Chapter 40

_ANOTHER RIDE WITH THE DOCTOR._

Half-past nine was the breakfast-hour at Fairfield, and Bessie Fairfax said she would prepare for her ride before going down.

"Will you breakfast in your riding-habit, miss?--her ladyship is very particular," said Mrs. Betts in a tone implying that her ladyship might consider it a liberty. Bessie said Yes, she must not keep Mr. Carnegie waiting when he came.

So she went down stairs in her habit and a crimson neck-tie, with her hair compactly rolled up, and looking exceedingly well. Lady Latimer justified Dora's predictions: she kissed Bessie as if she had never been affronted. Bessie accepted the caress, and was thankful. It was no part of her pleasure to vex my lady.

They had not left the breakfast-table when the servant announced that Mr. Carnegie had arrived. "We will go out and see you mount," said Lady Latimer, and left her unfinished meal, Mr. Cecil Burleigh attending her. Dora would have gone too, but as Mr. Logger made no sign of moving, my lady intimated that she must remain. Lady Latimer had inquiries to make of the doctor respecting several sick poor persons, her pensioners, and while they are talking Mr. Cecil Burleigh gave Bessie a hand up into her saddle, and remarked that Miss Hoyden was in high condition and very fresh.

"Oh, I can hold her. She has a good mouth and perfect temper; she never ran away from me but once," said Bessie, caressing her old favorite with voice and hand.

"And what happened on that occasion?" said Mr. Cecil Burleigh.

"She had her fling, and nothing happened. It was along the road that skirts the Brook pastures, and at the sharp turn Mr. Harry Musgrave saw her coming--head down, the bit in her teeth--and threw open the gate, and we dashed into the clover. As I did not lose my nerve or tumble off, I am never afraid now. I love a good gallop."

Mr. Cecil Burleigh asked no more questions. If it be true that out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh, Brook and Mr. Harry Musgrave must have been much in Miss Fairfax's thoughts; this was now the third time that she had found occasion to mention them since coming to breakfast.

Lady Latimer turned in-doors again with a preoccupied air. Bessie had looked behind her as she rode down the avenue, as if she were bidding them good-bye. Mr. Cecil Burleigh was silent too. He had come to Fairfield with certain lively hopes and expectations, for which my lady was mainly responsible, and already he was experiencing sensations of blankness worse to bear than disappointment. Others might be perplexed as to Miss Fairfax's sentiments, but to him they were clear as the day--friendly, but nothing more. She was now where she would be, was exuberantly contented, and could not hide how slight a tie upon her had been established by a year amongst her kindred in Woldshire.

"This is like old times, Bessie," said the doctor as the Fairfield gate closed behind them.

Bessie laughed and tossed her head like a creature escaped. "Yes, I am so happy!" she answered.

The ride was just one of the doctor's regular rounds. He had to call at Brook, where a servant was ill, and they went by the high-road to the manor. Harry Musgrave was not at home. He had gone out for a day's ranging, and was pensively pondering his way through the bosky recesses of the Forest, under the unbroken silence of the tall pines, to the seashore and the old haunts of the almost extinct race of smugglers. The first person they met after leaving the manor was little Christie with a pale radiant face, having just come on a perfect theme for a picture--a still woodland pool reflecting high broken banks and flags and rushes, with slender birchen trees hanging over, and a cluster of low reed-thatched huts, very uncomfortable to live in, but gloriously mossed and weather-stained to paint.

"Don't linger here too late--it is an unwholesome spot," said Mr. Carnegie, warning him as he rode on. Little Christie set up his white umbrella in the sun, and kings might have envied him.

"My mother is better, but call and see her," he cried after the doctor; this amendment was one cause of the artist's blitheness.

"Of course, she is better--she has had nothing for a week to make her bad," said Mr. Carnegie; but when he reached the wheelwright's and saw Mrs. Christie, with a handkerchief tied over her cap, gently pacing the narrow garden-walks, he assumed an air of excessive astonishment.

"Yes, Mr. Carnegie, sir, I'm up and out," she announced in a tone of no thanks to anybody. "I felt a sing'lar wish to taste the air, and my boy says, 'Go out, mother; it will do you more good than anything.' I could enjoy a ride in a chaise, but folks that make debts can afford to behave very handsome to themselves in a many things that them that pays ready money has to be mean enough to do without. Jones's wife has her rides, but if her husband would pay for the repair of the spring-cart that was mended fourteen months ago come Martinmas, there'd be more sense in that."

"Don't matter, my good soul! Walking is better than riding any fine day, if you have got the strength," said the doctor briskly.

"Yes, sir; there's that consolation for them that is not rich and loves to pay their way. I hope to walk to church next Sunday, please the Lord. And if a word could be given to Mr. Wiley not to play so on the feelings, it would be a mercy. He do make such awful faces, and allude to sudden death and accidents and the like, as is enough to give an ailing person a turn. I said to Mrs. Bunny, 'Mary,' I said, 'don't you go to hear him; leastways, sit by the door if you must, and don't stop for the sermon: it might make that impression it would do the babe a mischief.'"

"Go to chapel; it is nearer. And take Mrs. Bunny with you," said Mr. Carnegie.

"No, sir. Mrs. Wiley has been very kind in calling and taking notice since I have been laid up, and one good turn deserves another. I shall attend church in future, though the doctrine's so shocking that if folks pondered it the lunatic asylums wouldn't hold 'em all. I'll never believe as the Lord meant us to be threatened with judgment to come, and hell, and all that, till one's afraid to lie down in one's bed. He'd not have let there be an end of us if we didn't get so mortal tired o' living."

"Living is a weariness that men and women bear with unanimous patience, Mrs. Christie--aches and pains included."

