But, unfortunately, farce writers and burlesque writers, and young
meerschaum-smoking painters, are not the sort of men to give good advice:
I want the advice of a medical man."
Mr. Hawkehurst almost bounded from his seat as he said this. The advice
of a medical man? Yes; and was there not a medical man among the
Ragamuffins? and something more than a medical man? That very doctor, who
of all other men upon this earth could best give him counsel--the doctor
who had stood by the deathbed of Charlotte Halliday's father.
He remembered the conversation that had occurred at Bayswater, on the
evening of Christmas day, upon this very subject. He remembered how from
the talk about ghosts they had drifted somehow into talking of Tom
Halliday; whereupon Mrs. Sheldon had been melted to tears, and had gone
on to praise Philip Sheldon's conduct to his dying friend, and to speak
of Mr. Burkham, the strange doctor, called in too late to save, or, it
might have been, incapable to save.
"Sheldon seems to have a genius for calling in incapable doctors," he
thought bitterly.
Incapable as Mr. Burkham might have been for the exigencies of this
particular case, he would at least be able to inform Valentine who among
the medical celebrities of London would be best adapted to advise in such
an illness as Charlotte Halliday's.
"And if, as Diana has sometimes suggested, there is any hereditary
disease, this Burkham may be able to throw some light upon the nature of
it," thought Valentine.
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