Wenderholme Part 8

"Mrs. Prigley's a relation of yours, Lady Helena,--rather a near relation,--perhaps you are not aware of it?"

Lady Helena looked, and was, very much surprised. "A relation of _mine_, Dr. Bardly! you must be mistaken. I believe I know the names of all my relations!"

"I mean a relation of your husband--of Colonel Stanburne. Mrs. Prigley was a Miss Stanburne of Byfield, and her father was brother to Colonel Stanburne's father, and was born in this house."

"That's quite a near relationship indeed," said Lady Helena; "I wonder I never heard of it. John never spoke to me about Mrs. Prigley."

"There was a quarrel between Colonel Stanburne's father and his uncle, and there has been no intercourse between their families since. I daresay the Colonel does not even know how many cousins he had on that side, or what marriages they made." On this the Colonel came in.

"John, dear, Dr. Bardly has just told me that we have some cousins at Shayton that I knew nothing about. It's the clergyman and his wife, and their name is Prig--Prig"--

"Prigley," suggested the Doctor.

"Yes, Prigley; isn't it curious, John? did you know about them?"

"Not very accurately. I knew one of my cousins had married a clergyman somewhere in that neighborhood, but was not aware that he was the inc.u.mbent of Shayton. I don't know my cousins at all. There was a lawsuit between their father and mine, and the two branches have never eaten salt together since. I haven't the least ill-will to any of them, but there's an awkwardness in making a first step--one never can tell how it may be received. What do you say, Doctor? How would Mrs.

Prig--Prigley and her husband receive me if I were to go and call upon them?"

"They'd give you cake and wine."

"Would they really, now? Then I'll go and call upon them. I like cake and wine--always liked cake and wine."

The conversation about the Prigleys did not end here. The Doctor was well aware that it would be agreeable to Mrs. Prigley to visit at Wenderholme, and be received there as a relation; and he also knew that the good-nature of the Colonel and Lady Helena might be relied upon to make such intercourse perfectly safe and pleasant. So he made the most of the opportunity, and that so successfully, that by the time dinner was announced both John Stanburne and his wife had promised to drive over some day to Shayton from Sootythorn, and lunch with the Doctor, and call at the parsonage before leaving.

Colonel Stanburne's conversation was not always very profound, but his dinners were never dull, for he _would_ talk, and make other people talk too. He solemnly warned the Doctor not to allow himself to be entrapped into giving gratuitous medical advice to Lady Helena. "She thinks she's got fifteen diseases, she does, upon my word; and she's a sort of notion that because you're the regimental doctor, she has a claim on you for gratuitous counsel and a.s.sistance. Now I consider that I _have_ such a claim--if a private has it, surely a colonel has it too--and when we come up for our first training I shall expect you to look at my tongue, and feel my pulse, and physic me as a militia-man, at her Majesty's expense. But it is by no means so clear to me that my wife has any right to gratuitous doctoring, and mind she doesn't extort it from you. She's a regular screw, my wife is; and she loses no opportunity of obtaining benefits for nothing." Then he rattled on with a hundred anecdotes about ladies and doctors, in which there was just enough truth to give a pretext for his audacious exaggerations.

When they returned to the drawing-room, the Colonel made Lady Helena sing; and she sang well. The Doctor, like many inhabitants of Shayton, had a very good ear, and greatly enjoyed music. Lady Helena had seldom found so attentive a listener; he sought old favorites of his in her collection of songs, and begged her to sing them one after another. It seemed as if he never would be tired of listening. Her ladyship felt pleased and flattered, and sang with wonderful energy and feeling. The Doctor, though in his innocence he thought only of the pure pleasure her music gave him, could have chosen no better means of ingratiating himself in her favor; and if there had not, unhappily, been that dark and dubious question about church attendance, which made her ladyship look upon him as a sort of Dissenter, or worse, the Doctor would that night have entered into relations of quite frank and cordial friendship with Lady Helena. English ladies are very kind and forgiving on many points. A man may be notoriously immoral, or a gambler, or a drinker, yet if he be well off they will kindly ignore and pa.s.s over these little defects; but the unpardonable sin is failure in church attendance, and they will not pa.s.s over _that_. Lady Helena, in her character of inquisitor, had discovered this symptom of heresy, and would have been delighted to find a moral screw of some kind by which the culpable Doctor might be driven churchwards. If the law had permitted it, I have no doubt that she would have applied material screws, and pinched the Doctor's thumbs, or roasted him gently before a slow fire, or at least sent him to church between two policemen with staves; but as these means were beyond her power, she must wait until the moral screw could be found. A good practical means, which she had resorted to in several instances with poor people, had been to deprive them of their means of subsistence; and all men and women whom her ladyship's little arm could reach knew that they must go to church or leave their situations; so they attended with a regularity which, though exemplary in the eyes of men, could scarcely, one would think (considering the motive), be acceptable to Heaven. But Lady Helena acted in this less from a desire to please G.o.d than from the instinct of domination, which, in her character of spiritual ruler, naturally exercised itself on this point.

