Relates the triumph of the Doctor, and the manner in which he achieved it.—Lawyer Skinwell's death-bed, and what happened there.

THE evening was warm and fine; and the gentle slope, on the top of which Dr. Rowel's establishment stood, was coloured with the setting light of the sun; as, with the glass-doors, which opened from his drawing-room upon the lawn, thrown wide back to admit the scarcely stirring air,—the doctor himself sat near it and alone, in an attitude of thought, meditating mischief. A dash of vermilion-coloured light shot athwart the lower part of his person, while the upper portion was covered with that kind of illuminated shadow, that clear obscure, which, to the delicate perception of a painter, constitutes one of Nature's greatest beauties. But the thoughts and reflections in which the doctor indulged were deeply at variance with those which the scene before him, and the character of the hour, were calculated to suggest. It was not with him—“how much do I now enjoy?” but the morose reflection—“how long shall I enjoy it?” His present happiness was swallowed up in the anticipation of possible coming evil.

“What matters it,” thought he, “when tomorrow, perhaps, that treacherous villain may make everything known? Nay, how do I know he has not done so already? True, I have had him watched. I know everything he has done, and something that he has said; and this very day again he is gone to York. To-morrow I may wake to be arrested,—to have my house searched, and Woodruff set at liberty.”

As the doctor then mused, the door opened, and a stranger was ushered in.

“Doctor,” said he in a hurried tone, “lawyer Skinwell has just got thrown out of his gig, and is almost killed. He has been insensible ever since.”

“Ah! Impossible!” exclaimed Rowel starting to his feet with surprise. “Are you sure, man?”

“It is quite true, sir,” replied he, as though scarcely knowing what to make of the doctor's strange manner, the latter gentleman regarding him for a moment with an eye of unaccountable incredulity; for the idea had instantaneously flashed across his mind that he might be deceived by his own imagination, and that it was only the devil that was tempting him. A minute or two elapsed; when, recovering himself, he replied in a more subdued and professional tone, “I will be there immediately,” on which the man disappeared.

“Now then,” thought Rowel, “is the time! Had I asked for it,—designed it myself,—I could not have made it better. Thrown out, and insensible. He cannot, therefore, know anything of what I do. And as nobody else knows of our differences, nobody will think otherwise than that I am doing for the best. Who shall question my practice? Even if it be inquired into,—if it come to anything that way,—they may arraign my judgment, but can do nothing else.”

The doctor went immediately into his dispensary, dismissed his assistant upon some frivolous errand, and closed the door after him. Some minutes he remained compounding drugs with his own hand; after which he mounted his pony, which had been saddled in the mean time, and rode rapidly off to the lawyer's house.

“Send all these people out!” somewhat sharply exclaimed the doctor, as, in passing up stairs, he cast his eye upon the numerous assembly of “sympathisers,” who had gathered in the passage and about the foot of the staircase. Fanny dismissed them, and then, accompanied by Colin, went up stairs into the room in which the unfortunate man had been laid upon a bed, and whither also Dr. Rowel had directed his steps.

In the first place, the lawyer was very copiously bled; after which the doctor administered a powder with his own hands, and gave instructions that, in the course of about an hour, if Mr. Skinwell appeared more recovered, another of a similar description should be given. He then very strictly charged Fanny not to allow any person to visit him, and to prevent him talking in case he should attempt to speak, as silence and quietness were highly essential to any patient in his condition. Promising that he should call again in the course of the night, the doctor then took his leave, though not until he had privately drawn Fanny aside, and fully satisfied himself that Mr. Skinwell had not discovered to her any material portion of that secret which he so greatly dreaded should come to her knowledge.

During several hours the unfortunate man continued much the same as before; but about midnight he rallied. There was nobody in the room except Fanny and the servant girl. Colin had taken his leave long before; and Skinwell's stripling clerk, who was introduced to the reader at the commencement of this story, and who had now grown up into a tame, spiritless, and crest-fallen man, was sitting below in the kitchen, seeking refuge from the whereases and aforesaids of the law in the pleasant pages of Joseph Andrews.

Mr. Skinwell, as I have said, rallied a little. He looked wildly about as though seeking for assurance of the locality of the place he was in, and then feebly beckoned Fanny to bring her ear near him.

“Who has been to me?” he whispered.

“Only Dr. Rowel, sir,” answered Fanny assuringly.

“Then I am a dead man!” exclaimed the lawyer, bursting into a flood of tears. “Oh Heaven, forgive my sins as I forgive all those who have sinned against me!” And he forced his head into the pillow as though he would bury it out of sight. The foam gathered upon his blue lips, and his teeth snapped together with a sound that made the girl's blood turn.—“Oh, what has he given me? my breath is hotter than fire.—The flame eats my heart out!—water,—water!”

