Chapter XI: "little Short of Miraculous."

Yes, as Mrs. Budd had told Miss Baynard, there was a decided change for the better in Mr. Cortelyon's condition, but by what means the change in question had been brought about was known to three people only--the sick man, his nurse, and the latter's son.

Cornelius Dinkel had gone to Stanbrook in obedience to his mother's midnight summons, taking with him a small quantity of his remedy, and had spent an hour with the Squire, unknown to any of the household.

He was a tall, sallow, dried-up man, who looked as if all the juices of his body had been sucked out of him by the heat of a tropical climate. He was thirty years old, but might well have been taken for a man of forty-five. Nobody would have ventured to call him handsome, but his expression was one of marked intelligence, in combination with considerable will-power and great tenacity of purpose.

"Mr. Cortelyon, my son," said Mrs. Dinkel, as she introduced the young doctor into the sick room.

Dinkel bowed gravely. The Squire blinked his eyes; he would have nodded, but had not strength to do so.

Then he said, speaking in a thin whisper, broken by frequent gaspings for breath: "Your mother informs me that you have brought some wonderful discovery back home with you, and she would fain cozen me into the belief that by means of it you can succeed in prolonging the life of a moribund like me. I tell you at once that I don't believe in your ability to do anything of the kind. No, damme! I'm too far gone for any hanky-panky of that sort, and both Banks and Mills would simply dub you a quack for your pains."

Dinkel's face remained impassive. "Permit me, Mr. Cortelyon," he said, and with that he proceeded to submit the other to a brief but searching examination. Till it had come to an end no one spoke. Then taking up a position on the hearth with his back to the fire, and speaking in the tone of one who felt himself master of the situation, he broke the silence:

"Your case, Mr. Cortelyon, I find to be exactly such as my mother described it to me. That I can permanently cure you I at once admit to be an impossibility. You are too advanced in life, and your constitution is too nearly worn out, to warrant any such hope. But that I can succeed in prolonging your life for weeks, nay, it may well be for several months to come, I make no manner of doubt--such is the marvellous efficacy of the remedy I have brought back with me from abroad."

This, to a man who had every reason for believing that a few more hours would bring the end, was news indeed. Weeks--perhaps months--of life, when he had looked forward to being buried about a week hence! It was too marvellous to credit.

For a little while he was too overcome to speak. Then he murmured, and Dinkel had to bend over him in order to catch what he said: "I--I cannot believe it--I cannot!"

"Nevertheless, Mr. Cortelyon, I am not dealing in romance--heaven forbid that I should in such a case!--but in sober fact. There is a homely proverb which affirms that the proof of the pudding is in the eating. I have brought with me a small quantity of my remedy. Will you permit me to administer a dose of it to you?"

Again there was a space of silence. The sick man's gaze was bent on the young doctor as if he would fain read him through and through, while his grizzled eyebrows made a straight line across his forehead, he liked the look of him; there was something in that strong, earnest, plain face which inspired confidence. Compared with him, Dr. Banks looked like an amiable old woman.

"First of all, I should like to know what this so-called wonder-worker of yours is compounded of," he murmured, after a time.

Dinkel shrugged his shoulders. "Its chief constituent is the dried and powdered bark of the tatao tree--a tree indigenous to the island of Java. The other ingredients consist of sundry drugs in certain fixed proportions, the secret of which I am not at present prepared to divulge."

"Quite right--quite right. Very sensible on your part. You don't want to poison me, I suppose--hey?"

The ghost of a smile flitted across Dinkel's rugged face. "What should I gain by that, sir? Only the hangman's noose. I think you ought to credit me with a desire for lengthening your days, not for shortening them."

"It would puzzle you to make 'em much shorter than they seem likely to be," gasped the Squire, with a painful imitation of one of his old chuckles. "Well, well," he resumed, "I'll venture on a dose of this stuff of yours, not because I've any faith in it, mind you, but merely to take the cock-a-doodle out of you, and prove to you that you're not the wonderfully clever fellow you're inclined to crack yourself up as being."

Not for days had the Squire spoken so much in so short a time, and as the last words died from off his lips his eyes closed and he sank into a half swoon.

He could not have been in more competent hands, and before long he was brought back to consciousness. His first words, in a feeble whisper, were: "Give me the stuff; I'll take it."

From his waistcoat pocket Dinkel extracted a tiny phial, no bigger than his little finger, about three-parts full of a ruby-colored fluid, which he proceeded to empty into a dessert spoon.

"You won't find it at all disagreeable," he said, as he proffered the spoon and its contents to the Squire.

"It tastes not unlike the liquorice-root I used to be fond of when a lad," murmured the latter half a minute later, and with that his eyes closed again.

Dinkel held up his hand, and for a little space neither he nor his mother stirred. Then said the young doctor, "He is asleep, and if all goes well, as I have every reason to think it will, he won't awake for five or six hours. I will go now, and return between six and seven o'clock."

As already stated, Dr. Banks, when he called as usual in the course of next forenoon, was considerably surprised at finding such a decided improvement in his patient's condition, when, according to all the rules and regulations of medical science, he ought to have been nearly, if not quite, in a state of collapse. "It's merely a flash in the pan--the sudden flare-up of a candle before it drops into darkness," he said to himself. "He's a wonderful old fellow, and I've evidently underrated the strength of his constitution."

