Chamberss Edinburgh Journal, No. 431 | Page 4

voice of Dr Lee sounded along the passage; and after a momentary pause at the bar, his round, smirking, good-humoured, knavish face looked in at the parlour-door, where, seeing me alone, he winked with uncommon expression, and said aloud: 'A prime fire in the smoking-room, I see; I shall treat myself to a whiff there presently.' This said, the shining face vanished, in order, I doubted not, that its owner might confer with the young girl who had been inquiring for him. This Lee, I must observe, had no legal right to the prefix of doctor tacked to his name. He was merely a peripatetic quack-salver and vender of infallible medicines, who, having wielded the pestle in an apothecary's shop for some years during his youth, had acquired a little skill in the use of drugs, and could open a vein or draw a tooth with considerable dexterity. He had a large, but not, I think, very remunerative practice amongst the poaching, deer-stealing, smuggling community of those parts, to whom it was of vital importance that the hurts received in their desperate pursuits should be tended by some one not inclined to babble of the number, circumstances, or whereabouts of his patients. This essential condition Lee, hypocrite and knave as he was, strictly fulfilled; and no inducement could, I think, have prevailed upon him to betray the hiding-place of a wounded or suffering client. In other respects, he permitted himself a more profitable freedom of action, thereto compelled, he was wont apologetically to remark, by the wretchedly poor remuneration obtained by his medical practice. If, however, specie was scarce amongst his clients, spirits, as his rubicund, carbuncled face flamingly testified, were very plentiful. There was a receipt in full painted there for a prodigious amount of drugs and chemicals, so that, on the whole, he could have had no great reason to complain.
He soon reappeared, and took a chair by the fire, which, after civilly saluting me, he stirred almost fiercely, eyeing as he did so the blazing coals with a half-abstracted and sullen, cowed, disquieted look altogether unusual with him. At least wherever I had before seen him, he had been as loquacious and boastful as a Gascon.
'What is the matter, doctor?' I said. 'You appear strangely down upon your luck all at once.'
'Hush--hush! Speak lower, sir, pray. The fact is, I have just heard that a fellow is lurking about here--You have not, I hope, asked for me of any one?'
'I have not; but what if I had?'
'Why, you see, sir, that suspicion--calumny, Shakspeare says, could not be escaped, even if one were pure as snow--and more especially, therefore, when one is not quite so--so----Ahem!--you understand?'
'Very well, indeed. You would say, that when one is not actually immaculate--calumny, suspicion takes an earlier and firmer hold.'
'Just so; exactly--and, in fact--ha!'----
The door was suddenly thrown open, and the doctor fairly leaped to his feet with ill-disguised alarm. It was only the bar-maid, to ask if he had rung. He had not done so, and as it was perfectly understood that I paid for all on these occasions, that fact alone was abundantly conclusive as to the disordered state of his intellect. He now ordered brandy and water, a pipe, and a screw of tobacco. These ministrants to a mind disturbed somewhat calmed the doctor's excitement, and his cunning gray eyes soon brightly twinkled again through a haze of curling smoke.
'Did you notice,' he resumed, 'a female sitting in the bar? She knows you.'
'A young, intelligent-looking girl. Yes. Who is she?'
'Young!' replied Lee, evasively, I thought. 'Well, it's true she is young in years, but not in experience--in suffering, poor girl, as I can bear witness.'
'There are, indeed, but faint indications of the mirth and lightness of youth or childhood in those timid, apprehensive eyes of hers.'
'She never had a childhood. Girls of her condition seldom have. Her father's booked for the next world, and by an early stage too, unless he mends his manners, and that I hardly see how he's to do. The girl's been to Lymington to see after a place. Can't have it. Her father's character is against her. Unfortunate; for she's a good girl.'
'I am sorry for her. But come, to business. How about the matter you wot of?'
'Here are all the particulars,' answered Lee, with an easy transition from a sentimental to a common-sense, business-like tone, and at the same time unscrewing the lid of a tortoise-shell tobacco-box, and taking a folded paper from it. 'I keep these matters generally here; for if I were to drop such an article--just now, especially--I might as well be hung out to dry at once.'
I glanced over the paper. 'Place, date, hour correct, and thoroughly to be depended upon you say, eh?'
'Correct as Cocker, I'll answer for it.