DOCTOR SHAW'S VERDICT.
Dr. Shaw, at whose house door Hanbury had left Oscar Leigh, was a
fresh-coloured, light haired, baldheaded, energetic man of about
fifty-five. He was always in a state of astonishment, and the
spectacles he wore over his green grey eyes seemed ever on the point
of being thrust forward out of their position by the large round
prominent dancing eyes of their wearer. He was a bachelor and had a
poor practice, but one which he preferred to hold in undisputed
ownership, rather than increase at the sacrifice of liberty in taking
a wife.
He had just come back from his round of morning visits and was sitting
down to his simple early dinner, as Leigh knocked. When he heard who
the visitor was he rose instantly and went into the small bare
surgery, the front ground-floor room.
"Bless my soul, Mr. Leigh, what's the matter?"
Leigh was sitting in a wooden elbow chair breathing heavily, noisily,
irregularly. "I have come," he said in gasps and snatches, "I have
come to die."
"Eh! Bless my soul, what are you saying?" cried the doctor approaching
the clockmaker so as to get the light upon his own back.
"I have come to die, I tell you."
"But that is an opinion, and it is I that am to give the opinion--not
you. You are to state the facts, I am to lay down the law. What's the
matter?"
"In this case, I am judge and jury. The facts and the law are all
against me. I have had another seizure a few minutes ago," he laid his
hand on his chest. "In the excitement I kept up, but I know 'tis all
over. You will remember your promise about the quicklime. I never let
anyone pry into the machinery of my clock, and I won't have any
foolish young jackanapes prying into the works of this old carcase.
You will fill up the box with quicklime?"
"Not yet anyway. What happened. Where do you feel queer?"
Leigh pointed to his chest a little at the left of the middle line.
"Shock?"
"Yes."
"What?"
"My clock, the work of seven years, has been burned, destroyed."
"Burned! That was hard. I'm very sorry to hear it. We'll have your
coat off. Yes, I'll lock the door. You need not be afraid. No one
comes at this time. Yes, I'll pull the blind down too. Stand up....
That will do. Put on your coat. Let me help you. Drink this. Sit down
now and rest yourself."
"Rest myself? Rest myself! After standing for that half a minute?"
"Yes."
"Did I not tell you facts and law were against me?"
"You are not well."
"I am dying."
"You are very ill."
"I had better go to bed?"
"You would be more rested there."
"Would it be safe for me to go to Millway, about sixty miles?"
"No."
"How long do you think I shall last?"
"It is quite impossible to say."
"Hours?"
"Oh, yes."
"Days?"
"Yes."
"Weeks?"
"With care."
"Months?"
"The best thing you can do now is to go to bed. I'll see the room got
ready. You feel very weak, weaker even than when you came in here."
"I feel I cannot walk."
"The excitement has kept you up so far. You are now suffering from
reaction. After you have rested a while you will be better."
"Very good. Shaw, will you send for your solicitor, I want to make my
will."
The doctor left the surgery for a few minutes to give the necessary
orders about the room for Leigh and to send for the solicitor. Half an
hour ago he had felt very hungry, and when the clockmaker knocked he
had been thinking of nothing but his dinner. His dinner still lay
untasted. He had forgotten all about it. He was the most kind-hearted
of men, and the sight of Leigh in his present condition, and the fatal
story he had heard through the stethoscope had filled him with pity
and solicitude.
"The room will be ready in a few minutes," he said, in a cheerful
voice and with an encouraging smile, when he again came into the
surgery. "We shall try to make you as comfortable as ever we can. I am
sorry for your sake I haven't a wife to look after you."
"If you had a wife I shouldn't be here."
"What! You! Why, that is the only ungallant thing I ever heard you say
in all my life."
"I should envy you and be jealous of you."
"Then, my dear fellow, I am very glad we are by ourselves. I suppose
your mother would not like to come up to nurse you?"
"She cannot move about now, except in her wheeled chair."
"Is there anyone you would wish to come to see you? This house you
will, of course, consider as your own."
"Thank you, there is no one. I do not know anyone in the world, except
my mother, so long as I know you. The only friend likely to call I saw
to-day. There is no need for me to send for him to-day, is there?"
"Need, no. You will be much better when you have rested a while. You
know cheerful company is always very useful to us doctors, and we like
to have all the help we can. But I daresay we shall get on famously as
we are." He would like to have heard all about the fire and the
destruction of the clock, but he refrained from asking because he
feared the excitement for his patient.
