Armadale. Wilkie Collins
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scandalous case of a man who had passed them over entirely without notice. Mrs. Mayor could only attribute such an outrage to the native ferocity of a savage. Mrs. Doctor took a stronger view still, and considered it as proceeding from the inbred brutality of a hog.
The hour of waiting for the traveling-carriage wore on, and the creeping night stole up the hillsides softly. One by one the stars appeared, and the first lights twinkled in the windows of the inn. As the darkness came, the last idlers deserted the square; as the darkness came, the mighty silence of the forest above flowed in on the valley, and strangely and suddenly hushed the lonely little town.
The hour of waiting wore out, and the figure of the doctor, walking backward and forward anxiously, was still the only living figure left in the square. Five minutes, ten minutes, twenty minutes, were counted out by the doctor’s watch, before the first sound came through the night silence to warn him of the approaching carriage. Slowly it emerged into the square, at the walking pace of the horses, and drew up, as a hearse might have drawn up, at the door of the inn.
“Is the doctor here?” asked a woman’s voice, speaking, out of the darkness of the carriage, in the French language.
“I am here, madam,” replied the doctor, taking a light from the landlord’s hand and opening the carriage door.
The first face that the light fell on was the face of the lady who had just spoken—a young, darkly beautiful woman, with the tears standing thick and bright in her eager black eyes. The second face revealed was the face of a shriveled old negress, sitting opposite the lady on the back seat. The third was the face of a little sleeping child in the negress’s lap. With a quick gesture of impatience, the lady signed to the nurse to leave the carriage first with the child. “Pray take them out of the way,” she said to the landlady; “pray take them to their room.” She got out herself when her request had been complied with. Then the light fell clear for the first time on the further side of the carriage, and the fourth traveler was disclosed to view.
He lay helpless on a mattress, supported by a stretcher; his hair, long and disordered, under a black skull-cap; his eyes wide open, rolling to and fro ceaselessly anxious; the rest of his face as void of all expression of the character within him, and the thought within him, as if he had been dead. There was no looking at him now, and guessing what he might once have been. The leaden blank of his face met every question as to his age, his rank, his temper, and his looks which that face might once have answered, in impenetrable silence. Nothing spoke for him now but the shock that had struck him with the death-in-life of paralysis. The doctor’s eye questioned his lower limbs, and Death-in-Life answered, I am here. The doctor’s eye, rising attentively by way of his hands and arms, questioned upward and upward to the muscles round his mouth, and Death-in-Life answered, I am coming.
In the face of a calamity so unsparing and so dreadful, there was nothing to be said. The silent sympathy of help was all that could be offered to the woman who stood weeping at the carriage door.
As they bore him on his bed across the hall of the hotel, his wandering eyes encountered the face of his wife. They rested on her for a moment, and in that moment he spoke.
“The child?” he said in English, with a slow, thick, laboring articulation.
“The child is safe upstairs,” she answered, faintly.
“My desk?”
“It is in my hands. Look! I won’t trust it to anybody; I am taking care of it for you myself.”
He closed his eyes for the first time after that answer, and said no more. Tenderly and skillfully he was carried up the stairs, with his wife on one side of him, and the doctor (ominously silent) on the other. The landlord and the servants following saw the door of his room open and close on him; heard the lady burst out crying hysterically as soon as she was alone with the doctor and the sick man; saw the doctor come out, half an hour later, with his ruddy face a shade paler than usual; pressed him eagerly for information, and received but one answer to all their inquiries—“Wait till I have seen him to-morrow. Ask me nothing to-night.” They all knew the doctor’s ways, and they augured ill when he left them hurriedly with that reply.
So the two first English visitors of the year came to the Baths of Wildbad in the season of eighteen hundred and thirty-two.
II. THE SOLID SIDE OF THE SCOTCH CHARACTER.
AT ten o’clock the next morning, Mr. Neal—waiting for the medical visit which he had himself appointed for that hour—looked at his watch, and discovered, to his amazement, that he was waiting in vain. It was close on eleven when the door opened at last, and the doctor entered the room.
“I appointed ten o’clock for your visit,” said Mr. Neal. “In my country, a medical man is a punctual man.”
“In my country,” returned the doctor, without the least ill-humor, “a medical man is exactly like other men—he is at the mercy of accidents. Pray grant me your pardon, sir, for being so long after my time; I have been detained by a very distressing case—the case of Mr. Armadale, whose traveling-carriage you passed on the road yesterday.”
Mr. Neal looked at his medical attendant with a sour surprise. There was a latent anxiety in the doctor’s eye, a latent preoccupation in the doctor’s manner, which he was at a loss to account for. For a moment the two faces confronted each other silently, in marked national contrast—the Scotchman’s, long and lean, hard and regular; the German’s, plump and florid, soft and shapeless. One face looked as if it had never been young; the other, as if it would never grow old.
“Might I venture to remind you,” said Mr. Neal, “that the case now under consideration is MY case, and not Mr. Armadale’s?”
“Certainly,” replied the doctor, still vacillating between the case he had come to see and the case he had just left. “You appear to be suffering from lameness; let me look at your foot.”
Mr. Neal’s malady, however serious it might be in his own estimation, was of no extraordinary importance in a medical point of view. He was suffering from a rheumatic affection of the ankle-joint. The necessary questions were asked and answered and the necessary baths were prescribed. In ten minutes the consultation was at an end, and the patient was waiting in significant silence for the medical adviser to take his leave.
“I cannot conceal from myself,” said the doctor, rising, and hesitating a little, “that I am intruding on you. But I am compelled to beg your indulgence if I return to the subject of Mr. Armadale.”
“May I ask what compels you?”
“The duty which I owe as a Christian,” answered the doctor, “to a dying man.”
Mr. Neal started. Those who touched his sense of religious duty touched the quickest sense in his nature.
“You have established your claim on my attention,” he said, gravely. “My time is yours.”
“I will not abuse your kindness,” replied the doctor, resuming his chair. “I will be as short as I can. Mr. Armadale’s case is briefly this: He has passed the greater part of his life in the West Indies—a wild life, and a vicious life, by his own confession. Shortly after his marriage—now some three years since—the first symptoms of an approaching paralytic affection began to show themselves, and his medical advisers ordered him away to try the climate of Europe. Since leaving the West Indies he has lived principally in Italy, with no benefit to his health. From Italy, before the last seizure attacked him, he removed to Switzerland, and from Switzerland he has been sent to this place. So much I know from his doctor’s report; the rest I can tell you from my own personal experience. Mr. Armadale has been sent to Wildbad too late: he is virtually a dead man. The paralysis is fast spreading upward, and disease of the lower part of the spine has already taken place. He can still move his hands a little, but he can hold nothing in his fingers. He can still articulate, but he may wake speechless to-morrow or next day. If I give him a week more to live, I give him what I honestly believe to be the utmost length of