* Garth.
Julia looked him in the face, and coldly ignored this perversion of Mrs. Maxley's meaning; and Mrs. Dodd returned pertinaciously to the previous topic. “Mr. Alfred Hardie interests me; he was good to Edward. I am curious to know why you call him a puppy?”
“Only because he is one, ma'am. And that is no reason at all with 'the Six.' He is a juveneel pidant and a puppy, and contradicts ivery new truth, bekase it isn't in Aristotle and th' Eton Grammar; and he's such a chatterbox, ye can't get in a word idgeways; and he and his sister—that's my virgin martyr—are a farce. He keeps sneerin' at her relijjin, and that puts her in such a rage, she threatens 't' intercede for him at the throne.”
“Jargon,” sighed Mrs. Dodd, and just shrugged her lovely shoulders. “We breathe it—we float in an atmosphere of it. My love?” And she floated out of the room, and Julia floated after.
Sampson sat meditating on the gullibility of man in matters medical. This favourite speculation detained him late, and almost his first word on entering the drawing-room was, “Good night, little girl.”
Julia coloured at this broad hint, drew herself up, and lighted a bedcandle. She went to Mrs. Dodd, kissed her, and whispered in her ear, “I hate him!” and, as she retired, her whole elegant person launched ladylike defiance; under which brave exterior no little uneasiness was hidden. “Oh, what will become of me!” thought she, “if he has gone and told him about Henley?”
“Let's see the prescriptions, ma'am,” said Dr. Sampson.
Delighted at this concession, Mrs. Dodd took them out of her desk and spread them earnestly. He ran his eye over them, and pointed out that the mucous-membrane man and the nerve man had prescribed the same medicine, on irreconcilable grounds; and a medicine, moreover, whose effect on the nerves was nil, and on the mucous membrane was not to soothe it, but plough it and harrow it; “and did not that open her eyes?” He then reminded her that all these doctors in consultation would have contrived to agree. “But you,” said he, “have baffled the collusive hoax by which Dox arrived at a sham uniformity—honest uniformity can never exist till scientific principles obtain. Listme! To begin, is the pashint in love?”
The doctor put this query in just the same tone in which they inquire “Any expectoration?” But Mrs. Dodd, in reply, was less dry and business-like. She started and looked aghast. This possibility had once, for a moment, occurred to her, but only to be rejected, the evidence being all against it.
“In love?” said she. “That child, and I not know it!”
He said he had never supposed that. “But I thought I'd just ask ye; for she has no bodily ailment, and the passions are all counterfeit diseases; they are connected, like all diseases, with cerebral instability, have their hearts and chills like all diseases, and their paroxysms and remissions like all diseases. Nlistme! You have detected the signs of a slight cerebral instability; I have ascertained th' absence of all physical cause: then why make this healthy pashint's buddy a test-tube for poisons? Sovereign drugs (I deal with no other, I leave the nullities to the noodles) are either counterpoisons or poisons, and here there is nothing to counterpoison at prisent. So I'm for caushin, and working on the safe side th' hidge, till we are less in the dark. Mind ye, young women at her age are kittle cattle; they have gusts o' this, and gusts o' that, th' unreasonable imps. D'ye see these two pieces pasteboard? They are tickets for a ball,
In Barkton town-hall.”
“Yes, of course I see them,” said Mrs. Dodd dolefully.
“Well, I prescribe 'em. And when they have been taken,
And the pashint well shaken,
perhaps we shall see whether we are on the right system: and if so, we'll dose her with youthful society in a more irrashinal form; conversaziones, cookeyshines, et citera. And if we find ourselves on the wrong tack why then we'll hark back.
Stick blindly to 'a course,' the Dockers cry.
But it does me harm: Then 'twill do good by-and-bye. Where lairned ye that, Echoes of Echoes, say! The killer ploughs 'a course,' the healer 'feels his way.'”
So mysterious are the operations of the human mind, that, when we have exploded in verse tuneful as the above, we lapse into triumph instead of penitence. Not that doggrel meets with reverence here below—the statues to it are few, and not in marble, but in the material itself—But then an Impromptu! A moment ago our Posy was not: and now is; with the speed, if not the brilliancy, of lightning, we have added a handful to the intellectual dust-heap of an oppressed nation. From this bad eminence Sampson then looked down complacently, and saw Mrs. Dodd's face as long as his arm. She was one that held current opinions; and the world does not believe Poetry can sing the Practical. Verse and useful knowledge pass for incompatibles; and, though Doggrel is not Poetry, yet it has a lumbering proclivity that way, and so forfeits the confidence of grave sensible people. This versification, and this impalpable and unprecedented prescription she had waited for so long, seemed all of a piece to poor mamma: wild, unpractical, and—“oh, horror! horror!”—eccentric.
Sampson read her sorrowful face after his fashion. “Oh, I see, ma'am,” cried he. “Cure is not welcome unless it comes in the form consecrated by cinturies of slaughter. Well, then, give me a sheet.” He took the paper and rent it asunder, and wrote this on the larger fragment:
Rx Die Mercur. circa x. hor: vespert:
eat in musca ad Aulam oppid:
Saltet cum xiii canicul:
praesertim meo. Dom: reddita,
6 hora matutin: dormiat at prand:
Repetat stultit: pro re nata.
He handed this with a sort of spiteful twinkle to Mrs. Dodd, and her countenance lightened again. Her sex will generally compound with whoever can give as well as take. Now she had extracted a real, grave prescription, she acquiesced in the ball, though not a county one; “to satisfy your whim, my good, kind friend, to whom I owe so much.”
Sampson called on his way back to town, and, in course of conversation, praised nature for her beautiful instincts, one of which, he said, had inspired Miss Julee, at a credulous age, not to swallow “the didly drastics of the tinkering dox.”
Mrs. Dodd smiled, and requested permission to contradict him; her daughter had taken the several prescriptions.
Sampson inquired brusquely if she took him for a fool.
She replied calmly: “No; for a very clever, but rather opinionated personage.
“Opinionated? So is ivery man who has grounnds for his opinin. D'ye think, because Dockers Short, an' Bist, an' Kinyon, an' Cuckoo, an' Jackdaw, an' Starling, an' Co., don't know the dire effecks of calomel an' drastics on the buddy, I don't know't? Her eye, her tongue, her skin, her voice, her elastic walk, all tell me she has not been robbed of her vital resources. 'Why, if she had taken that genteel old thief Short's rimidies alone, the girl's gums would be sore,
And herself at Dith's door.”
Mrs. Dodd was amused. “Julia, this is so like the gentlemen; they are in love with argumeunt. They go on till they reason themselves out of their reason. Why beat about the bush; when there she sits?”
“What,
