“Am I indeed the cause of this?”
In one of the streets of Keswick stood an old, gloomy, but respectable house. In this house was a small back parlour, receiving light from a back lane, and surrounded with shelves, covered with bottles and jars; while ranged beneath the shelves were small drawers, on the outsides of which appeared, labelled, the names of every medicine in use. In the midst of this parlour stood a table; on the table stood a number of bottles, with the apparatus for various chemical experiments; and before the table, wrapped in a loose dressing-gown, slippers on his feet, his grey hair uncombed, stood Doctor Dixon. On his face a haggard expression of fear, inverted the lines of harmless mirth which had so often mingled, gleefully, with those of age, on the poor man’s features. His step was uncertain, and his hand trembled, as he selected another and another bottle from a shelf, or another paper from a drawer. His whole frame seemed to have undergone a species of dissolution; and all the infirmities of old age, which he had hitherto, with so much gaiety, warded off, seemed to have been suddenly let in upon him. In short, his heart was broken!
A terrible suspicion had for some days pressed upon his mind; his experiments, his researches, had failed to throw any light upon the subject; he had not dared to communicate his thoughts to any one. He sat down. At length he exclaimed, “I—I, who should have healed, have I destroyed?” Tears came to his relief. “I am an old man,” he said, in a faltering tone, “I cannot live long: would I had died before this had happened!” After a long silence, during which he moved his lips often, and seemed to undergo a powerful inward struggle, he pronounced, with the air of one refusing an importunate request, “Never! never! never!”
The cruel thoughts which so agonized the poor man’s mind were these. From Lady L.’s symptoms, he suspected that her death had been occasioned by poison; every medicine she had taken had been mixed by himself, and here was the distracting thought! Some ingredients in his dispensary must then, he feared, have come to him wrong labelled; and, in mixing these, he must have formed some combination, hitherto unknown in chemistry, which had produced a deadly poison. To decide this point, he made numerous experiments. When every mixture proved wholesome, or at least innocent, and every label seemed rightly placed, he would say to himself. “But, they are dead!” Then, after pausing, and wearying his mind with vain conjectures, he would break forth again: “And the symptoms of both were those of poison, which the babe, doubtless, imbibed with its mother’s milk. And I mixed every medicine myself; my own servant took them over; they lay on the table in Lady L.’s own bedroom, till I, with my own hands, administered them, taking care to see that my own labels were upon them! Yet,” he added, shuddering, “the dregs in one of the bottles had neither exactly the colour, nor exactly the taste, that I should have anticipated.” And whenever this conviction forced itself upon him, he turned cold, and the pulsations of his heart ceased for some seconds.
We have seen the doctor completing the last of his experiments. He had reflected for a short time, in dreadful agitation, whether he were not in duty bound to declare his belief respecting the cause of Lady L.’s death to the family. He had decided that the information could only add to their affliction; while the confession, to himself, would be worse than ten thousand deaths! It was at this conclusion he had arrived, when we heard him exclaim, “Never! never! never!”
He destroyed the whole contents of his dispensary, never more prescribed for any one, or mixed another medicine. All observed a general decay, a total failure both of strength and faculties, in their friend, the good doctor. He never smiled again, nor made another pun; and in a few weeks he died, carrying with him to the grave, the dreadful secret, or rather surmise, which was the occasion of his death.
