"Well, yo'd best see Dr. Yool. If yo' con get him talking he con tell yo' more'n onybody else. He were there when they were born--one of 'em onyway."
"Worse and worse? You're a most mysterious old lady. What's it all about?"
"Yo'd better ask t' doctor. He knows. I only knows what folks say, and that's mostly lies as often as not. Yore dinner's all ready. Yo' go and see t' doctor after supper and ax him all about it."
After dinner he took a ramble round his new parish. He had arrived a couple of days sooner than expected and the head shepherd was away from home, so he had had to find his way about alone and make the acquaintance of his sheep as best he could.
Mrs. Jex, who had also acted as landlady for the departed Smythe, had already thanked God for the change. For Smythe, a lank, boneless creature, who cloaked a woeful lack of zeal for humanity under cover of an unwrinkling robe of high observance, had found the atmosphere of Wyvveloe uncongenial. It lacked the feminine palliatives to which he had been accustomed. He had grown fretful and irritable--"a perfec' whimsy!" as Mrs. Jex put it. The sturdy fisher-farmer folk laughed him and his ways to scorn, and the whole parish was beginning to run to seed when, to the relief of all concerned, he succeeded in obtaining his transfer to a sphere better suited to his peculiar requirements.
Mrs. Jex had had experience of Mr. Eager for one night and half a day, and she already breathed peacefully, and had thanked God for the change. And it was the same in every cottage into which the Rev. Charles put his lean, smiling face that day.
Those simple folk, who looked death in the face as a necessary part of their daily life, knew a man when they saw one, and there was that in Charles Eager's face which would never be in Mr. Smythe's if he lived to be a hundred--that keen hunger for the hearts and souls and lives of men which makes one man a pastor, and the lack of which leaves another but a priest.
And if the cottagers instinctively recognised the difference, how much more that bluff guardian--beyond their inclinations at times--of their outer husks, Dr. Yool!
When Jane Tod, his housekeeper, ushered the stranger into his room Dr. Yool was mixing himself a stiff glass of grog and compounding new fulminations, objurgative and expletive, tending towards the cleansing of Wynsloe streets and backyards.
Miss Tod was a woman in ten thousand, and had been specially created for the post of housekeeper to Dr. Yool. She was blessed with an imperturbable placidity which the irascible doctor had striven in vain to ruffle for over twenty years. When he came in of a night, tired and hungry and bursting with anger at the bovine stupidity of his patients, she let him rave to his heart's relief without changing a hair, and set food and drink before him, and agreed with all he said, even when he grew personal, and she never talked back. When she showed in Mr. Eager she simply opened the sitting-room door, said "New passon," and closed it behind him.