then there was Day and Night (Gus wanted to have Morning and Afternoon, but somebody told him it wasn’t professional); then there was besides surgery, day, and night bells, another brilliant brass knob, inscribed “Visitors,” and a ditto ditto, whereon was engraved “Shop.” Though, as there was only one small back-parlour beyond the shop into which visitors ever penetrated, and as it was the custom for all such visitors to walk straight through the aforesaid shop into the aforesaid parlour without availing themselves of any bell whatever, the brass knobs were looked upon rather in the light of a conventionality than a convenience.
But Gus said they looked like business, especially when they were clean, which wasn’t always, as a couple of American gentlemen, friends of Darley’s, were in the habit of squirting tobacco-juice at them from the other side of the way, in the dusky twilight; the man who hit the brass oftenest out of six times to be the winner, and the loser to stand beer all the evening—that is to say, until some indefinite time on the following morning, for Darley’s parties seldom broke up very early; and to let the visitors out and take the morning milk in was often a simultaneous proceeding in the household of our young surgeon.
If he had been a surgeon only, he would surely have been a Sir Benjamin Brodie; for when it is taken into account that he could play the piano, organ, guitar, and violoncello, without having learned any of those instruments; that he could write a song, and compose the melody to it; that he could draw horses and dogs after Herring and Landseer; make more puns in one sentence than any burlesque writer living; make love to half-a-dozen women at once, and be believed by every one of them; sing a comic song, or tell a funny story; name the winner of the Derby safer than any prophet on that side of the water; and make his book for the Leger with one hand while he wrote a prescription with the other; the discriminating reader will allow that there was a good deal of some sort of talent or other in the composition of Mr. Augustus Darley.
In the twilight of this particular autumn evening he is busily engaged putting up a heap of little packets labelled “Best Epsom Salts,” while his assistant, a very small youth, of a far more elderly appearance than his master, lights the gas. The half-glass door that communicates with the little back-parlour is ajar, and Gus is talking to some one within.
“If I go over the water to-night, Bell—” he says.
A feminine voice from within interrupts him—“But you won’t go to-night, Gus; the last time you went to that horrid Smasher’s, Mrs. Tompkins’s little boy was ill, and they sent into the London Road for Mr. Parker. And you are such a favourite with everybody, dear, that they say if you’d only stay at home always, you’d have the best practice in the neighbourhood.”
“But, Bell, how can a fellow stay at home night after night, and perhaps half his time only sell a penn’orth of salts or a poor man’s plaster? If they’d be ill,” he added, almost savagely, “I wouldn’t mind stopping in; there’s some interest in that. Or if they’d come and have their teeth drawn; but they never will: and I’m sure I sell ’em our Infallible Anti-toothache Tincture; and if that don’t make ’em have their teeth out, nothing will.”
“Come and have your tea, Gus; and tell Snix to bring his basin.”
Snix was the boy, who forthwith drew from a cupboard under the counter the identical basin into which, when a drunken man was brought into the shop, Gus usually bled him, with a double view of obtaining practice in his art and bringing the patient back to consciousness.
The feminine occupant of the parlour is a young lady with dark hair and grey eyes, and something under twenty years of age. She is Augustus Darley’s only sister; she keeps his house, and in an emergency she can make up a prescription—nay, has been known to draw a juvenile patient’s first tooth, and give him his money back after the operation for the purchase of consolatory sweetstuffs.
Perhaps Isabel Darley is just a little what very prim young ladies, who have never passed the confines of the boarding-school or the drawing-room, might call “fast.” But when it is taken into consideration that she was left an orphan at an early age, that she never went to school in her life, and that she has for a very considerable period been in the habit of associating with her brother’s friends, chiefly members of the Cherokee Society, it is not so much to be wondered at that she is a little more masculine in her attainments, and “go-ahead” in her opinions, than some others of her sex.
The parlour is small, as has before been stated. One of the Cherokees has been known to suggest, when there were several visitors present and the time arrived for their departure, that they should be taken out singly with a corkscrew. Other Cherokees, arriving after the room had been filled with visitors, had been heard to advise that somebody should go in first with a candle, to ascertain whether vitality could be sustained in the atmosphere. Perhaps the accommodation was not extended by the character of the furniture, which consisted of a cottage piano, a chair for the purposes of dental surgery, a small Corinthian column supporting a basin with a metal plug and chain useful for like purposes; also a violoncello in the corner, a hanging bookshelf—(which was a torture to tall Cherokees, as one touch from a manly head would tilt down the shelves and shower the contents of Mr. Darley’s library on the head in question, like a literary waterfall)—and a good-sized sofa, with that unmistakable well, and hard back and arms, which distinguish the genus sofa-bedstead. Of course tables, chairs, china ornaments, a plaster-of-Paris bust here and there, caricatures on the walls, a lamp that wouldn’t burn, and a patent arrangement for the manufacture of toasted cheese, are trifles in the way of furniture not worth naming. Miss Darley’s birds, again, though they did spill seed and water into the eyes of unoffending visitors, and drop lumps of dirty sugar sharply down upon the noses of the same, could not of course be considered a nuisance; but certainly the compound surgery and back-parlour in the mansion of Augustus Darley was, to say the least, a little too full of furniture.
While Isabel is pouring out the tea, two gentlemen open the shop door, and the bell attached thereto, which should ring but doesn’t, catching in the foremost visitor’s foot, nearly precipitates him headlong into the emporium of the disciple of Esculapius. This foremost visitor is no other than Mr. Peters, and the tall figure behind him, wrapped in a greatcoat, is Daredevil Dick.
“Here I am, Gus!” he cries out, in his own bold hearty voice; “here I am; found your place at last, in spite of the fascinations of half the stale shell-fish in the United Kingdom. Here I am; and here’s the best friend I have in the world, not even excepting yourself, old fellow.”
Gus introduces Richard to his sister Isabel, who has been taught from her childhood to look upon the young man shut up in a lunatic asylum down at Slopperton as the greatest hero, next to Napoleon Buonaparte, that ever the world had boasted. She was a little girl of eleven years old at the time of Dick’s trial, and had never seen her wild brother’s wilder companion; and she looks up now at the dark handsome face with a glance of almost reverence in her deep gray eyes. But Bell is by no means a heroine; and she has a dozen unheroine-like occupations. She has the tea to pour out, and in her nervous excitement she scalds Richard’s fingers, drops the sugar into the slop-basin, and pours all the milk into one cup of tea. What she would have done without the assistance of Mr. Peters, it is impossible to say; for that gentleman showed himself the very genius of order; cut thin bread-and-butter enough for half-a-dozen, which not one of the party touched; re-filled the teapot before it was empty; lit the gas-lamp which hung from the ceiling; shut the door which communicated with the shop and the other door which led on to the staircase; and did all so quietly that nobody knew he was doing anything.
Poor Richard! In spite of the gratitude and happiness he feels in his release, there is a gloom upon his brow and an abstraction in his manner, which he tries in vain to shake off.
A small, round, chubby individual, who might be twelve or twenty, according to the notions of the person estimating her age, removed the tea-tray, and in so doing broke a saucer. Gus looked up. “She always does it,” he
