Bath, or anywhere else out of the way. There is Scatcherd, he takes brandy; and there is Winterbones, he takes gin; and it'd puzzle a woman to say which is worst, master or man.'
It will be seen from this, that Lady Scatcherd and the doctor were on very familiar terms as regarded her little domestic inconveniences.
'Tell Sir Roger I am here, will you?' said the doctor.
'You'll take a drop of sherry before you go up?' said the lady.
'Not a drop, thank you,' said the doctor.
'Or, perhaps, a little cordial?'
'Not a drop of anything, thank you; I never do, you know.'
'Just a thimbleful of this?' said the lady, producing from some recess under the sideboard a bottle of brandy; 'just a thimbleful? It's what he takes himself.'
When Lady Scatcherd found that even this argument failed, she led the way to the great man's bedroom.
'Well, doctor! well, doctor! well, doctor!' was the greeting with which our son of Galen was saluted some time before he entered the sick-room. His approaching step was heard, and thus the ci-devant Barchester stonemason saluted his coming friend. The voice was loud and powerful, but not clear and sonorous. What voice that is nurtured on brandy can ever be clear? It had about it a peculiar huskiness, a dissipated guttural tone, which Thorne immediately recognised, and recognised as being more marked, more guttural, and more husky than heretofore.
'So you've smelt me out, have you, and come for you're fee? Ha! ha! ha! Well, I have had a sharpish bout of it, as her ladyship there no doubt has told you. Let her alone to make the worst of it. But, you see, you're too late, man. I've bilked the old gentleman again, without troubling you.'
'Any way, I'm glad you're something better, Scatcherd.'
'Something! I don't know what you call something. I never was better in my life. Ask Winterbones there.'
'Indeed, now, Scatcherd, you ain't; you're bad enough if you only knew it. And as for Winterbones, he has no business here up in your bedroom, which stinks of gin so, it does. Don't you believe him, doctor; he ain't well, nor yet nigh well.'
Winterbones, when the above ill-natured allusion was made to the aroma coming from his libations, might be seen to deposit surreptitiously beneath the little table at which he sat, the cup with which he had performed them.
The doctor, in the mean time, had taken Sir Roger's hand on the pretext of feeling his pulse, but was drawing quite as much information from the touch of the sick man's skin, and the look of the sick man's eye.
