My eagerness seemed to amuse -- perhaps, I might rather say, to please him.He smiled again.We had by this time left the last houses in the town behind us.Ezra Jennings stopped for a moment, and picked some wild flowers from the hedge by the road-side.`How beautiful they are!' he said, simply, showing his little nosegay to me.`And how few people in England seem to admire them as they deserve!'
`You have not always been in England?' I said.
`No.I was born, and partly brought up, in one of our colonies.My father was an Englishman; but my mother -- We are straying away from our subject, Mr.Blake; and it is my fault.The truth is, I have associations with these modest little hedgeside flowers -- It doesn't matter; we were speaking of Mr.Candy.To Mr.Candy let us return.'
Connecting the few words about himself which thus reluctantly escaped him, with the melancholy view of life which led him to place the conditions of human happiness in complete oblivion of the past, I felt satisfied that the story which I had read in his face was, in two particulars at least, the story that it really told.He had suffered as few men suffer; and there was the mixture of some foreign race in his English blood.
`You have heard, I dare say, of the original cause of Mr.Candy's illness?'
he resumed.`The night of Lady Verinder's dinner-party was a night of heavy rain.My employer drove home through it in his gig, and reached the house, wetted to the skin.He found an urgent message from a patient, waiting for him; and he most unfortunately went at once to visit the sick person, without stopping to change his clothes.I was myself professionally detained, that night, by a case at some distance from Frizinghall.When I got back the next morning, I found Mr.Candy's groom waiting in great alarm to take me to his master's room.By that time the mischief was done; the illness had set in.'
`The illness has only been described to me, in general terms, as a fever,'
I said.
`I can add nothing which will make the description more accurate,' answered Ezra Jennings.`From first to last the fever assumed no specific form.
I sent at once to two of Mr.Candy's medical friends in the town, both physicians, to come and give me their opinion of the case.They agreed with me that it looked serious; but they both strongly dissented from the view I took of the treatment.We differed entirely in the conclusions which we drew from the patient's pulse.The two doctors, arguing from the rapidity of the beat, declared that a lowering treatment was the only treatment to be adopted.On my side, I admitted the rapidity of the pulse, but Ialso pointed to its alarming feebleness as indicating an exhausted condition of the system, and as showing a plain necessity for the administration of stimulants.The two doctors were for keeping him on gruel, lemonade, barley-water, and so on.I was for giving him champagne, or brandy, ammonia, and quinine.A serious difference of opinion, as you see! A difference between two physicians of established local repute, and a stranger who was only an assistant in the house.For the first few days, I had no choice but to give way to my elders and betters; the patient steadily sinking all the time.I made a second attempt to appeal to the plain, undeniably plain, evidence of the pulse.Its rapidity was unchecked, and its feebleness had increased.The two doctors took offence at my obstinacy.They said, "Mr.Jennings, either we manage this case, or you manage it.Which is it to be?" I said, "Gentlemen, give me five minutes to consider, and that plain question shall have a plain reply." When the time expired, I was ready with my answer.I said, "You positively refuse to try the stimulant treatment?" They refused in so many words."I mean to try it at once, gentlemen."-- "Try it, Mr.Jennings, and we withdraw from the case." I sent down to the cellar for a bottle of champagne; and I administered half a tumblerful of it to the patient with my own hand.The two physicians took up their hats in silence, and left the house.'
`You had assumed a serious responsibility,' I said.`In your place, I am afraid I should have shrunk from it.'
`In my place, Mr.Blake, you would have remembered that Mr.Candy had taken you into his employment, under circumstances which made you his debtor for life.In my place, you would have seen him sinking, hour by hour; and you would have risked anything, rather than let the one man on earth who had befriended you, die before your eyes.Don't suppose that I had no sense of the terrible position in which I had placed myself! There were moments when I felt all the misery of my friendlessness, all the peril of my dreadful responsibility.If I had been a happy man, if I had led a prosperous life, I believe I should have sunk under the task I had imposed on myself.But I had no happy time to look back at, no past peace of mind to force itself into contrast with my present anxiety and suspense -- and I held firm to my resolution through it all.I took an interval in the middle of the day, when my patient's condition was at its best, for the repose I needed.For the rest of the four and twenty hours, as long as his life was in danger, I never left his bedside.Towards sunset, as usual in such cases, the delirium incidental to the fever came on.It lasted more or less through the night; and then intermitted, at that terrible time in the early morning -- from two o'clock to five -- when the vital energies even of the healthiest of us are at their lowest.It is then that Death gathers in his human harvest most abundantly.It was then that Death and I fought our fight over the bed, which should have the man who lay on it.
I never hesitated in pursuing the treatment on which I had staked everything.