The Port-Wine Stain by Norman Lock Page A

do you say to a face like my young friend’s here?”
    She blushed and replied, “He has a pleasant face and a kind one, I think.”
    â€œAnd what would the tea leaves say of him?”
    â€œThat he will live long and happily.”
    â€œThere!” said Mütter, with his most winning smile. “Mary’s instincts are infallible. You have nothing to worry about, Edward.” He drank his tea, set the cup on its saucer, and went on. “But, like it or not, you and our Mr. Poe have an affinity. What was it he recited to us? ‘From his inscrutable tyranny did I at length flee, panic-stricken, as from a pestilence; and to the very ends of the earth I fled in vain ’ You cannot escape him, Edward. He is your doppelgänger. Why, even your Christian names reveal your fraternity! Edward, Edgar.”
    He laughed, and I did, too, to be agreeable. I was not happy with the conversation and changed it.
    â€œWhat will you have me do today, Dr. Mütter?”
    â€œPlease excuse me, both of you,” said Mary, rising from the table. “I must see Cook. Will you be home for dinner, Thomas?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œAnything special you’d like?” she asked her husband, tucking a stray wisp of hair inside her old-fashioned “Sally cap.
    â€œA shank of beef would be very nice, and some boiled potatoes.”
    Mary nodded, smiled politely at me, and withdrew to the kitchen.
    â€œShe does not like to hear the hospital discussed, in case I should forget myself and mention some grisly business. She is delicate.”
    I nodded sympathetically.
    â€œI’m expecting several specimens from the city morgue. There are the pigeons—and Dr. Meigs has agreed that you shall give him whatever assistance you can this afternoon in the pit. I’m grooming you, my boy.”
    â€œI’m very grateful to you, sir.”
    â€œDon’t disappoint me. And consider Mr. Poe as having a role to play in your education if for no other reason than he will afford you the opportunity to study the pathological mind firsthand.”
    â€œI’ll keep an open mind, sir.”
    â€œGood fellow!”
    Morning crept into the room with the obsequiousness of a medical student approaching the chief of surgery. Conversation adjourned, I gave myself up to the luxury of silence. I would have been content to remain so; Mütter, however, had something on his mind.
    â€œNot long ago, Poe came to me with the most astonishing request: He wanted me to allow Menz to mesmerize one of my patients, Ernest Valdemar, who, he had found out through one of his cronies, was dying of Bright’s disease. It was, he said, to be in the nature of an experiment—one I could, conceivably, profit from. He intended nothing lessthan to discover, through the dead offices of poor Valdemar, ‘The undiscovered country, from whose bourn/ No traveller returns.’ There was something in Edgar’s face—a shame-lessness that made me shudder.
    â€œâ€˜Would you go even there to satisfy your curiosity?’ I asked him.
    â€œPoe smiled and said, ‘There is nowhere I wouldn’t go to learn the truth of the matter.’
    â€œI’m a doctor, Edward. I’ve done things to make the anti-vivisections howl and virtuous young ladies blush. I’ve done them—sometimes reluctantly—for the advancement of science and the medical arts. My curiosity is not an idle one. I acknowledge the inviolable mystery of death and the proprieties surrounding it. I’ve dissected corpses, but I would not put a telegraph key into a dying man’s hands and await his dispatches from the Other Side.”
    I made no answer, having none.
    â€œStrange, these fellows whose life seems all in the mind,” said Mütter as we rode in a cab toward the medical college. “From what I’ve read about Edgar, he’s done little during his thirty-five years on earth. Oh, he was in the