_Relates the triumph of the Doctor, and the manner in which he achieved
it.--Lawyer Skinwell's death-bed, and what happened there._
The evening was warm and fine; and the gentle slope, on the top of which
Dr. Rowel's establishment stood, was coloured with the setting light of
the sun; as, with the glass-doors, which opened from his drawing-room
upon the lawn, thrown wide back to admit the scarcely stirring air,--the
doctor himself sat near it and alone, in an attitude of thought,
meditating mischief. A dash of vermilion-coloured light shot athwart the
lower part of his person, while the upper portion was covered with that
kind of illuminated shadow, that clear obscure, which, to the delicate
perception of a painter, constitutes one of Nature's greatest beauties.
But the thoughts and reflections in which the doctor indulged were
deeply at variance with those which the scene before him, and the
character of the hour, were calculated to suggest. It was not with
him--“how much do I now enjoy?” but the morose reflection--“how long
shall I enjoy it?” His present happiness was swallowed up in the
anticipation of possible coming evil.
“What matters it,” thought he, “when tomorrow, perhaps, that
treacherous villain may make everything known? Nay, how do I know he has
not done so already? True, I have had him watched. I know everything he
has done, and something that he has said; and this very day again he
is gone to York. To-morrow I may wake to be arrested,--to have my house
searched, and Woodruff set at liberty.”
As the doctor then mused, the door opened, and a stranger was ushered
in.
“Doctor,” said he in a hurried tone, “lawyer Skinwell has just got
thrown out of his gig, and is almost killed. He has been insensible ever
since.”
“Ah! Impossible!” exclaimed Rowel starting to his feet with surprise.
“Are you sure, man?”
“It is quite true, sir,” replied he, as though scarcely knowing what to
make of the doctor's strange manner, the latter gentleman regarding him
for a moment with an eye of unaccountable incredulity; for the idea had
instantaneously flashed across his mind that he might be deceived by his
own imagination, and that it was only the devil that was tempting him.
A minute or two elapsed; when, recovering himself, he replied in a more
subdued and professional tone, “I will be there immediately,” on which
the man disappeared.
“Now then,” thought Rowel, “is the time! Had I asked for it,--designed
it myself,--I could not have made it better. Thrown out, and
_insensible_. He cannot, therefore, know anything of what I do. And as
nobody else knows of our differences, nobody will think otherwise than
that I am doing for the best. Who shall question my practice? Even if it
be inquired into,--if it come to anything that way,--they may arraign my
judgment, but can do nothing else.”
The doctor went immediately into his dispensary, dismissed his assistant
upon some frivolous errand, and closed the door after him. Some minutes
he remained compounding drugs with his own hand; after which he mounted
his pony, which had been saddled in the mean time, and rode rapidly off
to the lawyer's house.
“Send all these people out!” somewhat sharply exclaimed the doctor,
as, in passing up stairs, he cast his eye upon the numerous assembly of
“sympathisers,” who had gathered in the passage and about the foot of
the staircase. Fanny dismissed them, and then, accompanied by Colin,
went up stairs into the room in which the unfortunate man had been laid
upon a bed, and whither also Dr. Rowel had directed his steps.
In the first place, the lawyer was very copiously bled; after which the
doctor administered a powder with his own hands, and gave instructions
that, in the course of about an hour, if Mr. Skinwell appeared more
recovered, another of a similar description should be given. He then
very strictly charged Fanny not to allow any person to visit him, and to
prevent him talking in case he should attempt to speak, as silence
and quietness were highly essential to any patient in his condition.
Promising that he should call again in the course of the night, the
doctor then took his leave, though not until he had privately drawn
Fanny aside, and fully satisfied himself that Mr. Skinwell had not
discovered to her any material portion of that secret which he so
greatly dreaded should come to her knowledge.
During several hours the unfortunate man continued much the same as
before; but about midnight he rallied. There was nobody in the room
except Fanny and the servant girl. Colin had taken his leave long
before; and Skinwell's stripling clerk, who was introduced to the reader
at the commencement of this story, and who had now grown up into a tame,
spiritless, and crest-fallen man, was sitting below in the kitchen,
seeking refuge from the whereases and aforesaids of the law in the
pleasant pages of Joseph Andrews.
Mr. Skinwell, as I have said, rallied a little. He looked wildly about
as though seeking for assurance of the locality of the place he was in,
and then feebly beckoned Fanny to bring her ear near him.
“Who has been to me?” he whispered.
“Only Dr. Rowel, sir,” answered Fanny assuringly.
“Then I am a dead man!” exclaimed the lawyer, bursting into a flood
of tears. “Oh Heaven, forgive my sins as I forgive all those who have
sinned against me!” And he forced his head into the pillow as though he
would bury it out of sight. The foam gathered upon his blue lips, and
his teeth snapped together with a sound that made the girl's blood
turn.--“Oh, what has he given me? my breath is hotter than fire.--The
flame eats my heart out!--water,--water!”
