‘You come over to England, of course, sir, for the big events of the year?’
‘Not I, not I. When you arrive at the age of a hundred you will find yourself content with newspaper reports of most human goings on, great or small. I have my books about me here, my farm, my dogs, a horse or two, and my cure of souls. Marjorie, small witch, where are you? Did you not say Mr. Arbuthnot was to take Holy Orders?’
‘Mr. Arbuthnot is to cure bodies, not souls.’
Marjorie’s answer was given in a tone of altissimo derision.
Geff put himself through a little exercise of moral arithmetic; the result required being the precise sum of dislike which a man of his age could feel towards a scoffing girl of seventeen, a girl with eyes like Marjorie’s, silken black hair, and exquisite hands. It was not, perhaps, so large an amount as one might have looked for. ‘An Æsculapius,’ observed the Reverend Andros. ‘You know the parable, Mr. Arbuthnot? Two stalwart men, Nature and Disease, are fighting. A third man, the Doctor, seizes his club and rushes into the melée, sometimes hitting Disease and sometimes Nature. You are to be the man with the club.’
‘I am to be the man with the club,’ answered Geff, relishing the old Seigneur’s manner. ‘As long as I confine myself to the setting of broken bones, sir, I hope to do as little harm as may be.’
‘The doctors kill us no quicker than they used,’ admitted Andros Bartrand liberally. ‘When I was an undergraduate they relied on their brains, as you do now on your finger-tips, and I believe killed us no quicker. You are an honours’ man, of course? At a hundred years old one is naturally ignorant as to the University regulations of the times. I know next to nothing of your Cambridge Triposes. You won your laurels, I assume, among bones and minerals?’
The Seigneur’s prejudices were mellow and crusted as his own port. A born and passionate lover of classic literature, he regarded the admission of natural science into the Universities as a mistake, a sort of shuffle among examiners and Liberal Governments that enabled lowly-born classes of men to take high degrees.
‘Unfortunately for myself, I did not,’ said Geff. ‘When my real college life was over I saw bread and cheese in a remote perspective, and had to begin bones and minerals from their ABC. In my day I came out eighth,’ and being exceedingly human, Geff’s face flushed a bit, ‘in the Classical Tripos.’