"You made a serious mistake the other night—you didn't drink half enough. Give the good liquor a fair chance, my son. No, you won't? Must I try a little gentle persuasion before you will come back to your chair?" Suiting the action to the word, he put his arm round Jack. "What's this I feel under my hand?" he asked. "A bottle?" He took it out of Jack's breast-pocket. "Lord help us!" he exclaimed; "it looks like physic!"
Jack snatched it away from him, with a cry of delight. "The very thing for me—and I never thought of it!"
It was the phial which Madame Fontaine had repentantly kept to herself, after having expressly filled it for him with the fatal dose of "Alexander's Wine"—the phial which he had found, when he first opened the "Pink-Room Cupboard." In the astonishment and delight of finding the blue-glass bottle immediately afterwards, he had entirely forgotten it. Nothing had since happened to remind him that it was in his pocket, until Schwartz had stumbled on the discovery.
"It cures you when you are tired or troubled in your mind," Jack announced in his grandest manner, repeating Madame Fontaine's own words. "Is there any water here?"
"Not a drop, thank Heaven!" said Schwartz, devoutly.
"Give me my glass, then. I once tried the remedy by itself, and it stung me as it went down. The wine won't hurt me, with this splendid stuff in it. I'll take it in the wine."
"Who told you to take it?" Schwartz asked, holding back the glass.
"Mrs. Housekeeper told me."
"A woman!" growled Schwartz, in a tone of sovereign contempt. "How dare you let a woman physic you, when you've got me for a doctor? Jack! I'm ashamed of you."
Jack defended his manhood. "Oh, I don't care what she says! I despise her—she's mad. You don't suppose she made this? I wouldn't touch it, if she had. No, no; her husband made it—a wonderful man! the greatest man in Germany!"