doctor! Odd enough: I am so often called in by patients who have half killed themselves by trying to cure themselves, that I know the names of quack medicines pretty well, but I never heard of Raby's Restorative. Have you any of this precious compound in the room?" "Yes; there is an unopened bottle of it by the glass." "There is no label on the bottle," observed the Doctor, " an appendage in which patent medicines are seldom deficient; nor is there any vendor's or chemist's name, an omission equally uncommon." After smelling it for some time, and applying it very cautiously to the tip of his tongue, he continued "I think I can guess one of the ingredients; but if you will allow me to analyse the mixture at home, I shall be better enabled to decide. Promise me, in the mean time, not to taste another drop till you see me to-morrow." 66 Very well; but I shall miss it, for it's a very pleasant and comfortable cordial. George assures me that when taken in sufficient quantities it has always answered the purpose." "Very likely; but what was the purpose? I am afraid of quack medicines, as I have already told you, and still more of amateur pre scriptions." 66 Why, you are as suspicious as Sarah, who has implored me, over and over, not to go on with the Restorative. Poor girl! she has been a capital nurse, waiting upon me early and late, and never out of humour, except when I insist on following George's advice and increasing the cordial." "Her looks show that she has been doing too much. be. I will send you a regular nurse to-morrow." This must not "As to the girl's looks, I don't think much of that. Perhaps she is pining for her pauper lover: besides, my children ought to do something for me; I'm sure I have done enough for them, never hesitating, for their sakes, to commit a little irregularity in my contracts, when I thought it could be done safely,-always remembering my young folks." "And sometimes, as it seems, forgetting yourself." "I shouldn't confess these little malpractices to any one else, and this I do in confidence; my confession is quite entre nous." "No such thing; a third party has been listening to you all the time." "Bless my heart! you don't say so. Who?-where ?" The Doctor pointed his fore-finger to the sky, and remained silent. Strange! that so simple an action should send a thrill to my heart, and make me cast down my eyes with a feeling of humiliation and remorse. A minute or two elapsed before I could find courage to say "Nay, Doctor, you must not be squeamish and puritanical. Every one cheats government." "But no one cheats God!" was the reply; and I began to wish my rebuker out of the room, when he suddenly exclaimed "How comes it that your son makes Sarah the dispenser of his quack medicine, if such it is, and the watcher by your bed-side, when he himself ought to perform those duties ?" "Oh! George never misses the great Newmarket meeting, and he has a horse entered for the two first races. He is always happy when he is staying with his young friend, Sir Freeman Dashwood, and I have always indulged him in his whims and fancies." "Even to the double doses of Raby's Restorative, although it has hitherto failed so signally in realising its name. I will hurry home and send you some alexipharmick medicines, which I beg you will take as soon as you can." "How fond you all are of long words! What the deuce are alexipharmicks?" "They are usually administered when we suspect the presence of poison in the system." "Poison! what a horrible idea! Surely you do not suspect me of having been poisoned ?" "It is not my business to suspect, but to deal with symptoms, and yours very much resemble those of a poisoned man. You may have unconsciously received some deleterious matter into your system, which we must instantly endeavour to expel. Many men are thus destroyed without foul play of any sort. Yours is a case that requires prompt remedies, so I must hurry home. I will give directions to Sarah, in case you should have a recurrence of your attacks to-night, and will repeat my visit early in the morning." CHAPTER III. WHILE I thought that Doctor Linnel had indulged in very unnecessary suspicions as to Raby's Restorative, I could not shake off an occasional misgiving touching its injurious effects upon my health. That the most deleterious_compounds were sometimes sold under the name of quack medicines I was fully aware; but that my son, upon whom I had so fondly doated since his childhood, should press it upon me with so much importunity, unless he were fully convinced of its salutary quality, I could not bring myself to believe. With no ordinary interest, therefore, did I cross-question the Doctor next morning, as to the results of his analysis; but his answers were so cautious, not to say evasive, that it was difficult to draw from them any very decided inference. Judging, however, by what he supposed or vaguely hinted, rather than by what he actually said, I was led to believe that his impressions were unfavourable, especially when he again alluded, with much significance of manner, to