L'Estrange shook his head in silence, and after a moment said, "Is the attack serious?"
"A few hours will decide that, but it may be days before we shall know if his mind will recover. Craythorpe has been sent for from Dublin, and we shall have his opinion this evening. I have no hesitation in saying that mine is unfavorable."
"What a dreadful thing, and how fearfully sudden. I cannot conceive how he could have bethought him of the letter for me at such a moment."
"He wrote it, he said, as you left him; you had not quitted the house when he began. He said to me, 'I saw I was growing worse, I felt my confusion was gaining on me, and a strange commixture of people and events was occurring in my head; so I swept all my letters and papers into a drawer and locked it, wrote the few lines I had promised, and with my almost last effort of consciousness rang the bell for my servant.'"
"But he was quite collected when he told you this?"
"Yes, it was in one of those lucid intervals when the mind shines out clear and brilliant; but the effort cost him dearly: he has not rallied from it since."
"Has he over-worked himself; is this the effect of an over-exerted brain?"
"I 'd call it rather the result of some wounded sensibility; he appears to have suffered some great reverse in ambition or in fortune. His tone, so far as I can fathom it, implies intense depression. After all, we must say he met much coldness here. The people did not visit him, there was no courtesy, no kindliness shown him; and though he seemed indifferent to it, who knows how he may have felt it?"
"I do not suspect he gave any encouragement to intimacy; beseemed to me as if declining acquaintance with the neighborhood."
"Ay, but it was in resentment, I opine; but _you_ ought to know best. You were constantly here?"
"Yes, very frequently; but I am not an observant person; all the little details which convey a whole narrative to others are utterly lost upon _me_."
The doctor smiled. It was an expression that appeared to say he concurred in the curate's version of his own nature.
"It is these small gifts of combining, arranging, sifting, and testing, that we doctors have to cultivate," said he, as he took his hat. "The patient the most eager to be exact and truthful will, in spite of himself, mislead and misguide us. There is a strange bend sinister in human nature, against sincerity, that will indulge itself even at the cost of life itself. You are the physician of the soul, sir; but take my word for it, you might get many a shrewd hint and many a useful suggestion from us, the meaner workmen who only deal with nerves and arteries."