"Don"t I, oh, don"t I, by Jove! Now tell me. What were you using?"

"Well, sir, I thought I would fire at nothing but duck on the first day. Just to christen the day, sir. So I used five and a half and smokeless diamond. Your cartridges."

"What gun?"

"Well, I used my old pigeon gun, sir. It"s full choke, both barrels and on the meils it"s always a case of long shots."

"Why didn"t you have one of my guns? The long-chambered twelve, or the big Greener ten-bore--they"re there in the cupboard in the gun room, you"ve got the key! Did a whole sord of mallard come over, or were those three stragglers?"

"A sord, sir. The two drakes were right and left shots and this duck came down too. As I said to the mistress just now, "last year," I said, "Mr. Gilbert and I were out for two mornings after the first of August and we never brought back nothing but a brace of curlew--and now here"s a leash of duck, M"m.""

"If you"d had a bigger gun, and a sord came over, you"d have got a bag, William! Why the devil didn"t you take the ten-bore?"

"Well, sir, I won"t say as I didn"t go and have a look at "im in the gun room--knowing how they"re flighting just now and that a big gun would be useful. But with you lying in bed I couldn"t do it. So I went out and shot just for the honour of the house, as it were."

"Well, I shall be up in a day or two, William, and I"ll see if I can"t wipe your eye!"

"I hope you will, sir, I"m sure. There"s quite a lot of mallard about, early as it is."

"I"ll get among them soon, Tumpany!"

"Yessir--the Mistress I think, sir, and the doctor."

Tumpany"s ears were keen, like those of most wildfowlers,--he heard voices coming along the pa.s.sage towards the bedroom.

The door opened and Morton Sims came in with Mary.

He shook hands with Gilbert, admired Tumpany"s leash of duck, and then, left alone with the poet, sat down upon the bed.

The two men regarded each other with interest. They were both "personalities" and both of them made their mark in their several ways.

"Good heavens!" the doctor was thinking. "What a brilliant brain"s hidden behind those lint bandages! This is the man who can make the throat swell with sorrow and the heart leap high with hope! With all my learning and success, I can only bring comfort to people"s bowels or cure insomnia. This fellow here can heal souls--like a priest! Even for me--now and then--he has unlocked the gates of fairyland."

"Good Lord!" Gilbert said to himself. "What wouldn"t I give to be a fellow like this fellow. He is great. He can put a drug into one"s body and one"s soul awakes! He"s got a magic wand. He waves it, and sanity returns. He pours out of a bottle and blind eyes once more see G.o.d, dull ears hear music! I go and get drunk at Amberleys" house and cringe before a Toftrees, Mon Dieu! This man can never go away from a house without leaving a sense of loss behind him."

--"Well, how are you, Mr. Lothian?"

"Much better, thanks, Doctor. I"m feeling quite fit, in fact."

"Yes, but you"re not, you know. I made a complete examination of you yesterday, you remember, and now I"ve tabulated the results."

"Tell me then."

"If you weren"t who you are, I wouldn"t tell you at all, being who you are, I will."

Lothian nodded. "Fire away!" he said with his sweet smile, his great charm of manner--all the greater for the enforced abstinence of the last three days--"I shan"t funk anything you tell me."

"Very well, then. Your liver is beginning--only beginning--to be enlarged. You"ve got a more or less permanent catarrh of the stomach, and a permanent catarrh of the throat and nasal pa.s.sages from membranes inflamed by alcohol and constant cigarette smoking. And there is a hint of coming heart trouble, too."

Lothian laughed, frankly enough. "I know all that," he said. "Really, Doctor, there"s nothing very dreadful in that. I"m as strong as a horse, really!"

"Yes, you are, in one way. Your const.i.tution is a fine one. I was talking to your man-servant yesterday and I know what you are able to go through when you are shooting in the winter. I would not venture upon such risks myself even."

"Then everything is for the best, in the best of all possible worlds?"

Gilbert answered lightly, feeling sure that the other would take him.

"Unfortunately, in your case, it"s _not_," Morton Sims replied. "You seem to forget two things about "Candide"--that Dr. Pangloss was a failure and a fool, and that one must cultivate one"s garden! Voltaire was a wise man!"

Gilbert dropped his jesting note.

"You"ve something to say to me," he answered, "probably a good deal more. Say it. Say anything you like, and be quite certain that I shan"t be offended."

"I will. It"s this, Mr. Lothian. Your stomach will go on digesting and your heart performing its functions long after your brain has gone."

Then there was silence in the sunlit bedroom.

"You think that?" Lothian said at length, in a quiet voice.

"I know it. You are on the verge of terrible nervous and mental collapse. I"m going to be brutal, but I"m going to speak the truth.

Three months more of drinking as you have been of late and, for all effective purposes you go out!"

Gilbert"s face flushed purple with rage.

"How dare you say such a thing to me, sir?" he cried. "How dare you tell me, tell _me_, that I have been drinking heavily. You are certainly wise to say it when there is no witness here!"

Morton Sims smiled sadly. He was quite unmoved by Lothian"s rage. It left him cool. But when he spoke, there was a hypnotic ring in his voice which caught at the weak and tremulous will of the man upon the bed and held it down.

"Now really, Mr. Lothian!" he said, "what on earth is the use of talking like that to me? It means nothing. It does not express your real thought. Can you suppose that your condition is not an open book to _me_? You know that you wouldn"t speak as you"re doing if your nerves weren"t in a terrible state. You have one of the finest minds in England; don"t bring it to irremediable ruin for want of a helping hand."

Lothian lay back on his pillow breathing quickly. He felt that his hands were trembling and he pushed them under the clothes. His legs were twitching and a spasm of cramp-pain shot into the calf of one of them.

"Look here, Doctor," he said after a moment, "I spoke like a fool, which I"m not. I have been rather overdoing it lately. My work has been worrying me and I"ve been trying to whip myself up with alcohol."

Morton Sims nodded. "Well, we"ll soon put you right," he said.

Mary Lothian had told him the true history of the case. For three years, at least, her husband had been drinking steadily, silent, persistent, lonely drinking. For a long time, a period of months to her own fear and horror-quickened knowledge, Lothian had been taking a quant.i.ty of spirits which she estimated at two-thirds of a bottle a day. Without enlightening her, and adding what an inebriate of this type could easily procure in addition, the doctor put the true quant.i.ty at about a bottle and a half--say for the last two months certainly.

He knew also, that whatever else Lothian might do, either now or when he became more confidential, he would lie about the _quant.i.ty_ of spirits he was in the habit of consuming. Inebriates always do.

"Of course," he said, talking in a quiet man-of-the-world voice, "_I_ know what a strain such work as yours must be, and there is certainly temptation to stimulate flagging energies with some drug. Hundreds of men do it, doctors too!--literary men, actors, legal men!"

He noted immediately the slight indication of relief in the patient, who thought he had successfully deceived him, and he saw also that sad and doubting anxiety in the eyes, which says so poignantly, "what must I do to be saved?"

Could he save this man?

Everything was against it, his history, his temperament, the length to which he had already gone. The whole stern and horrible statistics of experience were dead against it.

But he could, and would, try. There was a chance.