Page:Braddon--The Trail of the Serpent.djvu/165

Rh "No complaints about Sir Hudson Lowe, I hope?" said the medical man. "They give you everything you want, general?"

The good doctor, being so much in the habit of humouring his patients, had their titles always at the tip of his tongue; and walked about in a perfect atmosphere of Pinnock's Goldsmith.

As the general made no reply to his question, the doctor looked from him to the boy, who had, out of respect to the medical official, descended from his pulpit, and stood tugging at a very diminutive lock of hair, with an action which he intended to represent a bow.

"Does he ask for anything?" asked the doctor.

"Don't he, sir?" said the boy, answering one question with another. "He's been doing nothin' for ever so long but askin' for a drop o' wine. He says he feels a kind of sinkin' that nothin' but wine can cure."

"He shall have it, then," said the doctor. "A little port wine with a touch of iron in it would help to bring him round as soon as anything, and be sure you see that he takes it. I've been giving him quinine for some time past; but it has done so little towards making him stronger, that I sometimes doubt his having taken it. Has he complained of anything else?"

"Well, sir," said the boy, this time looking at his questioner very intently, and seeming to consider every word before he said it, "there is somethin' which I can make out from what he says when he talks to hisself—and he does talk to hisself awful—somethin' which preys upon his mind very much; but I don't suppose it's much good mentioning it either." Here he stopped, hesitating, and looking very earnestly at the doctor.

"Why not, my boy?"

"Because you see, sir, what he hankers after is agen the rules of the asylum—leastways, the rules the Board makes for such as him."

"But what is it, my good lad? Tell me what it is he wishes for?" said the medical man.

"Why, it's a singular wish, I dare say, sir; but he's allus a talkin' about the other lun" he hesitated, as if out of delicacy towards Richard, and substituted the word "boarders" for that which he had been about to use—"and he says, if he could only be allowed to mix with 'em now and then he'd be as happy as a king. But, of course, as I was a-tellin' him when you come in, sir, that's agen the rules of the establishment, and in consequence is impossible—'cause why, these 'ere rules is like Swedes and Nasturtiums—[the boy from Slopperton may possibly have been thinking of the Medes and Persians]—and can't be gone agen."