“No, no!” cried an eager voice behind; “'twill kill him!” and Dr. Rowel
strode across the room. Fanny saw him, and his looks terrified her. The
sedateness of the experienced physician, which no circumstance of this
kind can generally disturb, was all gone. He breathed half-convulsively
through his opened mouth and dilated nostrils; shining beads of water
that momentarily glistened in the lamplight, stood upon his forehead;
and several times successively, as he crossed the room, he passed his
hand with instinctive energy over the sides of his temples, so as to
cast the hair which clustered there backwards, as though his burning
brain sought closer contact with the cool common air. He stood by the
bedside. Skinwell rolled round his eyes, and strove to cry, “You 've
poisoned me!” But the doctor rapidly closed his hand over the sick man's
mouth, and drowned his failing voice.
Fanny stood petrified with horror; while the servant girl rushed
screaming out of the room. The doctor still kept his open hand on
Skin-well's mouth, while the dying man Strove to set himself free by
violent motions of the head and writhings of the body. A stifled call on
the name of Fanny at length broke from his muffled lips.
“Go out! leave me!” fiercely cried Rowel to the horrified young woman;
but she did not obey him.
“Fanny!” again escaped the lawyer's lips.
The sight, the voice, the desperate sense that came upon her all at once
that Rowel was killing his patient, nerved her with more than woman's
courage and ten times woman's ordinary strength. She rushed franticly
to the opposite side of the bed from that on which the doctor stood, and
violently seized his wrist.
“Away, woman!” he cried, suddenly turning all his efforts against her,
in the endeavour to free his hands and strike her down. But she held him
tightly. Curses upon her, whispered almost as from the inmost soul, but
deadly and pregnant with hellish meaning, hissed through the doctor's
teeth, which showed between his lips clenched like a workman's vice.
Fanny prayed mentally for strength to hold him. As they struggled, the
sick man beneath them spoke.
“Fanny--your father------”
Rowel threw the whole weight of his body upon him to stop that tongue.
He could not.
“Your father is in Rowel's--”
“It's a lie!--a lie!--a lie!” cried the doctor in rapid succession, to
render the words inaudible.
Their struggle grew more desperate, and Fanny could not hold much
longer: the unwonted muscles would not obey her will to gripe. They were
overstrained, and growing useless. At the same time the doctor wrenched
more furiously than ever. The dying man beneath him gurgled in the
throat for breath, and tossed in muscular convulsions beneath the
clothes. At last he got himself to the edge of the bed, and by a sudden
and last violent effort, struck himself against the doctor so forcibly
as to loosen him from the hands of Fanny, and throw him several paces
from the bed. The lawyer threw himself upright, and with his dim
half-dead eyes fixed on Fanny, and his finger turning to point at Rowel,
he cried with his last breath, “In his madhouse!--his madhouse!” and
sunk back to groan and die.
Fanny stood a moment, and then fell, like a stone, insensible to the
ground.
[Illustration: 061]
Presently the clerk and the maid-servant, were in the room. Doctor Rowel
had just folded up the bed-clothes.
“Take that girl up,” said he calmly; “she has fainted at this sight of
death. Your master is gone, young man. I did not think, at first,
he would see the night over. Give her some cold water; sprinkle her
temples, and carry her to bed, and then send for somebody to lay this
corpse out. Before morning it will be cold.”
As the doctor said this he gathered up such of the powders as had not
been administered, and put them in his pocket. At the same time Fanny
was carried away, according to his directions, and placed on the bed
in her own room. Thither Doctor Rowel followed, and employed himself in
restoring her. When Fanny first opened her eyes and saw him bending over
her, she shrieked and sunk again. Again she was recovered.
“Do leave me,” said she. “Do go away, or I shall die.”
“But I have something to say to you, my dear,” observed the doctor, with
an assumed sweetness of tone. “Now, quiet yourself, and endeavour to get
over this agitation. You will never be better till you get calmer.”
“Then pray leave me,” again replied Fanny, “and I may then be quiet. Is
master any better?”
“Yes--yes,” the doctor answered; “but never mind him. You should not
have interfered with _me_, Fanny. He was delirious,--outrageous. I was
obliged to hold him down.”
“He said something about my father,” observed Fanny in a faint voice. “I
heard him say it.”
“Nothing--nothing, I assure you!” the doctor exclaimed. “He was
delirious. Now, quiet yourself, and do not talk any more tonight.
Say nothing about it; and another day, when you are better, you shall
convince yourself, for Mrs. Rowel shall take you all over my house--you
shall see everybody in it--and I will prove to you that your father
cannot be there. As I told you some time ago, I know something about
you, and will take care to see you righted as far as I can; but then you
must not listen to the wild nonsense of a man who did not know what he
was talking about: it ruins everything.”
Fanny was silent; but she still beheld, as in a vivid picture, the
corpse-like figure of the lawyer sitting up in bed, its glazed eyes upon
her, and its finger pointing towards that man. She heard the rattle
of its horny tongue as it articulated those last words, “In his
madhouse!--_his_ madhouse!” And she thought of the words of Colin's
mother, which had been told to her only a few hours previously, that
dying people always speak the truth. But, was he dying? “Is he dead?”
asked she.
“My dear,” answered Rowel, “do not alarm yourself: but he _is_ dead.”
“O God! what have I seen!” cried the affrighted young woman, as she hid
her head beneath the bed-clothes, for a spirit seemed to pass before her
when she heard those words,--it was that of her dead master!
The doctor departed; but in that house there was no sleep that night.