Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/755

1885.] It's true that I have not had an attack for a couple of years. Just like my luck," he added, with the fractious injustice of a spoiled child, "it's choosing to lay hold of me in this heaven-forsaken Patmos, where the doctors are sure to smell of spirits and peat-smoke, and their drugs can't be worth the bottles they put them in. Well, if I am to be ill, I'll be ill in Berkeley Square, – always supposing I don't break down in making a bolt for it."

And when Willis appeared with his master's hot water, he received orders to make inquiries as to steamers, but to pack immediately in any case.

"Should no steamer be expected to-day, you will go and bargain for a tug, or something of that kind."

And Willis, who had been broken to passive obedience, and who had long before ceased to be surprised at anything, if he shrugged his shoulders metaphorically, simply answered with a "Yes, sir."

As it happened, a cargo-steamer, carrying passengers when it could pick them up, had come the day before into the adjacent harbour, and having received prompt despatch from the company's agents, was prepared to weigh anchor in the forenoon. Lord Somerled, Mr Winstanley's noble host, protested vehemently against his friend's departure. Mr Winstanley was profuse of apologies, but inflexible. It was altogether for Lord Somerled's sake that he left. He had made a rule of never being laid up in a friend's house when he could help it, and it was a rule he had never hitherto departed from.

"Nothing would tempt me to victimise you, my dear fellow. It would be flying in the face of all my principles. I hope I'm unselfish before everything, and I know my duty to my neighbour better than that."

So his lordship did what the valet did not venture on. He presumed on a long acquaintance so far as to shrug his shoulders openly, and ordered the carriage to drive Mr Winstanley to the harbour.

To do Mr Winstanley bare justice, however precipitate his impulses, he acted upon them with rare determination. Even to himself he would have been loath to acknowledge that, "not to put too fine a point on it," he had made a fool of himself. Yet we will not undertake to say that he had not some searchings of heart, when he hobbled on his sounder foot across the greasy decks of the Cuchullin. We could almost aver that when he was assisted down the battered brass-bound steps of the dark companion, and had stumbled into the gloom of his strong-smelling little cabin, he wafted a sigh of soft regret towards the comfortable quarters he had precipitately quitted. If he suffered, however, like the impenitent cardinal, he "made no sign"; and suffer he certainly did, in body if not in spirit. The shaking of a carriage is far from being a sovereign specific for a sharp attack of gout that has quickly developed itself. If we were to give a non-professional diagnosis of his symptoms, we should say that he felt as if the roomy slipper he was wearing had suddenly become several sizes too small for him; as if a cook had been scientifically scoring the ailing foot in the fashion in which you prepare a spatch-cocked chicken, subsequently rubbing in the mustard and Worcester sauce, not by any means forgetting the cayenne; and as if a spark or two from the glowing kitchen-fire had flown and lodged themselves under the toenail. In such circumstances the Stoic may make no sign, but his