burns, too; you're dreadfully feverish, do you know that? It's the journey perhaps, as you say. I should hardly have known you with that great beard, and all that thick long hair."
Wilford smiled as he tossed back the matted locks from his forehead.
"That's more like you; I know that smile; I know that grand old action of the head to shake the hair from your forehead. There's something leonine about it. Many of the Hadfields have had it, especially old Uncle Hugh and my poor friend up-stairs. I don't trace it in Stephen so much; perhaps it's because I wasn't in attendance at his birth," and the doctor laughed at himself. "He was born in the south, if you remember. They tell me I always think the most of my own children, as I call them. Ah, Wilford, it doesn't seem so very long ago since all the place was rejoicing at your birth. How well I remember it! I was attending on poor Mrs. Hadfield! Lord! it seems only yesterday!"
So the kind-hearted doctor ran on. Was he really garrulous? or was he talking with an object. Doctors are very cunning. It might have been to give time to his patient up-stairs. It might have been to accustom Wilford a little more to his position—to calm down his excitement—before the interview between the father and the son should take place. Or did it arise from that prevalent English practice of keeping back the most important topic of conversation until much preliminary discussion has been disposed of? for it is not only ladies who defer to the postscript the vital object of their letters. People will approach the matter that most interests them, and to which they are burning to come, circuitously and under cover of all sorts of common-places, just as Hamlet and Laertes stamp and wave their foils and attitudinise, losing so much time before they set to the serious business of fighting, upon which both are bent.
The doctor would say very little of old Mr. Hadfield, dying upstairs. He parried all Wilford's eager inquiries.
"He is dozing, at present," he said. "Yes—it has been a bad attack—a very bad attack; and at his age even the best constitution—and his has been a very good one—all the Hadfields have had good constitutions—but at a certain age the best constitution in the world can't stand some attacks. He is very weak, but he fights on manfully—wonderful stamina. Each time I think he is sinking, I find that he rouses himself again in a quite surprising way. Yes, you shall see him, by and by, never fear; but the slightest inclination to sleep is valuable to him just now, and we mustn't trifle with him in his present state. By and by. By and by. Why, you look taller than ever. I really think you must have grown!"
How tiresome seems this sort of talk, in answer to the questions of the sick man's friends? Will he live? Will he survive the night? For how many hours is he safe? Will the morning's sun find him yet living, or will it be struggling to pierce through the chinks of closed shutters, and to gleam in thin lines and fitful patches on the bed where a corpse is stretched out, and the sheet covers a dead man's face? Ask these questions, as they come surging up from a suffering heart, and receive in reply platitudes about stamina and constitution, and time, and quiet, care, and the best advice!
Yet what can the doctor do or say else? He is only a man after all, though a medical man. He is not one of the Parcæ. He is not Atropos the Unchangeable, ruling the end of life. And even supposing that he thinks the worst has come to the worst, as people say,—that Death's hand is already pressing on the patient's heart, staying its pulsation—is he really bound to tell his thoughts on the instant? Is he not entitled to use his discretion as to the when and where of his revelation? Don't we pay him to be discreet? So Mr. Fuller elected to talk rather of the living son than of the dying father. It may be that he had reasons for so doing; and it may be, moreover, that those reasons were good ones.
"Seven years ago, Wilford, since you went away. Yes, just seven years. Ah! a sad business—a very sad business indeed!"
"Don't speak of it now, good friend," said Wilford, turning away; "not just now, at any rate."
"I won't, my boy; I won't. But we've often thought of you—often—wondering what had become of you—what you were doing."
"And what have I done all the while?" the young man cried, bitterly. "What have I done? No good, you may be sure of that."
"Hush! hush! don't speak so now. All that's over now, you know. You're home again in your father's house. Bygones are to be bygones now. You were a mere boy when you went away. You are only a young man now. There's a long life before you—a happy one, very likely. Why not?"
Wilford shook his head mournfully.
"But there is," the doctor persisted. "I have great hopes of you. I always had great hopes of you. In the old times, don't you remember, you were quite a pet of mine? We used to have great games together. I could never keep you out of the surgery. You were always plaguing me to let you look at the skeleton locked up in the mahogany case. Do you remember that? And my poor wife, what a fright she was in when you got hold of that case of lancets! You were quite a baby then, in frocks; and she thought you'd cut your poor little hands all to pieces. But you didn't. There's a special providence watching over children, I do believe, or I'm sure a great many more would be blown up with gunpowder, or cut into little pieces with knives and sharp instruments, or be run over, or go tumbling out of window. The things children get doing! It's wonderful!"
So the doctor ran on—a small, spare man, nearly sixty years of age, perhaps, with a handsome, rather bald forehead, and quick, bright blue eyes. His smile was very pleasant, though peculiar, accompanied as it was by a certain declension of the eyebrows always, which imparted to it a piquancy and vivacity that were decidedly attractive. He toyed with his double eye-glass as he spoke, and his whole manner was very earnest. Perhaps the situation in which he was placed