It seldom happens that the master of a house is the spiritual ruler of it; he is the temporal power, not the spiritual. Colonel Stanburne felt and knew that he had no spiritual power.

This matter of the Doctor's laxness as a church-goer had been rankling in Lady Helena's mind all the time she had been singing, and when she closed the piano she was ready for an attack. If the Doctor had been shivering blanketless in a bivouac, and she had had the power of giving him a blanket or withholding it, she would have offered it on condition he promised to go to church, and she would have withheld it if he had refused compliance. But the Doctor had blankets of his own, and so could not be touched through a deprivation of blanket. She might, however, deprive the old woman he had recommended, and at the same time give the Doctor a lesson, indirectly.

"I forgot to ask you, Dr. Bardly, whether the old woman you recommended for a blanket was a churchwoman, and regular in her attendance."

"Two questions very easily answered," replied that audacious and unhesitating Doctor; "she is a Wesleyan Methodist, and irregular in her attendance."

"Then I'm--very sorry--Dr. Bardly, but I cannot give her a blanket, as I had promised. I can only give them to our--own people, you know; and I make it essential that they should be _good_ church-people--I mean, very regular church-people."

"Very well; I'll give her a blanket myself."

The opportunity was not to be neglected, and her ladyship fired her gun.

She had the less hesitation in doing so, that it seemed monstrously presumptuous in a medical man to give blankets at all! What right had he to usurp the especial prerogative of great ladies? And then to give a blanket to this very woman whom, for good reasons, her ladyship had condemned to a state of blanketlessness!

"I quite understand," she said, with much severity of tone, "that Dr.

Bardly, who never attends public worship himself, should have a fellow-feeling with those who are equally negligent."

It is a hard task to fight a woman in the presence of her husband, who is at the same time one's friend. The Doctor _thought_, "Would the woman have me offer premiums on hypocrisy as she does?" but he did not say so, because there was poor John Stanburne at the other end of the hearth-rug in a state of much uncomfortableness. So the Doctor said nothing at all, and the silence became perfectly distressing. Lady Helena had a way of her own out of the difficulty. Though it was an hour earlier than the usual time for prayers, she rang the bell and ordered all the servants in. When they were kneeling, each before his chair, her ladyship read the prayers herself, and accentuated with a certain severity a paragraph in which she thanked G.o.d that she was not as unbelievers, who were destined to perish everlastingly. It was a satisfaction to Lady Helena to have the Doctor there down upon his knees, with no means of escape from the expression of spiritual superiority.

CHAPTER IX.

THE FUGITIVE.

"I say, Doctor," said John Stanburne, when her ladyship was fairly out of hearing, and half-way in her ascent of the great staircase--"I say, Doctor, I hope you don't mind what Helena says about you not being--you know some women are so--indeed I do believe all women are so. They seem laudably anxious to keep us all in the right path, but perhaps they're just a little _too_ anxious."

The Doctor said he believed Lady Helena meant to do right, but--and then he hesitated.

"But you don't see the sense of bribing poor people into sham piety with blankets."

"Well, no, I don't."

"Neither do I, Doctor. There's a Roman Catholic family about three miles off, and the lady there gives premiums on going to ma.s.s, and still higher premiums on confession. She has won a great many converts; and there's a strong antagonism between her and Helena--a most expensive warfare it is too, I a.s.sure you, this warfare for souls. However, it's an ill wind that blows n.o.body good, and the poor profit by it, which is a consolation, only it makes them sneaks--it makes them sneaks and hypocrites. Doctor, come into my study, will you, and let's have a weed?"

The "study," as John Stanburne called it, was a cosey little room, with oak wainscot that his grandfather had painted white. It contained a small bookcase, and the bookcase contained a good many novels, some books of poetry, a treatise on dog-breaking, a treatise on driving, and a treatise on fishing. The novels were very well selected, and so was the poetry; and John Stanburne had read all these books, many of them over and over again. Such literary education as he possessed had been mainly got out of that bookcase; and though he had no claim to erudition, a man's head might be worse furnished than with such furniture as that. There was a splendid library at Wenderholme--a big room lined with the backs of books as the other rooms were lined with paper or wainscot; and when Stanburne wanted to know something he went there, and disturbed his ponderous histories and encyclopaedias; but he _used_ the little bookcase more than the big library. He could not read either Latin or Greek. Few men can read Latin and Greek, and of the few who can, still fewer do read them; but his French was very much above the usual average of English French--that is, he spoke fluently, and would no doubt have spoken correctly if only he could have mastered the conjugations and genders, and imitated the peculiar Gallic sounds.

