Part 48 (2/2)

CHAPTER XXI

IN the terror and confusion no questions were then asked: Alfred got to David's head, and told Skinner to take his feet; Mrs. Dodd helped, and they carried him up and laid him on her bed. The servant girls cried and wailed, and were of little use: Mrs. Dodd hurried them off for medical aid, and she and Julia, though pale as ghosts, and trembling in every limb, were tearless and almost silent, and did all for the best. They undid a s.h.i.+rt b.u.t.ton that confined his throat: they set his head high, and tried their poor little eau-de-Cologne and feminine remedies; and each of them held an insensible hand in both hers, clasping it piteously and trying to hold him tight, so that Death should not take him away from them.

”My son, where is my son?” sighed Mrs. Dodd.

Alfred threw his arm round her neck: ”You have one son here: what shall I do?”

The next minute he was running to the telegraph office for her.

At the gate he found Skinner hanging about, and asked him hurriedly how the calamity had happened. Skinner said Captain Dodd had fallen down senseless in the street, and he had pa.s.sed soon after, recognised him, and brought him home: ”I have paid the men, sir; I wouldn't let them ask the ladies at such a time.”

”Oh, thank you! thank you, Skinner! I will repay you; it is me you have obliged.” And Alfred ran off with the words in his mouth.

Skinner looked after him and muttered: ”I forgot _him._ It is a nice mess. Wish I was out of it.” And he went back, hanging his head, to Alfred's father.

Mr. Osmond met him. Skinner turned and saw him enter the villa.

Mr. Osmond came softly into the room, examined Dodd's eye, felt his pulse, and said he must be bled at once.

Mrs. Dodd was averse to this. ”Oh, let us try everything else first,”

said she. But Osmond told her there was no other remedy: ”All the functions we rely on in the exhibition of medicines are suspended.”

Dr. Short now drove up, and was ushered in.

Mrs. Dodd asked him imploringly whether it was necessary to bleed. But Dr. Short knew his business too well to be entrapped into an independent opinion where a surgeon had been before him. He drew Mr. Osmond apart, and inquired what he had recommended: this ascertained, he turned to Mrs. Dodd and said, ”I advise venesection or cupping.”

”Oh, Dr. Short, pray have pity and order something less terrible. Dr.

Sampson is so averse to bleeding.”

”Sampson? Sampson? never heard of him.”

”It is the chronothermal man,” said Osmond.

”Oh, ah! but this is too serious a case to be quacked. Coma with stertor, and a full, bounding pulse, indicates liberal bloodletting. I would try venesection; then cup, if necessary, or leech the temple. I need not say, sir, calomel must complete the cure. The case is simple, and, at present, surgical: I leave it in competent hands.” And he retired, leaving the inferior pract.i.tioner well pleased with him and with himself; no insignificant part of a physicians art.

When he was gone, Mr. Osmond told Mrs. Dodd that however crotchety Dr.

Sampson might be, he was an able man, and had very properly resisted the indiscriminate use of the lancet: the profession owed him much. ”But in apoplexy the leech and the lancet are still our sheet-anchor.”

Mrs. Dodd utter a faint shriek: ”Apoplexy! Oh, David! Oh, my darling, have you come home for this?”

Osmond a.s.sured her apoplexy was not necessarily fatal; provided the cerebral blood-vessels were relieved in time by depletion.

The fixed eye and terrible stertorous breathing on the one hand, and the promise of relief on the other, overpowered Mrs. Dodd's reluctance. She sent Julia out of the room on a pretext, and then consented with tears to David's being bled. But she would not yield to leave the room. No; this tender woman nerved herself to see her husband's blood flow, sooner than risk his being bled too much by the hard hand of custom. Let the peevish fools, who make their own troubles in love, compare their slight and merited pangs with this: she was his true lover and his wife, yet there she stood with eye horror-stricken yet unflinching, and saw the stab of the little lancet, and felt it deeper than she would a javelin through her own body, and watched the blood run that was dearer to her than her own.

At the first p.r.i.c.k of the lancet David s.h.i.+vered, and, as the blood escaped, his eye unfixed, and the pupils contracted and dilated, and once he sighed. ”Good sign that!” said Osmond.

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