otherwise—that I could beat him while he railed at me.—"—Troilus
and Cressida.
But Fred did not go to Stone Court the next day, for reasons thatwere quite peremptory. From those visits to unsanitary Houndsley streetsin search of Diamond, he had brought back not only a bad bargain inhorse-flesh, but the further misfortune of some ailment which for a dayor two had deemed mere depression and headache, but which got somuch worse when he returned from his visit to Stone Court that, goinginto the dining-room, he threw himself on the sofa, and in answer to hismother's anxious question, said, "I feel very ill: I think you must send forWrench."
Wrench came, but did not apprehend anything serious, spoke of a"slight derangement," and did not speak of coming again on the morrow.He had a due value for the Vincys' house, but the wariest men are apt tobe dulled by routine, and on worried mornings will sometimes gothrough their business with the zest of the daily bell-ringer. Mr. Wrenchwas a small, neat, bilious man, with a well-dressed wig: he had alaborious practice, an irascible temper, a lymphatic wife and sevenchildren; and he was already rather late before setting out on a four-miles drive to meet Dr. Minchin on the other side of Tipton, the deceaseof Hicks, a rural practitioner, having increased Middlemarch practice inthat direction. Great statesmen err, and why not small medical men? Mr.Wrench did not neglect sending the usual white parcels, which this timehad black and drastic contents. Their effect was not alleviating to poorFred, who, however, unwilling as he said to believe that he was "in foran illness," rose at his usual easy hour the next morning and went down-stairs meaning to breakfast, but succeeded in nothing but in sitting andshivering by the fire. Mr. Wrench was again sent for, but was gone onhis rounds, and Mrs. Vincy seeing her darling's changed looks andgeneral misery, began to cry and said she would send for Dr. Sprague. "Oh, nonsense, mother! It's nothing," said Fred, putting out his hotdry hand to her, "I shall soon be all right. I must have taken cold in thatnasty damp ride."
"Mamma!" said Rosamond, who was seated near the window (thedining-room windows looked on that highly respectable street calledLowick Gate), "there is Mr. Lydgate, stopping to speak to some one. If Iwere you I would call him in. He has cured Ellen Bulstrode. They say hecures every one."
Mrs. Vincy sprang to the window and opened it in an instant,thinking only of Fred and not of medical etiquette. Lydgate was only twoyards off on the other side of some iron palisading, and turned round atthe sudden sound of the sash, before she called to him. In two minuteshe was in the room, and Rosamond went out, after waiting just longenough to show a pretty anxiety conflicting with her sense of what wasbecoming.
Lydgate had to hear a narrative in which Mrs. Vincy's mind insistedwith remarkable instinct on every point of minor importance, especiallyon what Mr. Wrench had said and had not said about coming again. Thatthere might be an awkward affair with Wrench, Lydgate saw at once; butthe ease was serious enough to make him dismiss that consideration: hewas convinced that Fred was in the pink-skinned stage of typhoid fever,and that he had taken just the wrong medicines. He must go to bedimmediately, must have a regular nurse, and various appliances andprecautions must be used, about which Lydgate was particular. PoorMrs. Vincy's terror at these indications of danger found vent in suchwords as came most easily. She thought it "very ill usage on the part ofMr. Wrench, who had attended their house so many years in preferenceto Mr. Peacock, though Mr. Peacock was equally a friend. Why Mr.Wrench should neglect her children more than others, she could not forthe life of her understand. He had not neglected Mrs. Larcher's whenthey had the measles, nor indeed would Mrs. Vincy have wished that heshould. And if anything should happen—"
Here poor Mrs. Vincy's spirit quite broke down, and her Niobe throatand good-humored face were sadly convulsed. This was in the hall out ofFred's hearing, but Rosamond had opened the drawing-room door, andnow came forward anxiously. Lydgate apologized for Mr. Wrench, saidthat the symptoms yesterday might have been disguising, and that thisform of fever was very equivocal in its beginnings: he would goimmediately to the druggist's and have a prescription made up in orderto lose no time, but he would write to Mr. Wrench and tell him what hadbeen done.
"But you must come again—you must go on attending Fred. I can'thave my boy left to anybody who may come or not. I bear nobody ill-will, thank God, and Mr. Wrench saved me in the pleurisy, but he'dbetter have let me die—if—if—"
"I will meet Mr. Wrench here, then, shall I?" said Lydgate, reallybelieving that Wrench was not well prepared to deal wisely with a caseof this kind.
