Such being the case, the prospect of her possible demise was received with unconcern and even relief by all save a notable number of tradesmen who prayed fervently for her health because the lady, presuming on her connection with the official representative of the friendly state of Nicaragua, had contrived to owe them considerable sums of money.  Knowing the Commissioner as they did, these victims feared that they would never be able to collect their due in the event of her death.  Hence their prayers for her speedy recovery.

What would that gentleman do without her?  For it was his redeeming feature that he felt, or professed to feel, affection for this graceless harridan who was the only person on earth that believed, or professed to believe, in the integrity of his motives.  It is to be presumed that they saw through each other perfectly; she, at least, may well have appraised him at his true value.  She must have known him for a dishonest fool.  Yet this principle of mutual attachment was never relinquished.  Wiser than her stepbrother, she knew that a house divided against itself must fall; she therefore approved, forcefully if without conviction, of his every word and deed.  Such approval did him good.  It created a fictitious self-esteem.  And this was really rather unfortunate, since self-esteem, by giving him a sense of importance and consequence in the world, rendered him a good deal more objectionable to his fellow-creatures than he need have been.

Meanwhile she lingered on, and a small group of enquirers were gathered round the physician who was returning late at night from his third visit.  The moralists among them saw the finger of God in the fact that her mouth, out of which had proceeded so much harm to strong men and women, should now be sealed by one of the frailest of His creatures.  The doctor shrugged his shoulders at this kind of talk.  He was no moralizer; he was a true Southerner, an aesthete—­one of those who could appreciate the subtlest beauty of a skin disease.  He waxed discursive on the subject; said that the lady’s face reminded him of the rainbow in a certain picture by a local genius; avowed that there were moments when even a doctor’s hard life had its compensations, and that this was one of them.

His enthusiasm carried the audience off their feet.  It converted the sternest preachers into artists.  They forgot to talk about moral lessons.  All congratulated the good Aesculapius on his choice of the medical profession as a career and his luck in beholding a spectacle such as this; especially when he added, with glowing eloquence, that it was astonishing how so small an insect, a mere mosquito, should be able to produce an eruption of this magnitude and in colours, moreover, which would have made Titian or Peter Paul Rubens burst with envy.

CHAPTER XVII

Decidedly, things were happening, as Mr. Heard would have said.