There were wild folk in these parts, and lonesome errands to be run sometimes by Parson Langney, who had begun life as a surgeon, and who had been lucky enough to be pitch-forked into a living which exactly suited his adventurous habits, his love of fox-hunting, and his liking for good wine and well-hung game.
Before the importunate summons could be repeated, Parson Langney had come out of the little dining-parlor, and drawn the bolt of the front door.
For Nance, the solitary housemaid of the modest establishment, was getting into years, and inclined to regard a late visitor as a person to be thwarted by being kept as long as possible waiting at the door.
“Hast no better manners than to do thy best to drive the glass from out the panes?” asked he, as soon as he found himself face to face with the intruder, who proved to be a sailor, in open jacket, loose shirt and slops, and flat, three-cornered hat.
“Oons, sir, ’tis a matter of life and death!” said the man, as he saluted the parson with becoming respect, and then pointed quickly back in the direction of the sea, which could be seen faintly glistening in the murky light of a clouded moon. “I’m from the revenue cutter in the offing yonder, where one of my mates lies with a bullet in’s back, sent there by one of those rascally smugglers in a fray we’ve had with them but now. I’ve been in the village for help, but they say there’s no doctor here but yourself. So I beg your honor’ll come with me, and do what you can for him. And could you tell me of a woman that would watch by him? For we’ve all got our hands full, and he’ll be wandering from his wits ere morning.”
The parson, without a moment’s delay, had begun, by the help of his daughter, to get into a rough brown riding-coat that hung from a nail on the whitewashed wall.
“Why, there you have me out,” said he, as he buttoned himself up to the chin, and put a round, broad-brimmed black hat, with a bow and a twisted band of black cloth, tightly on to his somewhat rusty, grizzled bob-wig. “For there’s none in these parts to nurse the sick as well as my daughter Joan.”
“And sure I’m ready to go, father!” cried the girl, who, with the nimbleness of a fawn, had darted back into the parlor and brought out her father’s case of surgical instruments, as well as a diminutive portable chest, containing such drugs and medicines as were in use at the time.
“I’ll have on my hood in a tick of the clock.”
And by the time these words were uttered she had flown up the steep, narrow staircase and disappeared round the bend at the top. The sailor, who had stepped inside the porch, out of the wind and a drizzling rain which had now begun to fall, was full of admiration and astonishment.