"Pray make that arrangement, Mr. Lydgate," said Rosamond, comingto her mother's aid, and supporting her arm to lead her away.
When Mr. Vincy came home he was very angry with Wrench, and didnot care if he never came into his house again. Lydgate should go onnow, whether Wrench liked it or not. It was no joke to have fever in thehouse. Everybody must be sent to now, not to come to dinner onThursday. And Pritchard needn't get up any wine: brandy was the bestthing against infection. "I shall drink brandy," added Mr. Vincy,emphatically—as much as to say, this was not an occasion for firing withblank-cartridges. "He's an uncommonly unfortunate lad, is Fred. He'dneed have—some luck by-and-by to make up for all this—else I don'tknow who'd have an eldest son."
"Don't say so, Vincy," said the mother, with a quivering lip, "if youdon't want him to be taken from me."
"It will worret you to death, Lucy; that I can see," said Mr. Vincy,more mildly. "However, Wrench shall know what I think of the matter."(What Mr. Vincy thought confusedly was, that the fever might somehowhave been hindered if Wrench had shown the proper solicitude abouthis—the Mayor's—family.) "I'm the last man to give in to the cry aboutnew doctors, or new parsons either—whether they're Bulstrode's men ornot. But Wrench shall know what I think, take it as he will."
Wrench did not take it at all well. Lydgate was as polite as he couldbe in his offhand way, but politeness in a man who has placed you at adisadvantage is only an additional exasperation, especially if he happensto have been an object of dislike beforehand. Country practitioners usedto be an irritable species, susceptible on the point of honor; and Mr.Wrench was one of the most irritable among them. He did not refuse tomeet Lydgate in the evening, but his temper was somewhat tried on theoccasion. He had to hear Mrs. Vincy say—
"Oh, Mr. Wrench, what have I ever done that you should use meso?— To go away, and never to come again! And my boy might havebeen stretched a corpse!"
Mr. Vincy, who had been keeping up a sharp fire on the enemyInfection, and was a good deal heated in consequence, started up whenhe heard Wrench come in, and went into the hall to let him know whathe thought.
"I'll tell you what, Wrench, this is beyond a joke," said the Mayor,who of late had had to rebuke offenders with an official air, and howbroadened himself by putting his thumbs in his armholes.— "To let feverget unawares into a house like this. There are some things that ought tobe actionable, and are not so— that's my opinion."
But irrational reproaches were easier to bear than the sense of beinginstructed, or rather the sense that a younger man, like Lydgate,inwardly considered him in need of instruction, for "in point of fact," Mr.Wrench afterwards said, Lydgate paraded flighty, foreign notions, whichwould not wear. He swallowed his ire for the moment, but he afterwardswrote to decline further attendance in the case. The house might be agood one, but Mr. Wrench was not going to truckle to anybody on aprofessional matter. He reflected, with much probability on his side, thatLydgate would by-and-by be caught tripping too, and that hisungentlemanly attempts to discredit the sale of drugs by his professionalbrethren, would by-and-by recoil on himself. He threw out bitingremarks on Lydgate's tricks, worthy only of a quack, to get himself afactitious reputation with credulous people. That cant about cures wasnever got up by sound practitioners.
This was a point on which Lydgate smarted as much as Wrenchcould desire. To be puffed by ignorance was not only humiliating, butperilous, and not more enviable than the reputation of the weather-prophet. He was impatient of the foolish expectations amidst which allwork must be carried on, and likely enough to damage himself as muchas Mr. Wrench could wish, by an unprofessional openness.
However, Lydgate was installed as medical attendant on the Vincys,and the event was a subject of general conversation in Middlemarch.Some said, that the Vincys had behaved scandalously, that Mr. Vincyhad threatened Wrench, and that Mrs. Vincy had accused him ofpoisoning her son. Others were of opinion that Mr. Lydgate's passing bywas providential, that he was wonderfully clever in fevers, and thatBulstrode was in the right to bring him forward. Many people believedthat Lydgate's coming to the town at all was really due to Bulstrode; andMrs. Taft, who was always counting stitches and gathered herinformation in misleading fragments caught between the rows of herknitting, had got it into her head that Mr. Lydgate was a natural son ofBulstrode's, a fact which seemed to justify her suspicions of evangelicallaymen.
