第45章

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 of 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 sick-room. His approaching step was heard, and thus the ci-devant Barchester stone-mason 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 recognized, and recognized 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 here.'

'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 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 be mistaken.'

'Now, doctor, don't let him talk that way, don't,' said Lady Scatcherd, with her handkerchief to her eyes.

'Now, my lady, do you cut it; cut at once,' said Sir Roger, turning hastily round to his better-half; and his better-half, knowing that the province of a woman is to obey, did cut it. But as she went she gave the doctor a pull by the coat's sleeve, so that thereby his healing faculties might be sharpened to the very utmost.

'The best woman in the world, doctor; the very best,' said he, as the door closed behind the wife of his bosom.

'I'm sure of it,' said the doctor.

'Yes, till you find a better one,' said Scatcherd. 'Ha! ha! ha! but for good or bad, there are some things which a woman can't understand, and some things which she ought not to be let to understand.'

'It's natural she should be anxious about your health, you know.'

'I don't know that,' said the contractor. 'She'll be very well off.

All that whining won't keep a man alive, at any rate.'

There was a pause, during which the doctor continued his medical examination. To this the patient submitted with a bad grace; but still he did submit.