The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins (ebook reader screen TXT) 📗

which we drew from the patient’s pulse. The two doctors, arguing from the rapidity of the beat, declared that a lowering treatment was the only treatment to be adopted. On my side, I admitted the rapidity of the pulse, but I also pointed to its alarming feebleness as indicating an exhausted condition of the system, and as showing a plain necessity for the administration of stimulants. The two doctors were for keeping him on gruel, lemonade, barley-water, and so on. I was for giving him champagne, or brandy, ammonia, and quinine. A serious difference of opinion, as you see! A difference between two physicians of established local repute, and a stranger who was only an assistant in the house. For the first few days, I had no choice but to give way to my elders and betters; the patient steadily sinking all the time. I made a second attempt to appeal to the plain, undeniably plain, evidence of the pulse. Its rapidity was unchecked, and its feebleness had increased. The two doctors took offence at my obstinacy. They said, ‘Mr. Jennings, either we manage this case, or you manage it. Which is it to be?’ I said, ‘Gentlemen, give me five minutes to consider, and that plain question shall have a plain reply.’ When the time expired, I was ready with my answer. I said, ‘You positively refuse to try the stimulant treatment?’ They refused in so many words. ‘I mean to try it at once, gentlemen.’⁠—‘Try it, Mr. Jennings, and we withdraw from the case.’ I sent down to the cellar for a bottle of champagne; and I administered half a tumbler-full of it to the patient with my own hand. The two physicians took up their hats in silence, and left the house.”

“You had assumed a serious responsibility,” I said. “In your place, I am afraid I should have shrunk from it.”

“In my place, Mr. Blake, you would have remembered that Mr. Candy had taken you into his employment, under circumstances which made you his debtor for life. In my place, you would have seen him sinking, hour by hour; and you would have risked anything, rather than let the one man on earth who had befriended you, die before your eyes. Don’t suppose that I had no sense of the terrible position in which I had placed myself! There were moments when I felt all the misery of my friendlessness, all the peril of my dreadful responsibility. If I had been a happy man, if I had led a prosperous life, I believe I should have sunk under the task I had imposed on myself. But I had no happy time to look back at, no past peace of mind to force itself into contrast with my present anxiety and suspense⁠—and I held firm to my resolution through it all. I took an interval in the middle of the day, when my patient’s condition was at its best, for the repose I needed. For the rest of the four-and-twenty hours, as long as his life was in danger, I never left his bedside. Towards sunset, as usual in such cases, the delirium incidental to the fever came on. It lasted more or less through the night; and then intermitted, at that terrible time in the early morning⁠—from two o’clock to five⁠—when the vital energies even of the healthiest of us are at their lowest. It is then that Death gathers in his human harvest most abundantly. It was then that Death and I fought our fight over the bed, which should have the man who lay on it. I never hesitated in pursuing the treatment on which I had staked everything. When wine failed, I tried brandy. When the other stimulants lost their influence, I doubled the dose. After an interval of suspense⁠—the like of which I hope to God I shall never feel again⁠—there came a day when the rapidity of the pulse slightly, but appreciably, diminished; and, better still, there came also a change in the beat⁠—an unmistakable change to steadiness and strength. Then, I knew that I had saved him; and then I own I broke down. I laid the poor fellow’s wasted hand back on the bed, and burst out crying. An hysterical relief, Mr. Blake⁠—nothing more! Physiology says, and says truly, that some men are born with female constitutions⁠—and I am one of them!”

He made that bitterly professional apology for his tears, speaking quietly and unaffectedly, as he had spoken throughout. His tone and manner, from beginning to end, showed him to be especially, almost morbidly, anxious not to set himself up as an object of interest to me.

“You may well ask, why I have wearied you with all these details?” he went on. “It is the only way I can see, Mr. Blake, of properly introducing to you what I have to say next. Now you know exactly what my position was, at the time of Mr. Candy’s illness, you will the more readily understand the sore need I had of lightening the burden on my mind by giving it, at intervals, some sort of relief. I have had the presumption to occupy my leisure, for some years past, in writing a book, addressed to the members of my profession⁠—a book on the intricate and delicate subject of the brain and the nervous system. My work will probably never be finished; and it will certainly never be published. It has none the less been the friend of many lonely hours; and it helped me to while away the anxious time⁠—the time of waiting, and nothing else⁠—at Mr. Candy’s bedside. I told you he was delirious, I think? And I mentioned the time at which his delirium came on?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I had reached a section of my book, at that time, which touched on this same question of delirium. I won’t trouble you at any length with my theory on the subject⁠—I will confine myself to telling you only what it is your present interest to know. It has often occurred