Philip Oldroyd did not hear the end of the speech, for he closed the door, frowning with annoyance; and, mounting his pony, rode slowly back towards home.
“I shall not meet them again, I suppose,” he said to himself, as he neared the spot where he had seen Rolph and Judith on his way to the cottage; and, quite satisfied upon this point, he was riding softly on along the turf by the side of the road when, as he turned a corner, he came suddenly upon two men—the one ruddy and sun-browned, the other pale, close shaven, and sunken of eye.
“Hayle and Captain Rolph,” said the doctor between his teeth, “what does that mean?”
He rode on to pass close by the pair, both of whom looked up, the one to give him a haughty nod of the head, the other to touch his hat and say,—“How do, doctor?”
“The parson is said to know most about the affairs of people in a parish,” thought Oldroyd; “but that will not do. It’s a mistake. We are the knowing ones. Why, I could give quite a history of what is going on around us—if I liked. Your parson kens, as the north-country folk say, a’ aboot their morals, but we doctors are well up in the mental and bodily state too. Now then, who next? Bound to say, if I take the short cut through the firs and along the grass drives, I shall meet the old major toadstool hunting, and possibly Miss Day with him.”
Oldroyd’s ideas ran upon someone else; but he put the thoughts aside, and went on very moodily for a few minutes before his thoughts reverted to their former channel.
“Safe to meet them,” he muttered, with a bitter laugh. “Well, the captain is otherwise engaged to-day. The young lady with the gentleman as I came, and papa and the gentleman as I return. Well—go on Peter—I have enough to do with my own professional affairs, and giving advice gratis on moral matters is not in my department. No mention of them in the pharmacopoeia.”
Peter responded to his rider’s adjuration to go on in his customary way—to wit, he raised his head and whisked his tail, and went on, but without the slightest increase of speed. Oldroyd turned him out of the lane, through one of the game preserves, and he rode thoughtfully on for a couple of miles, with the peculiar smell of the bracken pervading the air as Peter crushed the stems beneath his hoofs. At times, as he rode through some opening where the sun beat down heavily, there was the pungent, lemony, resinous odour of the pines wafted to his nostrils, and once it was so strong that the doctor pulled up to inhale it.
“What a lunatic I was,” he thought, “to come and settle down in a place like this. Nature wants no doctors here; she does all the work herself—except the accidents,” he added laughingly. “Poor old Hayle yonder; I don’t think she would have made so good a job of him.”
He rode on again through the hot afternoon sunshine, going more and more out of his way; but he did not see the major with his creel, neither did the lady attendant upon some of his walks make his sore heart begin beating.