the absence of a vendor's name, or label of any sort, on the bottles. He congratulated me on having discontinued the draughts, which might possibly, though he would not positively affirm it, have been the cause of my mysterious malady; and expressed a hope that its progress would be arrested by the copious use of the medicines he had prescribed. My strange complaint, however, had got such complete possession of my system, that it would neither yield to the most potent remedies, nor to the unremitting and affectionate attentions of my daughter, who was now assisted by a regular nurse. With the fond illusion of an invalid, I still clung to the notion that my climacterical year prevented the remedies from proving efficacious; but whatever might be the cause, I could not conceal from myself that I was rapidly sinking. The derangement of all my bodily functions increased, the fainting fits and cataleptic attacks were more frequent and of longer continuance; and though, as I was assured, my personal appearance was far from indicating any fatal result, I felt as if life were passing away from me. At this juncture, unfortunately, the Doctor was summoned to attend his sick mother at Bath; but as he left full instructions as to my treatment, and contemplated an early return to his home, I would not allow any other physician to be called in. His absence, however, was unexpectedly protracted, and I dragged on without any material alteration in my state, until one morning a sudden and totally new sensation paralysed my whole frame. My head swam ; I felt as if Death had laid his hand upon my heart; and I had just breath enough to whisper to my attendant "Nurse, I am dying! all is over! I feel suffocated. Take off some of the bed-clothes." These were the last words I uttered before my burial! Marvellous and almost incredible as the statement may appear, I was only in a cataleptic trance, for although my limbs were stretched out in all the rigidity of death, my senses and my consciousness were by no means obliterated. Nay, they were in some respects intensified, for I could hear a distant whisper which would have been previously inaudible; one eye, being only half-closed, retained its full power of vision, and though the other was quite shut, methought I could see through the lid as clearly as if it had been a spectacle-glass. My tongue having lost all power of motion, I was utterly speechless, but my impeded breath, struggling in the transit of my body from vitality to inanimation, forced itself from my throat with a noise of gurgling and strangulation. The fat nurse who had htherto approached me with a maternal smile and a coaxing voice, as she exclaimed,-"Now, my dear good sir, it's time to take the pills. How purely you do look this morning! My life on't we shall have you riding the white cob again in a week or two!" -the fat nurse, I say, had no sooner caught the choking sound I have mentioned, than she croaked in her natural accents-"Them's the deathrattles! Then it is all over, sure enough, and high time too, God knows. Hanged if I didn't think the bothering old chap would never die. Can't imagine, for my part, how people can go on lingering in this way, willy-nilly, shilly-shally. If they can't die, they should live; and if they can't live, they should die. That's the worst of sickness; it do make folks so uncommon selfish, which is my peticklar 'bomination." Hastening into the parlour with which my bedroom communicated, this hater of selfishness snatched up a valuable shawl belonging to my daughter, as well as a cloth cloak of my own, and spread them over me, an action which would have surprised me, after having so recently requested her to remove some of the clothes, had I not recollected that these rapacious harpies claim as their perquisite everything lying on the bed when its occupant dies. Oh! how I wished for the use of my tongue, when I heard her afterwards affirming that the poor dear gentleman was "sadly cold and shivery just afore he went off, and so she covered him up comfortable." Making no further addition to her perquisites than by pocketing a few odds and ends lying about the room, the worthy creature, putting on the most heart-broken look she could assume, and with a ready-prepared handkerchief in her hand, hurried away to announce my death to my daughter and the household. CHAPTER IV. As Sarah had driven over to Doctor Linnel's to ascertain the day of his return, for which she was becoming hourly more impatient, no one entered my chamber for more than two hours, an interval which gave me leisure to reflect upon my perilous and unprecedented state. In all my former attacks the mind had sympathised with the suspended vitality of the frame, but now I had vital senses and apprehensiveness in a dead integument. Was this dissolution of partnership temporary only? How long would it last? Was it final? What then was to be my ultimate fate? I had read of disembodied spirits, and I could understand the continuance of such a separate existence; but as for me, I was entombed alive in my own