Part 47 (1/2)

Then they made haste, and told each other everything that had happened, and it was late in the afternoon before they parted.

Lady Ba.s.sett controlled her tears at parting as well as she could.

Mr. Coyne had slyly hid himself, but emerged when she came down to the carriage, and she shook him warmly by the hand, and he bowed at the door incessantly, with his face all in a pucker, till the cavalcade dashed away.

CHAPTER XXV.

LADY Ba.s.sETT timed her next visit so that she found Dr. Suaby at home.

He received her kindly, and showed himself a master; told her Sir Charles's was a mixed case, in which the fall, the fit, and a morbid desire for offspring had all played their parts.

He hoped a speedy cure, but said he counted on her a.s.sistance. There was no doubt what he meant.

Oh, for one thing, he said to her, rather slyly, ”Coyne tells me you have been good enough to supply us with a hint as to his treatment; sedatives are opposed to his idiosyncrasy.”

Lady Ba.s.sett blushed high, and said something about Dr. Willis.

”Oh, you are quite right, you and Dr. Willis; only you are not so very conversant with that idiosyncrasy. Why have you let him smoke twenty cigars every day of his life? the brain is accessible by other roads than the stomach. Well, we have got him down to four cigars, and in a month we will have him down to two. The effect of that, and exercise, and simple food, and the absence of powerful excitements--you will see.

Do your part,” said he, gayly, ”we will do ours. He is the most interesting patient in the house, and born to adorn society, though by a concurrence of unhappy circ.u.mstances he is separated from it for a while.”

She spent the whole afternoon with Sir Charles, and they dined together at the doctor's private table, with one or two patients who were touched, but showed no signs of it on that occasion; for the good doctor really acted like oil on the troubled waters.

Sir Charles and Lady Ba.s.sett corresponded, and so kept their hearts up; but after Rolfe's hint the correspondence was rather guarded. If these letters were read in the asylum the curious would learn that Sir Charles was far more anxious about his wife's condition than his own; but that these two patient persons were only waiting a certain near event to attack Richard Ba.s.sett with acc.u.mulated fury--that smoldering fire did not smoke by letter, but burned deep in both their sore and heavy, but enduring, Anglo-Saxon hearts.

Lady Ba.s.sett wrote to Mr. Rolfe, thanking him again for his advice, and telling him how it worked.

She had a very short reply from that gentleman.

But about six weeks after her visit he surprised her a little by writing of his own accord, and asking her for a formal introduction to Sir Charles Ba.s.sett, and begging her to back a request that Sir Charles would devote a leisure hour or two to correspondence with him. ”Not,”

said he, ”on his private affairs, but on a matter of general interest.

I want a few of his experiences and observations in that place. I have the less scruple in asking it, that whatever takes him out of himself will be salutary.”

Lady Ba.s.sett sent him the required introduction in such terms that Sir Charles at once consented to oblige his wife by obliging Mr. Rolfe.

”My DEAR SIR--In compliance with your wish, and Lady Ba.s.sett's, I send you a few desultory remarks on what I see here.

”1st. The lines,

'Great wits to madness nearly are allied, And thin part.i.tions do their bonds divide,'

are, in my opinion, exaggerated and untrue. Taking the people here as a guide, the insane in general appear to be people with very little brains, and enormous egotism.

”My next observation is, that the women have far less imagination than the men; they cannot even realize their own favorite delusions. For instance, here are two young ladies, the Virgin Mary and the Queen of England. How do they play their parts? They sit aloof from all the rest, with their noses in the air. But gauge their imaginations; go down on one knee, or both, and address them as a saint and a queen; they cannot say a word in accordance; yet they are cunning enough to see they cannot reply in character, so they will not utter a syllable to their adorers. They are like the shop-boys who go to a masquerade as Burleigh or Walsingham, and when you ask them who is Queen Bess's favorite just now, blush, and look offended, and pa.s.s sulkily on.

”The same cla.s.s of male lunatics can speak in character; and this observation has made me doubt whether philosophers are not mistaken in saying that women generally have more imagination than men. I suspect they have infinitely less; and I believe their great love of novels, which has been set down to imagination, arises mainly from their want of it. You writers of novels supply that defect for them by a pictorial style, by an infinity of minute details, and petty aids to realizing, all which an imaginative reader can do for himself on reading a bare narrative of sterling facts and incidents.