“It was, I assure you, a touching sight to behold this young mother, pale, feeble, and who had once renounced existence, clinging again to life for the sake of a little child which could not even say ‘Thanks, dear mother!’ What a marvel is the human heart! Of how small a thing it makes much! Give it but a grain of sand, and it elevates a mountain; at its latest throb show it but an atom to love, and again its pulses revive; it stops for good only when all is void around it, and when even the shadow of its affections has vanished from the earth!
“Time rolled on, and I received a letter from an uncle, my sole surviving relative. My uncle, a member of the faculty of Montpellier, summoned me to his side, to complete in that learned town my initiation into the secrets of my art. This letter, in form an invitation, was in fact an order. I had to set out. One morning, my heart big when I thought of the isolation in which I left the widow and the orphan, I repaired to the white cottage to take leave of Eva Meredith. I know not whether an additional shade of sadness came over her features when I told her I was about to make a long absence. Since the death of William Meredith such profound melancholy dwelt upon her countenance that a smile would have been the sole perceptible variation: sadness was always there.
“‘You leave us?’ she exclaimed; ‘your care is so useful to my child!’
“The poor lonely woman forgot to regret the departure of her last friend; the mother lamented the loss of the physician useful to her son. I did not complain. To be useful is the sweet recompense of the devoted.
“‘Adieu!’ she said, holding out her hand. ‘Wherever you go, may God bless you; and should it be His will to afflict you, may He at least afford you the sympathy of a heart compassionate as your own.’
“I bowed over the hand of Eva Meredith; and I departed, deeply moved.
“The child was in the garden in front of the house, lying upon the grass, in the sun. I took him in my arms and kissed him repeatedly; I looked at him long, attentively, sadly, and a tear started to my eyes. ‘Oh, no, no! I must be mistaken!’ I murmured, and I hurried from the white cottage.”
“Good heavens, doctor!” simultaneously exclaimed all Dr Barnaby’s audience, “what did you apprehend?”
“Suffer me to finish my story my own way,” replied the village doctor; “everything shall be told in its turn. I relate these events in the order in which they occurred.