Snell and Mr. Wyman continued their visits and their prescriptions.
The patient got a little worse.
Mr. Lusignan hoped Christopher would call again, but he did not.
When Dr. Staines had satisfied himself that the disorder was easily curable, then wounded pride found an entrance even into his loving heart. That two strangers should have been consulted before him! He was only sent for because they could not cure her.
As he seemed in no hurry to repeat his visit, Mr. Lusignan called on him, and said, politely, he had hoped to receive another call ere this. “Personally,” said he, “I was much struck with your observations; but my daughter is afraid she will catch cold if she leaves off her corset, and that, you know, might be very serious.”
Dr. Staines groaned, and, when he had groaned, he lectured. “Female patients are wonderfully monotonous in this matter; they have a programme of evasions; and whether the patient is a lady or a housemaid, she seldom varies from that programme. You find her breathing life's air with half a bellows, and you tell her so. 'Oh, no,' says she; and does the gigantic feat of contraction we witnessed that evening at your house. But, on inquiry, you learn there is a raw red line ploughed in her flesh by the cruel stays. 'What is that?' you ask, and flatter yourself you have pinned her. Not a bit. 'That was the last pair. I changed them, because they hurt me.' Driven out of that by proofs of recent laceration, they say, 'If I leave them off I should catch my death of cold,' which is equivalent to saying there is no flannel in the shops, no common sense nor needles at home.”
He then laid before him some large French plates, showing the organs of the human trunk, and bade him observe in how small a space, and with what skill, the Creator has packed so many large yet delicate organs, so that they should be free and secure from friction, though so close to each other. He showed him the liver, an organ weighing four pounds, and of large circumference; the lungs, a very large organ, suspended in the chest and impatient of pressure; the heart, the stomach, the spleen, all of them too closely and artfully packed to bear any further compression.
Having thus taken him by the eye, he took him by the mind.
“Is it a small thing for the creature to say to her Creator, 'I can pack all this egg-china better than you can,' and thereupon to jam all those vital organs close, by a powerful, a very powerful and ingenious machine? Is it a small thing for that sex, which, for good reasons, the Omniscient has made larger in the waist than the male, to say to her Creator, 'You don't know your business; women ought to be smaller in the waist than men, and shall be throughout the civilized world'?”
In short, he delivered so many true and pointed things on this trite subject, that the old gentleman was convinced, and begged him to come over that very evening and convince Rosa.
Dr. Staines shook his head dolefully, and all his fire died out of him at having to face the fair. “Reason will be wasted. Authority is the only weapon. My profession and my reading have both taught me that the whole character of her sex undergoes a change the moment a man interferes with their dress. From Chaucer's day to our own, neither public satire nor private remonstrance has ever shaken any of their monstrous fashions. Easy, obliging, pliable, and weaker of will than men in other things, do but touch their dress, however objectionable, and rock is not harder, iron is not more stubborn, than these soft and yielding creatures. It is no earthly use my coming—I'll come.”
He came that very evening, and saw directly she was worse. “Of course,” said he, sadly, “you have not taken my advice.”
Rosa replied with a toss and an evasion, “I was not worth a prescription!”
“A physician can prescribe without sending his patient to the druggist; and when he does, then it is his words are gold.”
Rosa shook her head with an air of lofty incredulity.
He looked ruefully at Mr. Lusignan and was silent. Rosa smiled sarcastically; she thought he was at his wit's end.
Not quite: he was cudgelling his brains in search of some horribly unscientific argument, that might prevail; for he felt science would fall dead upon so fair an antagonist. At last his eye kindled; he had hit on an argument unscientific enough for anybody, he thought. Said he, ingratiatingly, “You believe the Old Testament?”
“Of course I do, every syllable.”
“And the lessons it teaches?”
“Certainly!”
“Then let me tell you a story from that book. A Syrian general had a terrible disease. He consulted Elisha by deputy. Elisha said, 'Bathe seven times in a certain river, Jordan, and you will get well.' The general did not like this at all; he wanted a prescription; wanted to go to the druggist; didn't believe in hydropathy to begin, and, in any case, turned up his nose at Jordan. What! bathe in an Israelitish brook, when his own country boasted noble rivers, with a reputation for sanctity into the bargain? In short, he preferred his leprosy to such irregular medicine. But it happened, by some immense fortuity, that one of his servants, though an Oriental, was a friend, instead of a flatterer; and this sensible fellow said, 'If the prophet told you to do some great and difficult thing, to get rid of this fearful malady, would not you do it, however distasteful? and can you hesitate when he merely says, Wash in the Jordan, and be healed?' The general listened to good sense, and cured himself. Your case is parallel. You would take quantities of foul medicine; you would submit to some painful operation, if life and health depended on it; then why not do a small thing for a great result? You have only to take off an unnatural machine which cripples your growing frame, and was unknown to every one of the women whose forms in Parian marble the world admires. Off with that monstrosity, and your cure is as certain as the Syrian general's; though science, and not inspiration, dictates the easy remedy.”
Rosa had listened impatiently, and now replied with some warmth, “This is shockingly profane. The idea of comparing yourself to Elisha, and me to a horrid leper! Much obliged! Not that I know what a leper is.”
“Come, come! that is not fair,” said Mr. Lusignan. “He only compared the situation, not the people.”
“But, papa, the Bible is not to be dragged into the common affairs of life.”
“Then what on earth is the use of it?”
“Oh, papa! Well, it is not Sunday, but I have had a sermon. This is the clergyman, and you are the commentator—he! he! And so now let us go back from divinity to medicine. I repeat” (this was the first time she had said it) “that my other doctors give me real prescriptions, written in hieroglyphics. You can't look at them without feeling there MUST be something in them.”
An angry spot rose on Christopher's cheek, but he only said, “And are your other doctors satisfied with the progress your disorder is making under their superintendence?”
“Perfectly! Papa, tell him what they say, and I'll find him their prescriptions.” She went to a drawer, and rummaged, affecting not to listen.
Lusignan complied. “First of all, sir, I must tell you they are confident it is not the lungs, but the liver.”
“The what!” shouted Christopher.
“Ah!” screamed Rosa. “Oh, don't!—bawling!”
“And don't you screech,” said her father, with a look of misery and apprehension impartially distributed on the resounding pair.
