_The Physician._
I was now Captain Campbell, of the Scotch Greys, contriving to live on
my half pay, and thinking far more about the past than the present or
the future. My father was dead. My only brother was also gone, and the
property had passed into other hands. I had no fixed place of abode, but
went from one spot to another, as the whim seized me--sometimes
remaining months, sometimes removing next day, but generally choosing
retired villages about which I knew nothing.
I had spent a week in a small town on the borders of Wales, and intended
remaining a fortnight longer, when I was suddenly seized with a violent
illness, in which I lay insensible for three weeks. When I recovered
consciousness, I found that my head had been shaved, and that the
cicatrice of my old wound was occasionally very painful. Of late I have
suspected that I had some operation performed upon my skull during my
illness; but Dr. Ruthwell never dropped a hint to that effect. This was
the friend whom, when first I opened my seeing eyes, I beheld sitting by
my bedside, watching the effect of his last prescription. He was one of
the few in the profession, whose love of science and love of their
fellows combined, would be enough to chain them to the art of healing,
irrespective of its emoluments. He was one of the few, also, who see the
marvellous in all science, and, therefore, reject nothing merely because
the marvellous may seem to predominate in it. Yet neither would he
accept anything of the sort as fact, without the strictest use of every
experiment within his power, even then remaining often in doubt. This
man conferred honour by his friendship; and I am happy to think that
before many days of recovery had passed, we were friends indeed. But I
lay for months under his care before I was able to leave my bed.
He attributed my illness to the consequences of the sabre-cut, and my
recovery to the potency of the drugs he had exhibited. I attributed my
illness in great measure to the constant contemplation of my early
history, no longer checked by any regular employment; and my recovery in
equal measure to the power of his kindness and sympathy, helping from
within what could never have been reached from without.
He told me that he had often been greatly perplexed with my symptoms,
which would suddenly change in the most unaccountable manner, exhibiting
phases which did not, as far as his knowledge went, belong to any
variety of the suffering which gave the prevailing character to my
ailment; and after I had so far recovered as to render it safe to turn
my regard more particularly upon my own case, he said to me one day,
“You would laugh at me, Campbell, were I to confess some of the bother
this illness of yours has occasioned me; enough, indeed, to overthrow
any conceit I ever had in my own diagnosis.”
“Go on,” I answered; “I promise not to laugh.”
He little knew how far I should be from laughing. “In your case,” he
continued, “the _pathognomonic,_ if you will excuse medical slang, was
every now and then broken by the intrusion of altogether foreign
symptoms.”
I listened with breathless attention.
“Indeed, on several occasions, when, after meditating on your case till
I was worn out, I had fallen half asleep by your bedside, I came to
myself with the strangest conviction that I was watching by the bedside
of a woman.”
“Thank Heaven!” I exclaimed, starting up, “She lives still.”
I need not describe the doctor’s look of amazement, almost
consternation; for he thought a fresh access of fever was upon me, and I
had already begun to rave. For his reassurance, however, I promised to
account fully for my apparently senseless excitement; and that evening I
commenced the narrative which forms the preceeding part of this story.
Long before I reached its close, my exultation had vanished, and, as I
wrote it for him, it ended with the expressed conviction that she must
be dead. Ere long, however, the hope once more revived. While, however,
the narrative was in progress, I gave him a summary, which amounted to
this:--
I had loved a lady--loved her still. I did not know where she was, and
had reason to fear that her mind had given way under the suffering of
our separation. Between us there existed, as well, the bond of a distant
blood relationship; so distant, that but for its probable share in the
production of another relationship of a very marvellous nature, it would
scarcely have been worth alluding to. This was a kind of psychological
attraction, which, when justified and strengthened by the spiritual
energies of love, rendered the immediate communication of certain
feelings, both mental and bodily, so rapid, that almost the
consciousness of the one existed for the time in the mental
circumstances of the other. Nay, so complete at times was the
communication, that I even doubted her testimony as to some strange
correspondence in our past history on this very ground, suspecting that,
my memory being open to her retrospection, she saw my story, and took it
for her own. It was, therefore, easy for me to account for Dr.
Ruthwell’s scientific bewilderment at the symptoms I manifested.
As my health revived, my hope and longing increased. But although I
loved Lady Alice with more entireness than even during the latest period
of our intercourse, a certain calm endurance had supervened, which
rendered the relief of fierce action no longer necessary to the
continuance of a sane existence. It was as if the concentrated orb of
love had diffused itself in a genial warmth through the whole orb of
life, imparting fresh vitality to many roots which had remained leafless
in my being. For years the field of battle was the only field that had
borne the flower of delight; now nature began to live again for me.
One day, the first on which I ventured to walk into the fields alone, I
was delighted with the multitude of the daisies peeping from the grass
everywhere--the first attempts of the earth, become conscious of
blindness, to open eyes, and see what was about and above her.
Everything is wonderful after the resurrection from illness. It is a
resurrection of all nature. But somehow or other I was not satisfied
with the daisies. They did not seem to me so lovely as the daisies I
used to see when I was a child. I thought with myself, “This is the
cloud that gathers with life, the dimness that passion and suffering
cast over the eyes of the mind.” That moment my gaze fell upon a single,
solitary, red-tipped daisy. My reasoning vanished, and my melancholy
with it, slain by the red tips of the lonely beauty. This was the kind
of daisy I had loved as a child; and with the sight of it, a whole field
of them rushed back into my mind; a field of my father’s where,
throughout the multitude, you could not have found a white one. My
father was dead; the fields had passed into other hands; but perhaps the
red-tipped _gowans_ were left. I must go and see. At all events, the
hill that overlooked the field would still be there, and no change would
have passed upon _it._ It would receive me with the same familiar look
as of old, still fronting the great mountain from whose sides I had
first heard the sound of that clanking horseshoe, which, whatever might
be said to account for it, had certainly had a fearful connection with
my joys and sorrows both. Did the ghostly rider still haunt the place?
or, if he did, should I hear again that sound of coming woe? Whether or
not, I defied him. I would not be turned from my desire to see the old
place by any fear of a ghostly marauder, whom I should be only too glad
to encounter, if there were the smallest chance of coming off with the
victory.
As soon as my friend would permit me, I set out for Scotland.