"So it may be, sir. We are fearfully and wonderfully made. A week ago I could not have thought the pleasure it would be to-day to see the sun, and the pretty things in flower, and my boy going out with his color-box. And not as much physic have you given me, Mr. Carnegie, as would lie on a penny-piece."

Bessie Fairfax laughed as they rode on, and said, "Nobody changes. I should be tempted to give Mrs. Christie something horribly nasty for her ingratitude."

"Nobody changes," echoed the doctor. "She will be at her drugs again before the month is out."

A little beyond the wheelwright's, Mr. Carnegie pulled up at a spot by the wayside where an itinerant tinker sat in the shade with his brazier hot, doing a good stroke of work on the village kettles and pots: "Eh, Gampling, here you are again! They bade me at home look out for you and tell you to call. There is a whole regiment of cripples to mend."

"Then let 'em march to Hampton, sir--they'll get back some time this side o' Christmas," said the tinker, with a surly cunning glance out of the corner of his eye. "Your women's so mighty hard to please that I'm not meaning to call again; I prefers to work where I gives satisfaction."

"I did hear something of a pan new bottomed to mend a hole in its side; but what is that amongst friends? Mistakes will occur in the best-regulated businesses."

"You're likely to know, sir--there's a sight o' folks dropping off quite unaccountable else. I'm not dependent on one nor another, and what I says I stands to: I'll never call at Dr. Carnegie's back door again while that Irish lass is about his kitchen; she's give me the rough side of her tongue once, but she won't do it no more."

"Then good-day to you, Gampling; I can't part with the Irish lass at your price."

A sturdy laborer came along the road eating a hunch of bread and cheese. Mr. Carnegie asked him how his wife did. The answer was crabbed: "She's never naught to boast on, and she's allus worse after a spiritchus visit: parson's paying her one now. Can you tell me, Mr. Carnegie, sir, why parson chooses folk's dinner-time to drop in an' badger 'em about church? Old parson never did." He did not stay to have his puzzle elucidated, but trudged heavily on.

"Mr. Wiley does not seem very popular yet," observed Bessie.

"He is more so than he was. But his wife, who helps the poor liberally in the winter, is of twice the use in the parish that he is, with his inopportune 'spiritchus visits.' I have remonstrated with him about going to the cottages between twelve and one, when dinner is being eaten and the men want a bit of rest, but he professes that it is the only time to catch them in-doors. I suppose Molton won't bear it, and takes up his food and walks out. Yet Beechhurst might have a worse pastor than poor Wiley. He is a man I pity--a martyr to dyspepsia and a gloomy imagination. But I will not deny that he often raises my choler still." The doctor was on the verge of having it raised now.

At the last bend of the road to the village, and nearly opposite the forge, was a small cabin of one room, the abode of the respectable Mrs. Wallop, the mainstay of Beechhurst as a nurse in last illnesses and dangerous cases--a woman of heart and courage, though perhaps of too imaginative a style of conversation. Although it was but a work-day, she was sitting at her own door in her Sunday black gown and bonnet, and, like Niobe, all tears. Mr. Carnegie pulled up in sheer amazement at the deplorable spectacle his valued right hand was making of herself in public, and, as if she had been on the watch for him, up she rose from her stool and came forward to answer his unspoken questions.

"Ay, Mr. Carnegie, sir, you may well ask what I am doing at home all day idle," said she. "It is a Judas I feel, and if I don't get it off my mind it will be too much for me: I can't bear it, sir."

"Then out with it, Mrs. Wallop," said the imperative doctor. "It is nothing very private, or you would not advertise it by crying at the corner of the street."

"No, sir, but it shames me to tell it, that it do, though you're one o' them that well knows what flesh and blood comes to when the temptation's strong. I've took money, Mr. Carnegie, wage for a month, to go nowheres else but to the rectory; and nobody ill there, only a' might happen. It never occurred to me the cruel sin I'd done till Robb came along, begging and praying of me to go to them forlorn poor creturs at Marsh-End. For it is the fever, sir. Mr. Wiley got wind of it, and sent Robb over to make sure."

"Lost in misery they are. Fling away your dirty hire, and be off to Marsh-End, Mrs. Wallop. Crying and denying your conscience will disagree very badly with your inside," said Mr. Carnegie, angry contempt in his voice.

"I will sir, and be glad to. It ain't Christian--no, nor human natur--to sit with hands folded when there is sick folk wanting help. Poor Judas!" she went on in soliloquy as the doctor trotted off. "I reckon his feelings changed above a bit between looking at the thirty pieces of silver and wishing he had 'un, and finding how heavy they was on his soul afore he was drove to get rid of 'em, and went out and hanged himself. I won't do that, anyhow, while I've a good charicter to fall back on, but I'll return Mrs. Wiley her money, and take the consequences if she sets it about as I'm not a woman of my word."

A few minutes more brought Mr. Carnegie home with Bessie Fairfax to his own door. Hovering about on the watch for the doctor's return was Mr. Wiley. Though there was no great love lost between them, the rector was imbued with the local faith in the doctor's skill, and wanted to consult him.

"You have heard that the fever has broken out again?" he said with visible trepidation.

"I have no case of fever myself. I hear that Robb has."

"Yes--two in one house. Now, what precautions do you recommend against infection?"

"For nervous persons the best precaution is to keep out of the way of infection."

"You would recommend me to keep away from Marsh-End, then? Moxon is nearer, though it is in my parish."

"I never recommend a man to dodge his duty. Mrs. Wallop will be of most use at present; she is just starting."

"Mrs. Wallop? My wife has engaged her and paid her for a month in the event of any trouble coming amongst ourselves. You must surely be mistaken, Mr. Carnegie?"

"Mrs. Wiley was mistaken. She did not know her woman. Good-morning to you, sir."