DR. OLIVER BIRNIE’S NEW PATIENT.
Dr. Oliver Birnie’s consulting-room was generally pretty full in the
morning, and always with paying patients. He had long since passed the
‘super’ stage of the profession. Lest any intelligent reader should be
unacquainted with this phase of medical practice, let me explain that
it is the custom when young doctors are anxious to work up a reputation
for being fashionable for them to engage a few supers—that is, to give
advice gratis to a few selected persons, on condition that they come
once or twice a week and help to make a crowd in the waiting-room.
A doctor’s house, like a theatre, must be crowded if the proprietor
would have a success. An empty waiting-room is like an empty pit; it
dispirits the _clientèle_. Let a patient have to wait a couple of
hours, and he considers the doctor a great man; let him find himself
alone, and be shown in directly, and he imagines that the medical man
can’t be clever or he would be busier.
Dr. Birnie was at home for consultation till twelve, and his rooms were
generally crowded with genuine patients. They were, naturally,
well-dressed, well-to-do people, for his fee was high. One morning, as
the ladies and gentlemen at Dr. Birnie’s sat glaring at each other amid
the funereal silence which generally reigns in a doctor’s waiting-room,
the door opened, and a rough, hulking old man was shown in by the
solemn attendant. He was about six feet, and broad in proportion, his
hair and beard were grizzled, and his face was bronzed with exposure.
He wasn’t a nice-looking old gentleman at all, and his get-up did not
improve his appearance. He wore a thick pilot jacket, which was
anything but a fit, and round his throat was twisted a dirty white
comforter. He took off his hat as he entered the room, and sidled
awkwardly to a chair, sitting on the extreme edge, and eyeing the
company nervously. At first the ladies and gentlemen wondered what such
a huge, powerful fellow could possibly want with a doctor. They
imagined he must be a navvy, or something of the sort, and they felt it
was like his impudence to come and sit down in their presence. But
presently the great frame was racked, the fierce face became crimson,
and the silence of the waiting-room was broken by the violent coughing
of the new-comer.
That a man with a cough like that should need medical advice the ladies
and gentlemen understood, but their astonishment was great when the
door opened and the solemn attendant beckoned to this ‘navigator’ to
come out.
The idea of the doctor taking such a person out of his turn!
It was strange, certainly, but Dr. Birnie had done it, and when the
rough-looking fellow was shown into his consulting-room, he held out
his hand, and exclaimed, quite familiarly, ‘Well, Josh, wherever have
you turned up from?’
Then Mr. Josh Heckett told Dr. Birnie a long story, beginning in
England, then going to Australia, and coming back to England again, and
the said story ended on the banks of the Serpentine.
‘Good gracious me!’ said the doctor. ‘And you mean to say that Marston
deliberately tried to murder you?’
‘I do by———!’ exclaimed Heckett, bringing his fist down on the table
till the surgical instruments danced again; ‘and he’s done it, except
as it’s a slow death ‘stid of a quick un. I ain’t been the same man,
guv’nor, since that there night. It’s the wettin’ and the cold as done
it. This ‘ere corf don’t give me no rest night nor day.’
Dr. Birnie put something to the old man’s chest and listened, then he
put his ear to his back and made him draw his breath, and then the
doctor’s face assumed a grave, profound look.
‘Hem!’ he said; ‘that’s bad. You ought to have come to me before. How
long have you had this cough?’
‘Soon arter the duckin’ it come on, and it’s got wus and wus. I bought
no end o’ lozengers and things off the barrers, as they sez cures a
corf in no time; but they didn’t do me a bit o’ good. So I thought as
I’d find you out and see if you could set me right. I ain’t bothered
you for a good many years now.’
‘Well, Josh, I’ll see what I can do for you, but you must be careful.
You’d better keep indoors as much as you can, and I’ll give you a
prescription.’
The doctor wrote something on a piece of paper, and handed it to Josh.
‘You’ll get that made up at any chemist’s,’ he said. ‘Let me see you
again in a week.’
