BLACKWOOD'S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE
| No. DCCCLXXXXIX. | NOV. 1889. |
Vol. CXLVI. |
MASTER OF HIS FATE.
"It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul."
—A Book of Verses: W. E. Henley.
CHAPTER V.—THE REMARKABLE CASE OF LADY MARY FANE.
It was the kind of day that is called seasonable. If the sun had been obscured, the air would have been felt to be wintry; but the sunshine was full and warm, and so the world rejoiced, and declared it was a perfectly lovely May day,—just as a man who is charmed with the smiles and beauty of a woman, thinks her complete though she may have a heart of ice. Lefevre, as he went his hospital round that afternoon, found his patients revelling in the sunlight like flies. He himself was in excellent spirits, and he said a cheery or facetious word here and there as he passed, which gave infinite delight to the thin and bloodless atomies under his care; for a joke from so serious and awful a being as the doctor is to a desponding patient better than all the drugs of the pharmacopœia: it is as exquisite and sustaining as a divine text of promise to a religious enthusiast.
Dr Lefevre was thus passing round his female ward, with a train of attentive students at his heels, when the door was swung open and two attendants entered, bearing a stretcher between them, and accompanied by the house-physician and a policeman.
"What is this?" asked Lefevre, with a touch of severity; for it was irregular to intrude a fresh case into a ward while the physician was going his round.
"I thought, sir," said the house-physician, "you would like to see her at once: it seems to me a case similar to that of the man found in the Brighton train."