“No, no!” cried an eager voice behind; “'twill kill him!” and Dr. Rowel strode across the room. Fanny saw him, and his looks terrified her. The sedateness of the experienced physician, which no circumstance of this kind can generally disturb, was all gone. He breathed half-convulsively through his opened mouth and dilated nostrils; shining beads of water that momentarily glistened in the lamplight, stood upon his forehead; and several times successively, as he crossed the room, he passed his hand with instinctive energy over the sides of his temples, so as to cast the hair which clustered there backwards, as though his burning brain sought closer contact with the cool common air. He stood by the bedside. Skinwell rolled round his eyes, and strove to cry, “You 've poisoned me!” But the doctor rapidly closed his hand over the sick man's mouth, and drowned his failing voice.

Fanny stood petrified with horror; while the servant girl rushed screaming out of the room. The doctor still kept his open hand on Skin-well's mouth, while the dying man Strove to set himself free by violent motions of the head and writhings of the body. A stifled call on the name of Fanny at length broke from his muffled lips.

“Go out! leave me!” fiercely cried Rowel to the horrified young woman; but she did not obey him.

“Fanny!” again escaped the lawyer's lips.

The sight, the voice, the desperate sense that came upon her all at once that Rowel was killing his patient, nerved her with more than woman's courage and ten times woman's ordinary strength. She rushed franticly to the opposite side of the bed from that on which the doctor stood, and violently seized his wrist.

“Away, woman!” he cried, suddenly turning all his efforts against her, in the endeavour to free his hands and strike her down. But she held him tightly. Curses upon her, whispered almost as from the inmost soul, but deadly and pregnant with hellish meaning, hissed through the doctor's teeth, which showed between his lips clenched like a workman's vice. Fanny prayed mentally for strength to hold him. As they struggled, the sick man beneath them spoke.

“Fanny—your father———”

Rowel threw the whole weight of his body upon him to stop that tongue. He could not.

“Your father is in Rowel's—”

“It's a lie!—a lie!—a lie!” cried the doctor in rapid succession, to render the words inaudible.

Their struggle grew more desperate, and Fanny could not hold much longer: the unwonted muscles would not obey her will to gripe. They were overstrained, and growing useless. At the same time the doctor wrenched more furiously than ever. The dying man beneath him gurgled in the throat for breath, and tossed in muscular convulsions beneath the clothes. At last he got himself to the edge of the bed, and by a sudden and last violent effort, struck himself against the doctor so forcibly as to loosen him from the hands of Fanny, and throw him several paces from the bed. The lawyer threw himself upright, and with his dim half-dead eyes fixed on Fanny, and his finger turning to point at Rowel, he cried with his last breath, “In his madhouse!—his madhouse!” and sunk back to groan and die.

Fanny stood a moment, and then fell, like a stone, insensible to the ground.

Presently the clerk and the maid-servant, were in the room. Doctor Rowel had just folded up the bed-clothes.

“Take that girl up,” said he calmly; “she has fainted at this sight of death. Your master is gone, young man. I did not think, at first, he would see the night over. Give her some cold water; sprinkle her temples, and carry her to bed, and then send for somebody to lay this corpse out. Before morning it will be cold.”

As the doctor said this he gathered up such of the powders as had not been administered, and put them in his pocket. At the same time Fanny was carried away, according to his directions, and placed on the bed in her own room. Thither Doctor Rowel followed, and employed himself in restoring her. When Fanny first opened her eyes and saw him bending over her, she shrieked and sunk again. Again she was recovered.

“Do leave me,” said she. “Do go away, or I shall die.”

“But I have something to say to you, my dear,” observed the doctor, with an assumed sweetness of tone. “Now, quiet yourself, and endeavour to get over this agitation. You will never be better till you get calmer.”

“Then pray leave me,” again replied Fanny, “and I may then be quiet. Is master any better?”

“Yes—yes,” the doctor answered; “but never mind him. You should not have interfered with me, Fanny. He was delirious,—outrageous. I was obliged to hold him down.”

“He said something about my father,” observed Fanny in a faint voice. “I heard him say it.”

“Nothing—nothing, I assure you!” the doctor exclaimed. “He was delirious. Now, quiet yourself, and do not talk any more tonight. Say nothing about it; and another day, when you are better, you shall convince yourself, for Mrs. Rowel shall take you all over my house—you shall see everybody in it—and I will prove to you that your father cannot be there. As I told you some time ago, I know something about you, and will take care to see you righted as far as I can; but then you must not listen to the wild nonsense of a man who did not know what he was talking about: it ruins everything.”

Fanny was silent; but she still beheld, as in a vivid picture, the corpse-like figure of the lawyer sitting up in bed, its glazed eyes upon her, and its finger pointing towards that man. She heard the rattle of its horny tongue as it articulated those last words, “In his madhouse!—his madhouse!” And she thought of the words of Colin's mother, which had been told to her only a few hours previously, that dying people always speak the truth. But, was he dying? “Is he dead?” asked she.

“My dear,” answered Rowel, “do not alarm yourself: but he is dead.”

“O God! what have I seen!” cried the affrighted young woman, as she hid her head beneath the bed-clothes, for a spirit seemed to pass before her when she heard those words,—it was that of her dead master!

The doctor departed; but in that house there was no sleep that night.