We got several answers to the advertisement from people who didn’t come. The questions they asked were awful—it took me a whole day nearly to answer them. Were we on gravel soil? Where did we get our water from? Was the church High or Low? How far off was the nearest doctor? Was the air bracing or relaxing?—and, some of them, if these things were all satisfactory, were good enough to say that they would come if we could take them on inclusive terms. One lady and her three daughters, after writing four pages every other day, wanted the best sitting-room and three bedrooms, fire and light, breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea, and late dinner, for two guineas a week for the four of them, no extras to be charged.
It was about a week after our advertisement appeared that we got our first visitor through it. A very nice old gentleman, with beautiful silver hair and gold spectacles, and a hand portmanteau, arrived one evening, and told us that he’d seen our advertisement, and he’d come to give the place a trial.
He told us that he was a London physician, and had been ordered a few days’ holiday; and he had seen our advertisement, and thought, if it suited, it would be just the place for him to send some of his patients to. He said he had a big practice among City men, and he had often to tell them to go and sleep in the country for a week or so because of their nerves; but as they wanted to get to business every day he couldn’t send them far, and we were just the right distance.
Harry was delighted when he heard the gentleman say that, because it was just the sort of connection he wanted—people who wanted to be quiet and go to bed early, and wouldn’t want a lot of waiting on till all hours of the morning; and people of that sort, business people, are always so respectable.
You may be sure we made the celebrated London physician as comfortable as we could, and gave him the best rooms, and waited on him hand and foot, and I went into the kitchen myself to look after cook while his meals were being prepared, because our cook was what you call “unequal.”
One day everything would be beautiful, a credit to the best hotel in the kingdom, and the next day everything would be spoiled. And she always was at her best when we’d nobody particular in the house, and she was always at her worst when it was a very particular customer. And she had a vile temper, too, as most cooks have, through standing so much over the fire, and wanted a lot of humouring, especially when she knew everything depended on her and I was anxious.
When the London physician came, I remembered how particular doctors are about food for their patients, especially for those that have nerves, and stomachs, and gout, and other things that come from overwork and anxiety, some of them saying that a badly-cooked dinner is at the bottom of many ailments that people suffer from, such as dyspepsia and indigestion.
So I stopped in the kitchen as much as I could to keep cook up to the mark for the London physician, and, to make her try her best, I told her if she suited she was to have her wages raised when we began to get busy.
She did try her best, and came out really quite grand once or twice in entrées and fancy puddings that I didn’t know she knew anything about, so that all the time the London physician was with us his dinners were fit for a nobleman.
He enjoyed them, too, and no mistake, and there wasn’t much that went up that came down again. “Ah, my dear madam,” he said to me one day, when I came to clear away and found that he’d finished a whole apple charlotte, and only left a quarter of a wine-jelly that cook had made—“ah, my dear madam, your salubrious air has made a new man of me. Why, before I came down here the very sight of food almost made me ill!”