He took no note of his daughter's little triumphs, the admiration that she excited, or the flatteries that greeted her. It is true he did not possess the same means of measuring these that she had, and in all that dreary leisure which besets an unhonored guest, he had ample time to mope and fret and moralize, as gloomily as might be. If, then, he did not enjoy himself on his visit, he came away from it soured and ill-humored.
He denounced “junketings”—by which unseemly title he designated the late entertainment—as amusements too costly for persons of his means. He made a rough calculation—a very rough one—of all that the “precious tomfoolery” had cost: the turnpike which he had paid, and the perquisites to servants—which he had not; the expense of Polly's finery,—a hazarded guess she would have been charmed to have had confirmed; and, ending the whole with a startling total, declared that a reign of rigid domestic economy must commence from that hour. The edict was something like what one reads from the French Government, when about to protest against some license of the press, and which opens by proclaiming that “the latitude hitherto conceded to public discussion has not been attended with those gratifying results so eagerly anticipated by the Imperial administration.” Poor Mrs. Dill—like a mere journalist—never knew she had been enjoying blessings till she was told she had forfeited them forever, and she heard with a confused astonishment that the household charges would be still further reduced, and yet food and fuel and light be not excluded from the supplies. He denounced Polly's equestrianism as a most ruinous and extravagant pursuit. Poor Polly, whose field achievements had always been on a borrowed mount! Tom was a scapegrace, whose debts would have beggared half-a-dozen families,—wretched dog, to whom a guinea was a gold-mine; and Mrs. Dill, unhappy Mrs. Dill, who neither hunted, nor smoked, nor played skittles, after a moment's pause, he told her that his hard-earned pence should not be wasted in maintaining a “circulating library.” Was there ever injustice like this? Talk to a man with one meal a day about gluttony, lecture the castaway at sea about not giving way to his appetites, you might just as well do so as to preach to Mrs. Dill—with her one book, and who never wanted another—about the discursive costliness of her readings.
Could it be that, like the cruel jailer, who killed the spider the prisoner had learned to love, he had resolved to rob her of Clarissa? The thought was so overwhelming that it stunned her; and thus stupefied, she saw the doctor issue forth on his daily round, without venturing one word in answer. And he rode on his way,—on that strange mission of mercy, meanness, of honest sympathy, or mock philanthropy, as men's hearts and natures make of it,—and set out for the “Fisherman's Home.”
CHAPTER IX. A COUNTRY DOCTOR
In a story, as in a voyage, one must occasionally travel with uncongenial companions. Now I have no reason for hoping that any of my readers care to keep Dr. Dill's company, and yet it is with Dr. Dill we must now for a brief space foregather. He was on his way to visit his patient at the “Fisherman's Home,” having started, intentionally very early, to be there before Stapylton could have interposed with any counsels of removing him to Kilkenny.
The world, in its blind confidence in medical skill, and its unbounded belief in certain practitioners of medicine, is but scantily just to the humbler members of the craft in regard to the sensitiveness with which they feel the withdrawal of a patient from their care, and the substitution of another physician. The doctor who has not only heard, but felt Babington's adage, that the difference between a good physician and a bad one is only “the difference between a pound and a guinea,” naturally thinks it a hard thing that his interests are to be sacrificed for a mere question of five per cent. He knows, besides, that they can each work on the same materials with the same tools, and it can be only through some defect in his self-confidence that he can bring himself to believe that the patient's chances are not pretty much alike in his hands or his rival's. Now Dr. Dill had no feelings of this sort; no undervaluing of himself found a place in his nature. He regarded medical men as tax-gatherers, and naturally thought it mattered but little which received the impost; and, thus reflecting, he bore no good will towards that gallant Captain, who, as we have seen, stood so well in his daughter's favor. Even hardened men of the world—old footsore pilgrims of life—have their prejudices, and one of these is to be pleased at thinking they had augured unfavorably of any one they had afterwards learned to dislike. It smacks so much of acuteness to be able to say, “I was scarcely presented to him; we had not exchanged a dozen sentences when I saw this, that, and t' other.” Dill knew this man was overbearing, insolent, and oppressive, that he was meddlesome and interfering, giving advice unasked for, and presuming to direct where no guidance was required. He suspected he was not a man of much fortune; he doubted he was a man of good family. All his airs of pretensions—very high and mighty they were—did not satisfy the doctor. As he said himself, he was a very old bird, but he forgot to add that he had always lived in an extremely small cage.
The doctor had to leave his horse on the high-road and take a small footpath, which led through some meadows till it reached the little copse of beech and ilex that sheltered the cottage and effectually hid it from all view from the road. The doctor had just gained the last stile, when he suddenly came upon a man repairing a fence, and whose labors were being overlooked by Miss Barrington. He had scarcely uttered his most respectful salutations, when she said, “It is, perhaps, the last time you will take that path through the Lock Meadow, Dr. Dill. We mean to close it up after this week.”
“Close it up, dear lady!—a right of way that has existed Heaven knows how long. I remember it as a boy myself.”
“Very probably, sir, and what you say vouches for great antiquity; but things may be old and yet not respectable. Besides, it never was what you have called it,—a right of way. If it was, where did it go to?”