When I described Lucy's symptoms, the same as before, but infinitely
more marked, he looked very grave, but said nothing. He took with him
a bag in which were many instruments and drugs, "the ghastly
paraphernalia of our beneficial trade," as he once called, in one of
his lectures, the equipment of a professor of the healing craft.
When we were shown in, Mrs. Westenra met us. She was alarmed, but not
nearly so much as I expected to find her. Nature in one of her
beneficient moods has ordained that even death has some antidote to
its own terrors. Here, in a case where any shock may prove fatal,
matters are so ordered that, from some cause or other, the things not
personal, even the terrible change in her daughter to whom she is so
attached, do not seem to reach her. It is something like the way dame
Nature gathers round a foreign body an envelope of some insensitive
tissue which can protect from evil that which it would otherwise harm
by contact. If this be an ordered selfishness, then we should pause
before we condemn any one for the vice of egoism, for there may be
deeper root for its causes than we have knowledge of.
|