Josh took his prescription and thanked the doctor; but before he went
he told him a portion of another little story, and, carried away by his
excitement, he even went so far as to let the doctor into the details
of a little scheme of vengeance which he was brewing against a man whom
the doctor in days gone by had once known exceedingly well.
The doctor was so interested in the story that he let Josh talk on for
ever so long, utterly oblivions of the ladies and gentlemen drumming
their heels in the waiting-room.
And when Josh was gone he didn’t send for a fresh patient at once, but
sat for a few minutes buried in thought.
‘I wonder what to do for the best,’ he said, thinking aloud. ‘I suspect
Gurth would like to be in at the death, and it’s all up with Edward
Marston. He need fear nothing in that quarter now. Yes, I think Gurth
had better come.’
That morning, when all the patients were disposed of, Dr. Birnie
started out on his round of visits.
But the first thing he did was to send a telegraphic message to
America:
‘From Birnie, London, to Egerton, ———— Hotel, New York.—Come back. The
game is yours. M. is trapped.’
Josh Heckett’s cough grew worse and worse. Bess and George were still
with him, and very grateful they were for the means of avoiding
pursuit. George never ventured out now, but Bess, thickly veiled, did
all the marketing for the little household. She was a capital nurse
too, and Josh, in his rough, uncouth way, was grateful. He had never
known all his life what kindness was. Gertie he had looked upon as
bound to do what he wanted, because he fed and kept her, and Gertie was
only a child. But with Bess it was different. She and her husband had
not only saved his life, they were going to be his chosen instruments
in a deep-laid scheme of vengeance.
He had found out now the whole vile plot against him, and as he sat at
home and coughed, he brooded over his wrongs. He had found out that he
had been frightened out of the country by a ruse, and that Marston and
Preene were at the bottom of it. Every time he coughed, every time he
swayed to and fro, the great gorged veins on his head standing out in
ridges with the violence of the paroxysms, he cursed Marston. He
believed that he had caught his death that night in the cold waters of
the Serpentine, and he grew almost to thirst for his destroyer’s blood.
If he had met Edward Marston face to face now he would have sprung upon
him and throttled him where he stood. But the temptation did not come,
and he sat and brooded over his wrongs, and matured the deep-laid
scheme which was to put his enemy under his feet.
He rubbed his hands when he thought of the scene. He chuckled and
laughed to himself as he pictured the hour of his triumph.
And day by day the cough grew worse and worse, and his brawny limbs
lost more and more of their strength. Long sleepless nights and days of
unrest were telling on him, and at times he would lean back in the
easy-chair, which Bess had wheeled to the fire for him, close his eyes,
and wonder what sort of a world it was men like himself went to when
they died.
Bess and George knew only a portion of their protector’s secret. They
knew that he, like themselves, had been foully wronged by Marston.
George lost sight of everything in his desire to wipe the awful stain
from his name, and to clear himself before the world. And Josh Heckett
promised him if he would only be patient he should wring a confession
of his innocence from the real culprit himself.
It was necessary for them to act with caution, for George’s recapture
would have ruined all. Heckett would not risk all by striking till the
blow was sure, and he had not the information he wanted yet, though
some of his old associates were at work for him.
Birnie had promised to assist him in something that he particularly
wanted to know, and one day the doctor’s carriage drove up to the door,
and the doctor came in and told Josh two things—one he was glad to
hear, and one he would not have heard for untold gold.
From the first piece of information he learnt that Marston was in his
clutches now. The doctor had traced him to his den; the doctor had
found out that he had inherited, through his wife, the Heritage
estates, and that he had taken the name with the money.
But the doctor also told Heckett that his cough was worse, and that he
must take every care of himself, for the symptoms were serious, and a
fresh cold on this one would end in consumption.
And the doctor spoke only half the truth.
The wetting and exposure to cold that eventful night in Hyde Park had
done their work, and a fatal disease had already seized the stalwart
burglar in its grip.
The symptoms of galloping consumption had shown themselves to the
experienced eye of Dr. Birnie.