Doctor Thorne, Anthony Trollope [an ebook reader .TXT] 📗

a good horseman, and he did much of his work on horseback. The fact that he occasionally took a day with the East Barsetshires, and that when he did so he thoroughly enjoyed it, had probably not failed to add something to the strength of the squire’s friendship.

“Well, my lady, how is he? Not much the matter, I hope?” said the doctor, as he shook hands with the titled mistress of Boxall Hill in a small breakfast-parlour in the rear of the house. The showrooms of Boxall Hill were furnished most magnificently, but they were set apart for company; and as the company never came⁠—seeing that they were never invited⁠—the grand rooms and the grand furniture were not of much material use to Lady Scatcherd.

“Indeed then, doctor, he’s just bad enough,” said her ladyship, not in a very happy tone of voice; “just bad enough. There’s been some’at at the back of his head, rapping, and rapping, and rapping; and if you don’t do something, I’m thinking it will rap him too hard yet.”

“Is he in bed?”

“Why, yes, he is in bed; for when he was first took he couldn’t very well help hisself, so we put him to bed. And then, he don’t seem to be quite right yet about the legs, so he hasn’t got up; but he’s got that Winterbones with him to write for him, and when Winterbones is there, Scatcherd might as well be up for any good that bed’ll do him.”

Mr. Winterbones was confidential clerk to Sir Roger. That is to say, he was a writing-machine of which Sir Roger made use to do certain work which could not well be adjusted without some contrivance. He was a little, withered, dissipated, broken-down man, whom gin and poverty had nearly burnt to a cinder, and dried to an ash. Mind he had none left, nor care for earthly things, except the smallest modicum of substantial food, and the largest allowance of liquid sustenance. All that he had ever known he had forgotten, except how to count up figures and to write: the results of his counting and his writing never stayed with him from one hour to another; nay, not from one folio to another. Let him, however, be adequately screwed up with gin, and adequately screwed down by the presence of his master, and then no amount of counting and writing would be too much for him. This was Mr. Winterbones, confidential clerk to the great Sir Roger Scatcherd.

“We must send Winterbones away, I take it,” said the doctor.

“Indeed, doctor, I wish you would. I wish you’d send him to Bath, or anywhere else out of the way. There is Scatcherd, he takes brandy; and there is Winterbones, he takes gin; and it’d puzzle a woman to say which is worst, master or man.”

It will seem from this, that Lady Scatcherd and the doctor were on very familiar terms as regarded her little domestic inconveniences.

“Tell Sir Roger I am here, will you?” said the doctor.

“You’ll take a drop of sherry before you go up?” said the lady.

“Not a drop, thank you,” said the doctor.

“Or, perhaps, a little cordial?”

“Not a drop of anything, thank you; I never do, you know.”

“Just a thimbleful of this?” said the lady, producing from some recess under a sideboard a bottle of brandy; “just a thimbleful? It’s what he takes himself.”

When Lady Scatcherd found that even this argument failed, she led the way to the great man’s bedroom.

“Well, doctor! well, doctor! well, doctor!” was the greeting with which our son of Galen was saluted some time before he entered the sickroom. His approaching step was heard, and thus the ci-devant Barchester stonemason saluted his coming friend. The voice was loud and powerful, but not clear and sonorous. What voice that is nurtured on brandy can ever be clear? It had about it a peculiar huskiness, a dissipated guttural tone, which Thorne immediately recognised, and recognised as being more marked, more guttural, and more husky than heretofore.

“So you’ve smelt me out, have you, and come for your fee? Ha! ha! ha! Well, I have had a sharpish bout of it, as her ladyship there no doubt has told you. Let her alone to make the worst of it. But, you see, you’re too late, man. I’ve bilked the old gentleman again without troubling you.”

“Anyway, I’m glad you’re something better, Scatcherd.”

“Something! I don’t know what you call something. I never was better in my life. Ask Winterbones there.”

“Indeed, now, Scatcherd, you ain’t; you’re bad enough if you only knew it. And as for Winterbones, he has no business here up in your bedroom, which stinks of gin so, it does. Don’t you believe him, doctor; he ain’t well, nor yet nigh well.”

Winterbones, when the above ill-natured allusion was made to the aroma coming from his libations, might be seen to deposit surreptitiously beneath the little table at which he sat, the cup with which he had performed them.

The doctor, in the meantime, had taken Sir Roger’s hand on the pretext of feeling his pulse, but was drawing quite as much information from the touch of the sick man’s skin, and the look of the sick man’s eye.

“I think Mr. Winterbones had better go back to the London office,” said he. “Lady Scatcherd will be your best clerk for some time, Sir Roger.”

“Then I’ll be d⁠⸺ if Mr. Winterbones does anything of the kind,” said he; “so there’s an end of that.”

“Very well,” said the doctor. “A man can die but once. It is my duty to suggest measures for putting off the ceremony as long as possible. Perhaps, however, you may wish to hasten it.”

“Well, I am not very anxious about it, one way or the other,” said Scatcherd. And as he spoke there came a fierce gleam from his eye, which seemed to say⁠—“If that’s the bugbear with which you wish to frighten me, you will find that you are mistaken.”

“Now, doctor, don’t let him talk that way, don’t,” said Lady Scatcherd, with her handkerchief