It happened that Dr. Shaw's solicitor lived near, and was at home, so
that he came back with the boy before the room was ready. Shaw
withdrew from the surgery, and for half-an-hour the lawyer and the
clockmaker were alone. Then Leigh was carried upstairs and went to
bed, and felt, as Shaw said he would, better and easier for lying
down.
"I have no trouble on my mind now, Shaw, and my body cannot be a
trouble to me or anybody else long. I never say thanks or make pretty
speeches, but I am not ungrateful all the same. I don't think we have
ever shaken hands yet, Shaw. Will you shake hands now?"
"With the greatest pleasure, my dear fellow," said Shaw, grasping the
hand of the little man, and displaying his greatest pleasure by
allowing his large dancing green-grey eyes to fill up with tears
behind his unemotional spectacles.
"That clock would have made my fame. I don't know how the fire arose.
I had the clock wound up last night by a mechanical contrivance, and
before leaving for Millway I lit the faintest glimmer of gas. Some
accident must have happened. Some accident which can now never be
explained. I left the window open for the first time last night. I had
put up a curtain for the first time last night. If any boy had thrown
a stone, and the stone got through the curtain, there is no knowing
what it might not do among the machinery; the works were so close and
complicated, it might have brought something inflammable within reach
of the flame of the gas, for the gas would not be quite out. At all
events, the clock is gone. It was getting too much for me. Often of
late, when I was away from it, the movements became reversed, and all
the works went backwards, and I often thought that kind of thing would
injure my brain."
"It was a sure sign injury was beginning, and I think it is a good
thing for you the clock is burned," said Shaw soothingly.
"But the shock! The shock you will say, by-and-by, killed me. How,
then, do you count the loss of the clock good?"
"I mean if you had told me there was no way of stopping this
involuntary reversal of the movement I should have advised you to
smash the clock rather than risk the brain."
"And I should have declined to take your advice."
Shaw laughed. "You would not be singular in that. I can get ten people
to take my medicines for one who will take my advice."
"What an awful mortality there would be, Shaw, if people took both!"
"There now," said Shaw, with another laugh, "you will do now. You are
your old self again. I must run away. I shall see you in an hour or
two, and have my tea up here with you. If you want anything, ring."
So Leigh was left alone.
"The clothes," he thought, "of the figure must have in some way or
other come in contact with the gas-jet. If they once caught fire the
wax would burn--the wax of the head, and then there would be plenty of
material for a blaze.
"Ah, me; the clock is gone! Even if that survived, I should not mind.
I was so jealous of it. I never let anyone examine it, and the things
it could do will not be credited when I am dead, for I often, very
often, exaggerated, and even invented, a little.
"Ay, ay, ay, the clock is gone, and the Miracle Gold, too. I am glad I
never had anything really to do with it. I am sorry I was not always
of the mind I was yesterday--my last day at my bench. All the time I
was burying in my own grave my own small capital of life, I was
missing the real gold of existence. I sought to build up fame in my
clock and in that gold. Fame is for the dead. What are the dead to us?
What shall I be when they bury me to myself, who walked in the
sunlight and saw the trees and the flowers, and the clouds and the
sea, where there were no men to remind me of my own unshapeliness?
Nothing. Why should a man care for fame among people he has never
seen, among the dim myriads of faces yet to come out of the womb of
time, when he could have had an abiding place in the heart's ingle
among those whom he knows and whose hands he can touch? What good to
us will the voices of the strange men of the hereafter be? What a fool
I was to think of buying the applause of strange, unborn men out of
gold rent from living men, whose friend I might have been.
"I told Hanbury I was making a dying confession to him. I suppose this
is a death-bed repentance. Very well. But I sinned only in thought. In
order to show other men I was better than they, I was willing to be
worse. Shaw is right. I am much easier here. I feel rested. I feel
quiet. I have really done nothing harmful to any man. It will be a
relief to get out of this husk. I will try to sleep. My poor old
mother! But we cannot be separated long. It is easier to die in a body
like this than to live in it."
He was very weak, and life fluttered feebly in his veins. He closed
his eyes and ceased to think. The calm that comes with the knowledge
that one is near the end was upon him. He did not think, he did not
sleep. He lay simply gathering quiet for the great sleep. He was
learning how to rest, how to lie still, how to want not, how to wait
the sliding aside of the mysterious panel that the flesh keeps shut
against the eyes of the spirit while the two are partners in life.