Page:Once a Week NS Volume 7.djvu/14

 —I don't think the sentence is in the Latin  Grammar—“Sine verecundia nihil rectum esse potest, nihil honestum.”

INE, wine!—we will save her yet!” cried the doctor. Heavens above us! what an anxiety and bustle, what a straining of hope, of nerve, what a motion and an eagerness, to save life —one life! As if at other times we were not all as ready to throw away lives by the thousand!

For the sake of science—rather, cynics might say (but cynics are such queer fellows!), for the sake of himself—the good Dr. Richards was as eager in attempting to bolster up the fleeting existence of Mrs. Wade as a man well could be who was hunting, let us say, or pursuing any object, fame, or wealth, or ambition of any sort

The good little man—who had a tender heart too—would have been just as eager to annihilate the reputation of a rival; or to have criticised, in one of the journals devoted to medical science, the works of a brother with such biting gall, that the said brother might have languished and have died from the wound, and Dr. Richards would sophistically have believed that he had done his duty. But now the desire was not to slay, but to save—not to wound, but to heal; and the eager little man, putting his arm round the thin, wasted form of the invalid, lifted her up, made the Religieuse arrange the pillows, and himself poured, slowly and carefully, some very old port— of the vintage of '98—down the throat of poor Eugenie.

It would have done Old Daylight good to have seen the form of the woman he loved—even although he were deceived in her—suddenly resuscitate itself under the influence of the old port that he had provided.

And is it to he attributed to the far-seeing cleverness of Mr. Tom Forster that, in the degenerate days in which he lived, forty years ago, he was so much before his time that he made himself a judge of wines, as to age and vintage, and at a time when the middle-class person drank port as dark as the blacking of the patriotic Mr. Hunt, and as fiery as the furnace in the pantomime of “St. George and the Dragon?”

The good sister dropped her beads when Eugenie spoke. She had been so long silent, that the nurse had grown accustomed to the dumb woman she attended to, and whose lips she wetted with brandy and water; and she had so quietly’made her own soul in her constant prayers as she moved noiselessly about the room, that Mrs. Wade was forgotten, save as some necessary piece of furniture.

So in this world we become the property of each other. “ I have said so many aves so many credos. Let me see—what must I do? Oh, I must attend to my invalid.”

“ My invalid!” Poor Eugenie had faded out of life, and had not a holding even in herself.

Mr. Tom Forster’s wine seconded the effect of the electric fluid in a marvellous way. The most admirable and subtle spirit, alcohol—the most absurdly abused of all God’s creatures, the thing which sets free the true nature of man, and then is credited by the ungrateful creature with having caused the crimes which it gave him the courage to commit—coursed through the veins of  Eugenie, and made her tremble into something like reanimation.

“It is wondrous, is it not,” whispered the doctor to his onlooking friends, “that, when one who has lived simply and purely, as this lady has, and who has no organic disease, some little action like that of electricity and alcohol will give her life? You see, it has a mechanical effect—it is like shaking a watch when a particle of dust stops it. And yet, if this lady had been; under the hands of Dr. Dash or Dr. Blank, he would have drenched the life out of her; with Physic!—Physic!” Here the doctor, in great disgust, made a face as if he were taking a nasty dose of senna. “Physic—if only the fools knew it—physic means Nature! and they have perverted it to signify poisonous drugs!”

“Half a glass more, sister,” he said, after a pause; during which the lips of the patient opened, and the faintest of faint glows rose to her throat and cheeks.

“There—that will be enough. She wishes