She one day communicated this piece of knowledge to Mrs.Farebrother, who did not fail to tell her son of it, observing—
"I should not be surprised at anything in Bulstrode, but I should besorry to think it of Mr. Lydgate."
"Why, mother," said Mr. Farebrother, after an explosive laugh, "youknow very well that Lydgate is of a good family in the North. He neverheard of Bulstrode before he came here."
"That is satisfactory so far as Mr. Lydgate is concerned, Camden,"said the old lady, with an air of precision.—"But as to Bulstrode—thereport may be true of some other son."
CHAPTER XXVII.
Let the high Muse chant loves Olympian:
We are but mortals, and must sing of man.
An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify evenyour ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, hasshown me this pregnant little fact. Your pier-glass or extensive surface ofpolished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely andmultitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it alighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seemto arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round thatlittle sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhereimpartially and it is only your candle which produces the flatteringillusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusiveoptical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events,and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent—of Miss Vincy,for example. Rosamond had a Providence of her own who had kindlymade her more charming than other girls, and who seemed to havearranged Fred's illness and Mr. Wrench's mistake in order to bring herand Lydgate within effective proximity. It would have been to contravenethese arrangements if Rosamond had consented to go away to StoneCourt or elsewhere, as her parents wished her to do, especially since Mr.Lydgate thought the precaution needless. Therefore, while Miss Morganand the children were sent away to a farmhouse the morning after Fred'sillness had declared itself, Rosamond refused to leave papa and mamma.
Poor mamma indeed was an object to touch any creature born ofwoman; and Mr. Vincy, who doted on his wife, was more alarmed on heraccount than on Fred's. But for his insistence she would have taken norest: her brightness was all bedimmed; unconscious of her costumewhich had always been so fresh and gay, she was like a sick bird withlanguid eye and plumage ruffled, her senses dulled to the sights andsounds that used most to interest her. Fred's delirium, in which heseemed to be wandering out of her reach, tore her heart. After her firstoutburst against-Mr. Wrench she went about very quietly: her one lowcry was to Lydgate. She would follow him out of the room and put herhand on his arm moaning out, "Save my boy." Once she pleaded, "He hasalways been good to me, Mr. Lydgate: he never had a hard word for hismother,"—as if poor Fred's suffering were an accusation against him. Allthe deepest fibres of the mother's memory were stirred, and the youngman whose voice took a gentler tone when he spoke to her, was one withthe babe whom she had loved, with a love new to her, before he wasborn.
"I have good hope, Mrs. Vincy," Lydgate would say. "Come downwith me and let us talk about the food." In that way he led her to theparlor where Rosamond was, and made a change for her, surprising herinto taking some tea or broth which had been prepared for her. Therewas a constant understanding between him and Rosamond on thesematters. He almost always saw her before going to the sickroom, and sheappealed to him as to what she could do for mamma. Her presence ofmind and adroitness in carrying out his hints were admirable, and it isnot wonderful that the idea of seeing Rosamond began to mingle itselfwith his interest in the case. Especially when the critical stage waspassed, and he began to feel confident of Fred's recovery. In the moredoubtful time, he had advised calling in Dr. Sprague (who, if he could,would rather have remained neutral on Wrench's account); but after twoconsultations, the conduct of the case was left to Lydgate, and there wasevery reason to make him assiduous. Morning and evening he was at Mr.Vincy's, and gradually the visits became cheerful as Fred became simplyfeeble, and lay not only in need of the utmost petting but conscious of it,so that Mrs. Vincy felt as if, after all, the illness had made a festival forher tenderness.
Both father and mother held it an added reason for good spirits,when old Mr. Featherstone sent messages by Lydgate, saying that Fred-must make haste and get well, as he, Peter Featherstone, could not dowithout him, and missed his visits sadly. The old man himself wasgetting bedridden. Mrs. Vincy told these messages to Fred when he couldlisten, and he turned towards her his delicate, pinched face, from whichall the thick blond hair had been cut away, and in which the eyesseemed to have got larger, yearning for some word about Mary—wondering what she felt about his illness. No word passed his lips; but"to hear with eyes belongs to love's rare wit," and the mother in thefulness of her heart not only divined Fred's longing, but felt ready for anysacrifice in order to satisfy him.
