“Where is she?”
The doctor persisted in repeating his formula:
“Take a sup of this.”
I was too weak to contest the matter; I obeyed. My medical attendant nodded across the bed to my mother, and said, “Now, he’ll do.” My mother had some compassion on me. She relieved my anxiety in these plain words:
“The lady has quite recovered, George, thanks to the doctor here.”
I looked at my professional colleague with a new interest. He was the legitimate fountainhead of the information that I was dying to have poured into my mind.
“How did you revive her?” I asked. “Where is she now?”
The doctor held up his hand, warning me to stop.
“We shall do well, sir, if we proceed systematically,” he began, in a very positive manner. “You will understand, that every time you open your mouth, it will be to take a sup of this, and not to speak. I shall tell you, in due course, and the good lady, your mother, will tell you, all that you have any need to know. As I happen to have been first on what you may call the scene of action, it stands in the fit order of things that I should speak first. You will just permit me to mix a little more of the elixir of life, and then, as the poet says, my plain unvarnished tale I shall deliver.”
So he spoke, pronouncing in his strong Scotch accent the most carefully selected English I had ever heard. A hard-headed, square-shouldered, pertinaciously self-willed man—it was plainly useless to contend with him. I turned to my mother’s gentle face for encouragement; and I let my doctor have his own way.