“Here, Jenny,” she said to a sharp little girl, the man's grandniece, “take this down to Vizard Court, and if the housekeeper objects, go to the front-door and demand in my name to see the squire or Miss Vizard, and give them the paper. Don't you give it up without the meat. Take this basket on your arm.”
Then she walked out of the cottage, and Severne followed her: he ventured to say that was a novel prescription.
She explained. “Physicians are obliged to send the rich to the chemist, or else the fools would think they were slighted. But we need not be so nice with the poor; we can prescribe to do them good. When you inflicted your company on me, I was sketching out a treatise, to be entitled, 'Cure of Disorders by Esculents.' That old man is nearly exsanguis. There is not a drug in creation that could do him an atom of good. Nourishing food may. If not, why, he is booked for the long journey. Well, he has had his innings. He is fourscore. Do you think you will ever see fourscore—you and your vices?”
“Oh, no. But I think you will; and I hope so; for you go about doing good.”
“And some people one could name go about doing mischief?”
Severne made no reply.
Soon after they discovered a little group, principally women and children. These were inspecting something on the ground, and chattering excitedly. The words of dire import, “She have possessed him with a devil,” struck their ear. But soon they caught sight of Miss Gale, and were dead silent. She said, “What is the matter? Oh, I see, the vermifuge has acted.”
It was so: a putty-faced boy had been unable to eat his breakfast; had suffered malaise for hours afterward, and at last had been seized with a sort of dry retching, and had restored to the world they so adorn a number of amphibia, which now wriggled in a heap, and no doubt bitterly regretted the reckless impatience with which they had fled from an unpleasant medicine to a cold-hearted world.
“Well, good people,” said Miss Gale, “what are you making a fuss about? Are they better in the boy or out of him?”
The women could not find their candor at a moment's notice, but old Giles replied heartily, “Why, hout! better an empty house than a bad tenant.”