Bessie laughed and tossed her head like a creature escaped. "Yes, I am so happy!" she answered.
The ride was just one of the doctor's regular rounds. He had to call at Brook, where a servant was ill, and they went by the high-road to the manor. Harry Musgrave was not at home. He had gone out for a day's ranging, and was pensively pondering his way through the bosky recesses of the Forest, under the unbroken silence of the tall pines, to the seashore and the old haunts of the almost extinct race of smugglers. The first person they met after leaving the manor was little Christie with a pale radiant face, having just come on a perfect theme for a picture—a still woodland pool reflecting high broken banks and flags and rushes, with slender birchen trees hanging over, and a cluster of low reed-thatched huts, very uncomfortable to live in, but gloriously mossed and weather-stained to paint.
"Don't linger here too late—it is an unwholesome spot," said Mr. Carnegie, warning him as he rode on. Little Christie set up his white umbrella in the sun, and kings might have envied him.
"My mother is better, but call and see her," he cried after the doctor; this amendment was one cause of the artist's blitheness.
"Of course, she is better—she has had nothing for a week to make her bad," said Mr. Carnegie; but when he reached the wheelwright's and saw Mrs. Christie, with a handkerchief tied over her cap, gently pacing the narrow garden-walks, he assumed an air of excessive astonishment.
"Yes, Mr. Carnegie, sir, I'm up and out," she announced in a tone of no thanks to anybody. "I felt a sing'lar wish to taste the air, and my boy says, 'Go out, mother; it will do you more good than anything.' I could enjoy a ride in a chaise, but folks that make debts can afford to behave very handsome to themselves in a many things that them that pays ready money has to be mean enough to do without. Jones's wife has her rides, but if her husband would pay for the repair of the spring-cart that was mended fourteen months ago come Martinmas, there'd be more sense in that."
"Don't matter, my good soul! Walking is better than riding any fine day, if you have got the strength," said the doctor briskly.
"Yes, sir; there's that consolation for them that is not rich and loves to pay their way. I hope to walk to church next Sunday, please the Lord. And if a word could be given to Mr. Wiley not to play so on the feelings, it would be a mercy. He do make such awful faces, and allude to sudden death and accidents and the like, as is enough to give an ailing person a turn. I said to Mrs. Bunny, 'Mary,' I said, 'don't you go to hear him; leastways, sit by the door if you must, and don't stop for the sermon: it might make that impression it would do the babe a mischief.'"
"Go to chapel; it is nearer. And take Mrs. Bunny with you," said Mr. Carnegie.
"No, sir. Mrs. Wiley has been very kind in calling and taking notice since I have been laid up, and one good turn deserves another. I shall attend church in future, though the doctrine's so shocking that if folks pondered it the lunatic asylums wouldn't hold 'em all. I'll never believe as the Lord meant us to be threatened with judgment to come, and hell, and all that, till one's afraid to lie down in one's bed. He'd not have let there be an end of us if we didn't get so mortal tired o' living."