But next day, and the day after that, a still further improvement unmistakably manifested itself. Dr. Banks rubbed his nose with his forefinger and was clearly nonplussed. On the fourth morning he was joined by Dr. Mills, who had been expecting from hour to hour to have tidings of the Squire's demise. He and Banks did not fail to discuss the case as they drove over to Stanbrook in the latter's gig, but neither of them could make head or tail of it, and certainly it was difficult for them to believe the evidence of their eyes when, on entering their patient's room, they found him seated in his easy-chair, propped up by cushions, and not only that, but dictating a letter in a firm voice to his secretary, Andry Luce.

He favored them with a curt nod, but did not otherwise notice them till he had brought his dictation to an end. Then turning with a sardonic smile, he said: "Good-morrow, gentlemen. Very pleased to see you, especially you, Mills. You find an unlooked-for change in me since you were here last week--hey? It's all your friend Jimmy Banks's doing. From the hour he changed my physic, now four or five days since, I began to mend. Why he didn't change it before, instead of letting me get down to death's door first, the Lord only knows. But Jimmy always was a wag. Don't shake your pow in that way, sir; you know I'm speaking the truth. What grand weather for the crops we are having just now! I'm told that both my corn and my taties are coming on famously; but I hope to drive round in a day or two and see them for myself."

There was nothing to be done and very little to be said, and the two doctors cut their visit as short as possible.

Said Mills to the other after they had left the room: "What was the change of medicine he spoke of? What fresh treatment have you been subjecting him to?"

"To none at all, I give you my word. I am sending him the same mixture now that I was sending him three weeks ago--the one that you and I agreed upon. No single ingredient has been changed. In saying what he did he was only poking fun at us in his cynical way."

"Possibly at you, Banks, but certainly not at me," rejoined the other in his pompous way. "In any case, he's a very remarkable old man, and although I could not quite follow you in thinking that his vitality was at such a low ebb as you seemed to make out, I certainly did not credit him with the possession of the marvellous recuperative powers to which our eyes have just borne testimony."

"Humph! You seem to be blessed with a very short memory, Mills. Your own words on the occasion of your last visit were, 'I give him three days at the outside,' and that's just a week ago."

"Well, well; we are all liable to err, of course. Still, I'm afraid that I allowed my judgment to be in some measure led astray by your diagnosis. I ought to have subjected him to a more comprehensive examination than seemed to be necessary at the time. For all that, I cannot deny that his case is one of the most remarkable which has come under my notice. In short, I should hardly be going too far if I were to term his recovery, however temporary it may be, little short of miraculous."

Dr. Banks grunted. He was too indignant to reply in words. Only to himself he said, "I always set you down in my own mind as a humbug, and now I'm more convinced of it than ever."

As the reader will have rightly surmised, the marvellous change in Squire Cortelyon was wholly and solely due to the drug administered to him by Cornelius Dinkel. Already, as we have seen, he was able to sit up--although only for a short hour at first--and transact business; and each day brought its own small addition of strength and vital power. Soon he was able to go out on fine days for a drive, and a little later he even got so far as, with the help of Andry Luce's arm, to take short strolls about the grounds.

But this eminently satisfactory state of things could only be maintained on one condition: it was absolutely essential that a certain regulated dose of the wonderful drug should be administered to the patient daily. For the purpose of carrying out this arrangement Dinkel made a point of coming to the Hall every evening after dark, bringing the day's dose with him in a phial. He simply waited long enough to see the Squire swallow it, and then went his way.

Mrs. Dinkel remained at Stanbrook, nor, although he was so much better, would her patient listen to a word about her departure. Perhaps it seemed to him that so long as he could succeed in retaining her services he would have a firmer hold on those of her son. Besides, his man Tatham was not yet able to resume his duties.

So interested was young Dinkel in the case of Mr. Cortelyon that for the present he made up his mind to stay where he was. As his mother had told the Squire, the object of his life now was to take his discovery to London, and build up a fortune on the strength of it. But he was gifted with the patience, slow but sure, of his father's race, and was content to wait.

By this time it had got rumored about the country-side that the Squire's amazing recovery was due to Dinkel, or rather, to the effect of some magic compound he had brought with him from abroad. Further, it was commonly reported that so long as Dinkel continued to practise his arts on the old man, the latter would not, or could not, die. Among others, the whisper went that the Squire had sold himself, body and soul, to the young doctor on condition of his life being prolonged till he was a hundred.

These rumors were not lessened by Dinkel's mode of life. He had fitted up an old shed at the back of his mother's cottage, and there he conducted his experiments. Strange-colored flames would often be seen issuing from its chimney after dark, and one or two bolder spirits, who had ventured to pry upon him, averred that they had seen him warming his hands at a big glass jar which gave off blue sparks when he touched it. Evidently he was a man to be both shunned and feared.

But the love of life burns strongly in us. Not merely are we desirous of prolonging our own existence, but the lives of those dear to us, and among the villagers were three mothers who, their children having been given up by the local doctor, went to Cornelius Dinkel as a last resource, and prayed him with tears in their eyes to try to save their little ones. He did try, and in two cases out of the three he succeeded.

Still, the country people, with their ingrained superstitious prejudices, fought shy of him, and regarded him with a suspicion that was largely mixed with dislike. "He's a man-witch, that's what he is," they muttered among themselves. If he could prolong "th' owd Squire's" life, why couldn't he save Molly Grigg's child?--and why didn't he try his hand on old Tommy Binns, who was only eighty-seven when he died?