Page:Quartette - Kipling (1885).djvu/106

 brain, too little stomach, and thoroughly unhealthy eyes. Get your stomach straight and the rest follows. And all that's French for a liver pill, my boy. I take sole medical charge of you from this hour! for you're too interesting a phenomenon to be passed over." By this time we were deep in the shadow of the Blessington lower road and the 'rickshaw came to a dead stop under a pine-clad, overhanging shale cliff. Instinctively I halted too, giving my reason. Heatherlegh rapped out an oath:—"Now, if you think I'm going to spend a cold night on the hill side for the sake of a stomach cum brain cum eye illusionLord, ha' mercy! what's that!"

There was a muffled report like a cannon; a blinding smother of dust twenty yards in front of us—a crack—the noise of rent boughs—and about ten yards of the cliff-side, pines, undergrowth, and all, slid down into the road below; completely blocking it up. The uprooted trees swayed and tottered for a moment like drunken giants in the gloom, and then fell prone among their fellows with a thunderous crash. Our two horses stood motionless and sweating with fear. As soon as the rattle of falling earth and stone had subsided, my companion muttered:—"Man, if we'd gone forward we should have been ten feet deep in our graves by now. There are more things in heaven and earth. Come home, Pansay and thank God. I want a peg badly." We retraced our way over the Church Ridge, and I arrived at Dr. Heatherlegh's house shortly after midnight. His attempts toward my cure commenced almost immediately, and for a week I never left his house. Many a time in the course of that week did I bless the good fortune which had thrown me in contact with Simla's best and kindest doctor. Day by day my spirits grew lighter and more equable. Day by day too I became more and more inclined to fall in with Heatherlegh's "spectral illusion" theory, implicating eyes, brain, and stomach. I wrote to Kitty telling her that a slight sprain caused by a fall from my horse kept me indoors for a few days; and that I should be alright before she had time to regret my absence, and much more fully to the same effect. Heatherlegh's treatment was simple to a degree. It consisted of liver-pills, cold water baths and strong exercise, taken in the dusk or at early dawn—for, as he sagely observed:—"A man with a sprained ankle doesn't walk a dozen miles a day, and your young woman might be wondering if she saw you." At the end of the week, after much examination of pupil and pulse and strict injunctions