Mr. Digby entered the room of the inn in which he had left Helen. She was seated by the window, and looking out wistfully on the narrow street, perhaps at the children at play. There had never been a playtime for Helen Digby.
She sprang forward as her father came in. His coming was her holiday.
“We must go back to London,” said Mr. Digby, sinking helplessly on the chair. Then with his sort of sickly smile,—for he was bland even to his child,—“Will you kindly inquire when the first coach leaves?”
All the active cares of their careful life devolved upon that quiet child. She kissed her father, placed before him a cough mixture which he had brought from London, and went out silently to make the necessary inquiries, and prepare for the journey back.
At eight o’clock the father and child were seated in the night-coach, with one other passenger,—a man muffled up to the chin. After the first mile the man let down one of the windows. Though it was summer the air was chill and raw. Digby shivered and coughed.
Helen placed her hand on the window, and, leaning towards the passenger, whispered softly.
“Eh!” said the passenger, “draw up the window? You have got your own window; this is mine. Oxygen, young lady,” he added solemnly, “oxygen is the breath of life. Cott, child!” he continued with suppressed choler, and a Welsh pronunciation, “Cott! let us breathe and live.”
Helen was frightened, and recoiled.
Her father, who had not heard, or had not heeded, this colloquy, retreated into the corner, put up the collar of his coat, and coughed again.
“It is cold, my dear,” said he, languidly, to Helen.
The passenger caught the word, and replied indignantly, but as if soliloquizing,—
“Cold-ugh! I do believe the English are the stuffiest people! Look at their four-post beds—all the curtains drawn, shutters closed, board before the chimney—not a house with a ventilator! Cold-ugh!”
The window next Mr. Digby did not fit well into its frame. “There is a sad draught,” said the invalid.
Helen instantly occupied herself in stopping up the chinks of the window with her handkerchief. Mr. Digby glanced ruefully at the other window. The look, which was very eloquent, aroused yet more the traveller’s spleen.
“Pleasant!” said he. “Cott! I suppose you will ask me to go outside next! But people who travel in a coach should know the law of a coach. I don’t interfere with your window; you have no business to interfere with mine.”
“Sir, I did not speak,” said Mr. Digby, meekly.
“But Miss here did.”
“Ah, sir!” said Helen, plaintively, “if you knew how Papa suffers!” And her hand again moved towards the obnoxious window.
“No, my dear; the gentleman is in his right,” said Mr. Digby; and, bowing with his wonted suavity, he added, “Excuse her, sir. She thinks a great deal too much of me.”
The passenger said nothing, and Helen nestled closer to her father, and strove to screen him from the air.
The passenger moved uneasily. “Well,” said he, with a sort of snort, “air is air, and right is right: but here goes—” and he hastily drew up the window.
Helen turned her face full towards the passenger with a grateful expression, visible even in the dim light.
“You are very kind, sir,” said poor Mr. Digby; “I am ashamed to—” his cough choked the rest of the sentence. The passenger, who was a plethoric, sanguineous man, felt as if he were stifling. But he took off his wrappers, and resigned the oxygen like a hero.
Presently he drew nearer to the sufferer, and laid hand on his wrist.
“You are feverish, I fear. I am a medical man. St!—one—two. Cott! you should not travel; you are not fit for it!”
Mr. Digby shook his head; he was too feeble to reply.
The passenger thrust his hand into his coat-pocket, and drew out what seemed a cigar-case, but what, in fact, was a leathern repertory, containing a variety of minute phials.
From one of these phials he extracted two tiny globules. “There,” said he, “open your mouth, put those on the tip of your tongue. They will lower the pulse, check the fever. Be better presently, but should not travel, want rest; you should be in bed. Aconite! Henbane! hum! Your papa is of fair complexion,—a timid character, I should say;—a horror of work, perhaps. Eh, child?”
“Sir!” faltered Helen, astonished and alarmed. Was the man a conjuror?
“A case for phosphor!” cried the passenger: “that fool Browne would have said arsenic. Don’t be persuaded to take arsenic!”
“Arsenic, sir!” echoed the mild Digby. “No: however unfortunate a man may be, I think, sir, that suicide is—tempting, perhaps, but highly criminal.”
“Suicide,” said the passenger, tranquilly,—“suicide is my hobby! You have no symptom of that kind, you say?”
“Good heavens! No, sir.”
“If ever you feel violently impelled to drown yourself, take pulsatilla; but if you feel a preference towards blowing out your brains, accompanied with weight in the limbs, loss of appetite, dry cough, and bad corns, sulphuret of antimony. Don’t forget.”
Though poor Mr. Digby confusedly thought that the gentleman was out of his mind, yet he tried politely to say “that he was much obliged, and would be sure to remember;” but his tongue failed him, and his own ideas grew perplexed. His head fell back heavily, and he sank into a silence which seemed that of sleep.
The traveller looked hard at Helen, as she gently drew her father’s head on her shoulder, and there pillowed it with a tenderness which was more that of a mother than child.
“Moral affections, soft, compassionate!—a good child and would go well with—pulsatilla.”
Helen held up her finger, and glanced from her father to the traveller, and then to her father again.
“Certainly,—pulsatilla!” muttered the homoeopathist, and ensconcing himself in his own corner, he also sought to sleep. But after vain efforts, accompanied by restless gestures and movements, he suddenly started up, and again extracted his phial-book.
“What the deuce are they to me?” he muttered. “Morbid sensibility of character—coffee? No!—accompanied by vivacity and violence—nux!” He brought his book to the window, contrived to read the label on a pigmy bottle. “Nux! that’s it,” he said,—and he swallowed a globule!
“Now,” quoth he, after a pause, “I don’t care a straw for the misfortunes of other people; nay, I have half a mind to let down the window.”
Helen looked up.
“But I’ll not,” he added resolutely; and this time he fell fairly asleep.
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