body-destined, perhaps, to die hideously and loathsomely, as my corporeal particles putrified and decomposed. I had read, too, of miserable victims who, being buried in a trance, had turned round in their coffins; and of some who, having forced themselves out of them, had been discovered as huddled skeletons in a corner of the vault, whither they had crawled to die of hunger and exhaustion. Recoiling with a mental shudder from such horrible thoughts, I clung to the hope that, although my present fearful seizure was decidedly different from all my previous attacks, it might, after a little longer interval, terminate, like them, in my revival. While I was alternately horrified and reassured by these anticipations of my fate, my daughter entered, and after bursting into a passion of tears as she kissed my insensible lips, she kneeled down by my bed-side, and prayed long and earnestly for the discontinuance of my trance; for, in spite of the positive assurances of my death, she would not abandon the hope of my recovery. Some one, however, in the house, probably the nurse, who wished the forfeiture of the shawls to be confirmed, chose to consider me unequivocally defunct, for I heard the servants closing the shutters in the other apartments, and was made aware of various post mortem proceedings, to which I listened with conflicting feelings that baffle all description. The house was now quiet, but occasional sounds still fell upon my ear with an ominous and harrowing significancy, for every passing hour announced by the hall clock seemed to be a passing-bell that ratified my decease, and brought me so much nearer to the appalling moment when I should be buried alive. At intervals other sounds were distinguishable; and as I caught the grating of wheels on the road, the whistle of a railway train, the clattering and chattering of my servants at their dinner, it seemed to me both unfeeling and unnatural that, on the very day of my supposed death, the world should be pursuing its ordinary occupations, and my own servants regaling themselves with their customary appetites, as if no such catastrophe had occurred. Thus I remained, with no other companion than my own sad thoughts, till the evening, when my daughter's maid and the housemaid, having solemnly pledged themselves to stand by each other, whatever might happen, and grasping each other's hand to ensure the performance of the contract, stole on tiptoe into the chamber to have a peep at me, neither of them having ever seen a dead man. Peering at me furtively and askance, as if afraid of being scared by my ghost, they agreed, whisperingly, that I looked for all the world as if I were fast asleep, although Nurse had maintained that I was as dead as a door-nail. Both declared that I should be no real gentleman if I had not remembered all the servants in my will; and as mourning was a matter of course, one of them had resolved that her dress should be made to fasten in front, and the other knew of a most becoming pattern for her white muslin cap. But their conversation was not limited to such frivolities, for the lady's maid declared, on the authority of her mistress, that Dr. Linnel, before he went away, had written to Mr. George, stating that he must return immediately; that Miss Sarah had said she hoped he would arrive the very next morning, and that the Doctor himself was expected back on the day after; whereupon they stole away, with their hands still locked together. In these tidings there was no small comfort. Should I revive, my son would have an instant opportunity of clearing himself from all suspicion touching the Restorative, in which I still felt a hope rather than a confidence that he would succeed. Should my trance continue, there was no fear of my being buried alive, for Linnel would again be at my bedside long before the time for my interment, and he was too skilful and experienced a physician not to distinguish between real and apparent death. My most appalling and revolting terror being thus removed, I patiently counted the clock till my usual bed-time, hoping that I might then fall asleep, and so escape the tedium of a long wakeful night. But sleep is a provision of nature for repairing the day's wear and tear; in my cataleptic state there had been no such expenditure of corporeal energy, and consequently there was no requirement of repose. Perhaps my mind was still too much agitated to settle into any sort of oblivion; perhaps it would never be otherwise, and my trance-existence-might be a perpetual consciousness, and consequently an unvaried misery. Such a state must soon lead to madness; but how could a man be mad and motionless, a maniac and a statue ? What inconceivable misery, to feel your brain raving and raging with an insanity which can find no vent for its fury, either by the explosions of the voice or the convulsive violence of the limbs! In such sad thoughts, wearily and drearily did the first night of my living death drag its slow length along. TASSO. BY W. BRAILSFORD. THE world and all for love, the same fond theme |