“I know that you are an abstemious beggar, but take the stuff for the tonic it is, and drink to an ‘incomparable’ wife’s health. . . . Gage is smuggling this over for me in the car.”
She stood holding the letter in her two hands, and looking at the senseless figure on the floor. Love triumphed in that ordeal of the night. There was nothing but pity and great tenderness in her eyes.
“Thank God!” and she caught her breath; “thank God, you did not do this wilfully! Oh, my beloved, if I had known!”
CHAPTER XII
The surest test of a man’s efficiency is to leave him in a responsible post with nothing to trust to save his own skill and courage. Young doctors, like raw soldiers, are prone to panic, and your theoretical genius may bungle over the slitting of a whitlow, though he be the possessor of numberless degrees.
Mere book lore never instilled virility into a man, and Frederick Inglis, B.A., A.M., B.Sc., D.Ph., gilded to the last button with the cleverness of the schools, was an amiable fellow whose cultured and finnicking exterior covered unhappy voids of self-distrust. It had been very well for him so long as he could play with a few new drugs, look quietly clever, and leave the grimness of the responsibility to Murchison. Dr. Inglis had found private practice a pleasant pastime. He had come from the laboratories full to the brim with the latest scientific sensations, and a preconceived pity for the average sawbones in the provinces. He boasted a brilliant air so long as he was second in command. It was possible to pose behind the barrier of another man’s strength.
That same Saturday night Murchison’s highly educated assistant had been dragged out of bed at two in the morning, and taken in a bumping milk-cart to a farm some five miles north of Roxton. His youth had been flouted on the very threshold by a stern, keen-eyed woman who had expressed herself dissatisfied with the offer of a juvenile opinion. Dr. Inglis had blushed, and rallied his dignity. Dr. Murchison had intrusted the practice to him; what more could a mere farmer’s wife desire?
Above, in a big bed, Dr. Inglis discovered a fat man writhing with what appeared to be a prosaic and violent colic. A simple case, perhaps, to the lay understanding, but abdominal diagnosis may be a nightmare to a surgeon. It is like feeling for a pea through the thickness of a pillow.
Two straight-backed, hard-faced, and very awesome ladies stood at the bottom of the bed and watched Dr. Inglis with sceptical alertness. The assistant fumbled, stammered, and looked hot. The women exchanged glances. A man’s personal fitness is soon gauged in a sick-room.
“Well, doctor, what’s your opinion?”