It was some time before I could shake off the impression made on me by
the words and the look of that dying man.
It was not that my conscience upbraided me. What had I done? Denounced
that which I held, in common with most men of sense in or out of my
profession, to be one of those illusions by which quackery draws profit
from the wonder of ignorance. Was I to blame if I refused to treat
with the grave respect due to asserted discovery in legitimate science
pretensions to powers akin to the fables of wizards? Was I to descend
from the Academe of decorous science to examine whether a slumbering
sibyl could read from a book placed at her back, or tell me at L----
what at that moment was being done by my friend at the Antipodes?
And what though Dr. Lloyd himself might be a worthy and honest man, and
a sincere believer in the extravagances for which he demanded an equal
credulity in others, do not honest men every day incur the penalty
of ridicule if, from a defect of good sense, they make themselves
ridiculous? Could I have foreseen that a satire so justly provoked
would inflict so deadly a wound? Was I inhumanly barbarous because the
antagonist destroyed was morbidly sensitive? My conscience, therefore,
made me no reproach, and the public was as little severe as my
conscience. The public had been with me in our contest; the public knew
nothing of my opponent’s deathbed accusations; the public knew only that
I had attended him in his last moments; it saw me walk beside the bier
that bore him to his grave; it admired the respect to his memory which
I evinced in the simple tomb that I placed over his remains, inscribed
with an epitaph that did justice to his unquestionable benevolence and
integrity; above all, it praised the energy with which I set on foot a
subscription for his orphan children, and the generosity with which I
headed that subscription by a sum that was large in proportion to my
means.
To that sum I did not, indeed, limit my contribution. The sobs of the
poor female child rang still on my heart. As her grief had been keener
than that of her brothers, so she might be subjected to sharper trials
than they, when the time came for her to fight her own way through the
world; therefore I secured to her, but with such precautions that the
gift could not be traced to my hand, a sum to accumulate till she was
of marriageable age, and which then might suffice for a small wedding
portion; or if she remained single, for an income that would place
her beyond the temptation of want, or the bitterness of a servile
dependence.
That Dr. Lloyd should have died in poverty was a matter of surprise at
first, for his profits during the last few years had been considerable,
and his mode of life far from extravagant. But just before the date of
our controversy he had been induced to assist the brother of his lost
wife, who was a junior partner in a London bank, with the loan of his
accumulated savings. This man proved dishonest; he embezzled that and
other sums intrusted to him, and fled the country. The same sentiment of
conjugal affection which had cost Dr. Lloyd his fortune kept him silent
as to the cause of the loss. It was reserved for his executors to
discover the treachery of the brother-in-law whom he, poor man, would
have generously screened from additional disgrace.
The Mayor of L----, a wealthy and public-spirited merchant, purchased
the museum, which Dr. Lloyd’s passion for natural history had induced
him to form; and the sum thus obtained, together with that raised
by subscription, sufficed not only to discharge all debts due by the
deceased, but to insure to the orphans the benefits of an education that
might fit at least the boys to enter fairly armed into that game, more
of skill than of chance, in which Fortune is really so little blinded
that we see, in each turn of her wheel, wealth and its honours pass away
from the lax fingers of ignorance and sloth, to the resolute grasp of
labour and knowledge.
Meanwhile a relation in a distant county undertook the charge of the
orphans; they disappeared from the scene, and the tides of life in a
commercial community soon flowed over the place which the dead man had
occupied in the thoughts of his bustling townsfolk.
One person at L----, and only one, appeared to share and inherit the
rancour with which the poor physician had denounced me on his death-bed.
It was a gentleman named Vigors, distantly related to the deceased,
and who had been, in point of station, the most eminent of Dr. Lloyd’s
partisans in the controversy with myself, a man of no great scholastic
acquirements, but of respectable abilities. He had that kind of power
which the world concedes to respectable abilities when accompanied
with a temper more than usually stern, and a moral character more than
usually austere. His ruling passion was to sit in judgment upon others;
and being a magistrate, he was the most active and the most rigid of all
the magistrates L---- had ever known.
Mr. Vigors at first spoke of me with great bitterness, as having ruined,
and in fact killed, his friend, by the uncharitable and unfair acerbity
which he declared I had brought into what ought to have been an
unprejudiced examination of simple matter of fact. But finding no
sympathy in these charges, he had the discretion to cease from making
them, contenting himself with a solemn shake of his head if he heard my
name mentioned in terms of praise, and an oracular sentence or two,
such as “Time will show,” “All’s well that ends well,” etc. Mr. Vigors,
however, mixed very little in the more convivial intercourse of
the townspeople. He called himself domestic; but, in truth, he was
ungenial,--a stiff man, starched with self-esteem. He thought that his
dignity of station was not sufficiently acknowledged by the merchants of
Low Town, and his superiority of intellect not sufficiently recognized
by the exclusives of the Hill. His visits were, therefore, chiefly
confined to the houses of neighbouring squires, to whom his reputation
as a magistrate, conjoined with his solemn exterior, made him one of
those oracles by which men consent to be awed on condition that the awe
is not often inflicted. And though he opened his house three times
a week, it was only to a select few, whom he first fed and then
biologized. Electro-biology was very naturally the special entertainment
of a man whom no intercourse ever pleased in which his will was not
imposed upon others. Therefore he only invited to his table persons whom
he could stare into the abnegation of their senses, willing to say that
beef was lamb, or brandy was coffee, according as he willed them to say.
And, no doubt, the persons asked would have said anything he willed,
so long as they had, in substance, as well as in idea, the beef and the
brandy, the lamb and the coffee. I did not, then, often meet Mr. Vigors
at the houses in which I occasionally spent my evenings. I heard of his
enmity as a man safe in his home hears the sough of a wind on a common
without. If now and then we chanced to pass in the streets, he looked
up at me (he was a small man walking on tiptoe) with a sullen scowl of
dislike; and from the height of my stature, I dropped upon the small man
and sullen scowl the affable smile of supreme indifference.