“Nicotina is never in a temper. Terrible thing being a doctor. These functions make me sweat. We medicoes have to trot round and do the affable shop-walker to the community. Good for the practice, you know. By Jove, we have to salve every soul with blarney. It’s blarney, blarney, blarney from morning till night. My tongue’s dry. Going to be married soon?”
“In a month or two.”
“Fine woman your fiancée, fit to make every subaltern in the Rilchester barracks envy you like the devil. Let me see, you wanted information. What’s the person’s name?”
Gabriel appeared to flog his memory.
“I almost forget it. Gilder—Gildersleeve—Gildersedge. Ah, yes, Gildersedge! Rather a miser, my friend said.”
The doctor withdrew his cigar from his lips.
“By George! yes. I know the old beggar—a regular Silas; lives in a house smothered up in trees on the third hill beyond Rilchester—a regular hermitage, like a house out of a novel. You can’t see it for trees till you get well inside the gate. I attended there on one solitary occasion. It was the servant. Res natura. I only got paid after a lawyer’s letter. Never been there since.”
Gabriel appeared interested despite his affectation. He had turned the doctor into good grazing land, and anecdotes bristled. Dr. Marjoy had not lived fifteen years with his wife without assimilating some of her linguistical propensities.
“I remember talking with Clissold, of the bank,” he said, “and he told me that old Gildersedge’s figures totted up phenomenally. He’s worth two Scrooges. And, by Jeremy! he has a daughter; I was forgetting that daughter.”
Gabriel tilted his chair and surveyed the clouds.