this is really providential! You are the very person I wished to see!”
It was the younger of two heavily upholstered and matronly ladies who spoke, in a voice of many underscorings. The Doctor, who had removed his hat with a purely mechanical motion, knew himself a prey, identified his captor, and eyed her with restrained bitterness.