Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/394

 386 delight when he saw who was the visitor. “Massa had been talking, only then, of sending him off for the other doctor, Mr. Grey,” he whispered; and Mr. Carlton with a haughty throw-back of his own head as he heard it,—for, somewhat curious to say, this irritation on the part of his patient tended to render him irritable,—stepped upstairs to the captain’s room.

The captain was in bed. Mr. Carlton had just brought him through one of his worst attacks of gout, and he was really progressing towards convalescence as fast as he possibly could. There was no need whatever for Mr. Carlton or any other doctor to visit him; but it was always during the period of recovery that Captain Chesney was most impatient and irritable. He was a short man, as are most sailors, with a pair of brilliant brown eyes, overhanging grey eyebrows, and grey hair. The daughter who was sitting with him, Laura Chesney, and whom he despatched from the room when he heard the step of the surgeon, had just such eyes, as brilliant and as beautiful.

Mr. Carlton took his seat between the bed and the fire, facing Captain Chesney, and waiting until that gentleman’s explosive anger should be over, before he proceeded to question his patient professionally.

“I could not help myself, Captain Chesney,” he quietly said when there was a lull in the storm; and it may be remarked that in the presence of the captain, Mr. Carlton retained his own personal suavity unruffled, however provoking the captain’s tongue might be. “I received a telegraphic message from my father, desiring me to go to town without a moment’s delay if I wished to see him alive. The hasty note I sent to you explained this.”

“And I might have died!” growled the captain.

“Pardon me, sir. Far from dying, I knew you were not in the least danger. Had you been so in ever so slight a degree, I should have requested one of the Messrs. Grey to attend you for me.”

“Had you not come in to-night I should have sent for them myself,” retorted the captain. “It’s monstrous to suppose I am to lie here in this pain with no doctor to come near me.”

“But, Captain Chesney, I feel sure the pain is nothing like what it has been. Have you not been up to—day?”

“No, I have not been up. And I don’t choose to get up,” added the irritable captain.

“Well, we will have you up tomorrow, and you will be all the better for it,” said the surgeon soothingly.

“Ugh!” grunted the captain. “Did you find your father dead?”

“No. I am glad to say I found him a trifle better than he had been when they telegraphed for me. But his life, I think, cannot be much prolonged. The obligation to attend his summons promptly; to see him, if possible, before death, lay urgently upon me, Captain Chesney; for he and I had been at variance,” continued Mr. Carlton, vouchsafing a piece of confidence into which he was rarely betrayed.

It was nothing to Captain Chesney. His medical attendant was his medical attendant, and nothing else; none less likely than the haughty old man to make of him even a temporary friend.

“He has not been a good father to me,” resumed the surgeon, looking dreamily into the fire. “Anything but that. And I lost my mother when I was an infant. But for that loss I might be different from what I am.”

“Men in this life are mostly what their own actions make them, sir; without reference to their father and mother,” returned the captain in a hard tone.

“Ah,” said Mr. Carlton. “But I meant with regard to happiness. You don’t know what my childhood and youth were—wanting my mother. Had she lived, it would have been so different.”

“Is your father a poor man?” asked the captain, taking a momentary interest in the question.

“Oh dear no. He is a rich one. And I "—Mr. Carlton suddenly laid pointed emphasis on the words—“am his only son, his only child.”

“I think that physic ought to he changed.”

The remark recalled Mr. Carlton to the present. He stood up, reached the medicine bottle pointed to by Captain Chesney, and was the composed professional attendant again. A very few minutes, and the visit ceased.

As Mr. Carlton left the chamber, the captain caught hold of the silken ribbon tied to his bedstead, that communicated with the bell-rope, and rang a peel loud enough to awaken the seven sleepers. It was for Pompey to show the doctor out; and Pompey generally was favoured with this sort of peal.

Mr. Carlton closed the bed-room door, stepped along the corridor, and met a girl, young and beautiful, who appeared at the door of another room. It was Laura Chesney, and her luminous dark eyes were raised to Mr. Carlton as he took her hand, and then were dropped behind the dark lashes which closed on her hot cheek.

A hot cheek then; a cheek like a burning