Jeavons still appeared confused. "I really did my best, Sir Reginald, to make her understand that you'd given up all that sort of thing and never went in for it now, finding it more or less uncertain, as you might say, and out of the usual course of events, and so not altogether to be depended upon; and that she'd much better stick to the doctor and not trouble you, Mr. Wildacre being laid up in the house, and you with enough on your hands as it is. But she went on crying, and said her mother'd never forgive her if she didn't give you the message."
I felt that such unaccustomed loquacity was a sign of serious mental disturbance on the part of Jeavons. He was generally so very brief and to the point.
"Well, what was the message?" I repeated, with (I cannot help thinking) commendable patience.
"Well, Sir Reginald, begging your pardon, the fact is that Mrs. Pearson's baby is dying of brownchitis or pewmonia or some other disease connected with its teething, and nothing will satisfy her but that you should come and lay your hands on it, like as was your custom at one time, having outgrown it since. I told Maggie as how you had given up the habit long ago, which she said her mother knew: but all the same, Mrs. Pearson still persisted that she was sure you could cure the baby if you tried, which was just like her obstinacy, and to my thinking a great impertinence."
"Have they had the doctor, do you know?" I asked.
"Yes, Sir Reginald, and he can't do nothing more than what he has done, he says, and he is afraid the child will die. Though what they wants with that extra child at all, beats me, having six besides, and none too much food for them all, with the dreadful war sending up the prices of everything."
For two years now I had refused all the villagers' requests that I would exercise my gift of healing upon them, as I knew, alas! that the gift was no longer mine: and they had gradually ceased to proffer these requests. Therefore it struck me as noteworthy that on the very day when, as the old theologists put it, I had "found peace," I should be asked to exercise this lost power once more. It seemed to be one of those wonderful instances of direct Interposition which we of this faithless and perverse generation disguise under the pseudonym of "remarkable coincidences."
"Tell Maggie that I will come at once," I said.
And Jeavons accordingly departed, leaving behind him an atmosphere of respectful disapproval and regret. Anything bordering on the unusual—let alone the miraculous—filled my excellent butler with horror and dismay.
When I am tempted—as indeed I often am, and frequently successfully—to despise those Jeavons-like souls who delight to burrow in the commonplace whenever the light of the supernatural shows above the horizon, I remind myself of the first Order that was given after the dread gates of death had been flung open and the ruler's little daughter had come through them back to life. He Who had performed the stupendous miracle did not take this unique opportunity of preaching a sermon to the company assembled in the house of mourning, with His Own Action as the text: on the contrary "He commanded that something should be given her to eat."