The society of ladies is always charming, but it must be admitted that there is an hour especially dear to the male s.e.x, and which does not owe its delightfulness to their presence. It is the hour of retirement into the smoking-room. When the lady of the house has a tendency to make the weight of her authority felt (and this will sometimes happen), the male members of her family and their guests feel a schoolboyish sense of relief in escaping from it; but even when she is very genial and pleasant, and when everybody enjoys the light of her countenance, it must also be confessed that the timely withdrawal of that light, like the hour of sunset, hath a certain sweetness of its own.

"My wife's always very good about letting me sit here, and smoke and talk as long as I like with my friends, after she's gone to bed," said Colonel Stanburne. "You smile because I seem to value a sort of goodness that seems only natural, but that's on account of your old-bachelorish ignorance of womankind. There are married men who no more dare sit an hour with a cigar when their wives are gone to bed than they dare play billiards on Sunday. Now, for instance, I was staying this autumn with a friend of mine in another county, and about ten o'clock his wife went to bed. He and I wanted to talk over a great many things. We had been old school-fellows, and we had travelled together when we were both bachelors, and we knew lots of men that his wife knew nothing about, and each of us wanted to hear all the news that the other had to tell; so he just ventured, the first night I was there, to ask me into his private study and offer me a cigar. Well, we had scarcely had time to light when his wife's maid knocks at the door and says, 'Please, sir, Missis wishes to see you;' so he promised to go, and began to look uncomfortable, and in five minutes the girl came again, and she came three times in a quarter of an hour. After that came the lady herself, quite angry, and ordered her husband to bed, just as if he had been a little boy; and though he seemed cool, and didn't stir from his chair, it was evident that he was afraid of her, and he solemnly promised to go in five minutes. At the expiration of the five minutes in she bursts again (she had been waiting in the pa.s.sage--perhaps she may have been listening at the door), and held out her watch without one word. The husband got up like a sheep, and said 'Good-night, John,' and she led him away just like that; and I sat and smoked by myself, thinking what a pitiable spectacle it was. Now my wife is not like that; she will have her way about her blankets, but she's reasonable in other respects."

They sat very happily for two hours, talking about the regiment that was to be. Suddenly, about midnight, a large watch-dog that inhabited a kennel on that side of the house began to bark furiously, and there was a cry, as of some woman or child in distress. The Colonel jumped out of his chair, and threw the window open. The two men listened attentively, but it was too dark to see any thing. At length Colonel Stanburne said, "Let us go out and look about a little--that was a human cry, wasn't it?" So he lighted a lantern, and they went.

There was a thick wood behind the house of Wenderholme, and this wood filled a narrow ravine, in the bottom of which was a little stream, and by the stream a pathway that led up to the open moor. This moor continued without interruption over a range of lofty hills, or, to speak more strictly, over a sort of plateau or table-land, till it terminated at the enclosed pasture-lands near Shayton. John Stanburne and the Doctor walked first along this pathway. The watch-dog's kennel was close to the path, at a little green wooden gate, where it entered the garden.

The dog, hearing his master's step, came out of his kennel, much excited with the hope of a temporary release from the irksomeness of his captivity; but his master only caressed and spoke to him a little, and pa.s.sed on. Then he began to talk to the Doctor. The sound of his voice reached the ears of a third person, who came out of the wood, and began to follow them on the path.

The Doctor became aware that they were followed, and they stopped. The Colonel turned his lantern, and the light of it fell full upon the intruder.

"Why, it's a mere child," said the Colonel. "But what on earth's the matter with the Doctor?"

Certainly that eccentric Doctor _did_ behave in a most remarkable manner. He s.n.a.t.c.hed the lantern from the Colonel's hand without one word of apology, and having cast its beams on the child's face, threw it down on the ground, and seized the vagrant in his arms. "The Doctor's mad,"

thought the Colonel, as he picked up the lantern.

"Why, _it's little Jacob_!" cried Dr. Bardly.

But this conveyed nothing to the mind of the Colonel. What did he know about little Jacob?

Meanwhile the lad was telling his tale to his friend. Father had beaten him so, and he'd run away. "Please, Doctor, don't send me back again."

The child's feet were bare, and icy cold, and covered with blood. His clothes were wet up to the waist. His little dog was with him.

"It's a little boy that's a most particular friend of mine," said the Doctor; "and he's been very ill-used. We must take care of him. I must beg a night's lodging for him in the house."

They took him into the Colonel's study, before the glowing fire. "Now, what's to be done?" said the Colonel. "It's lucky you're a doctor."

"Let us undress him and warm him first. We can do every thing ourselves.

There is a most urgent reason why no domestic should be informed of his being here. His existence here must be kept secret."

The Colonel went to his dressing-room and brought towels. Then he set some water on the fire in a kettle. The Doctor took the wet things off, and examined the poor little lacerated feet. He rubbed little Jacob all over with the towels most energetically. The Colonel, whose activity was admirable to witness, fetched a tub from somewhere, and they made arrangements for a warm bath.