This news was not very pleasant to Mary, by whom it had been understood, as it had been also by her uncle, that Lady Scatcherd would have had the house to herself; but as there was no means of preventing the evil, Mary could only inform the doctor, and prepare herself to meet Sir Louis Scatcherd.

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE DOCTOR HEARS SOMETHING TO HIS ADVANTAGE

Sir Louis Scatcherd had told his mother that he was rather out of sorts, and when he reached Boxall Hill it certainly did not appear that he had given any exaggerated statement of his own maladies.  He certainly was a good deal out of sorts.  He had had more than one attack of delirium tremens after his father’s death, and had almost been at death’s door.

Nothing had been said about this by Dr Thorne at Boxall Hill; but he was by no means ignorant of his ward’s state.  Twice he had gone up to London to visit him; twice he had begged him to go down into the country and place himself under his mother’s care.  On the last occasion, the doctor had threatened him with all manner of pains and penalties:  with pains, as to his speedy departure from this world and all its joys; and with penalties, in the shape of poverty if that departure should by any chance be retarded.  But these threats had at the moment been in vain, and the doctor had compromised matters by inducing Sir Louis to promise that he would go to Brighton.  The baronet, however, who was at length frightened by some renewed attack, gave up his Brighton scheme, and, without notice to the doctor, hurried down to Boxall Hill.

Mary did not see him on the first day of his coming, but the doctor did.  He received such intimation of the visit as enabled him to be at the house soon after the young man’s arrival; and, knowing that his assistance might be necessary, he rode over to Boxall Hill.  It was a dreadful task to him, this of making the same fruitless endeavour for the son that he had made for the father, and in the same house.  But he was bound by every consideration to perform the task.  He had promised the father that he would do for the son all that was in his power; and he had, moreover, the consciousness, that should Sir Louis succeed in destroying himself, the next heir to all the property was his own niece, Mary Thorne.

He found Sir Louis in a low, wretched, miserable state.  Though he was a drunkard as his father was, he was not at all such a drunkard as his father.  The physical capacities of the men were very different.  The daily amount of alcohol which the father had consumed would have burnt up the son in a week; whereas, though the son was continually tipsy, what he swallowed would hardly have had an injurious effect upon the father.

‘You are all wrong, quite wrong,’ said Sir Louis petulantly; ’it isn’t that at all.  I have taken nothing this week past—­literally nothing.  I think it’s the liver.’