CHAPTER XX.
CONCLUSION.
It is often said that no great work can be accomplished without some correspondingly great sacrifice, and the fever was not stamped out and the water supply made pure without the suffering of an innocent victim in the good cause. And scarcely had the excitement over the accident at the well abated, when Willowton learned that one of the chief directors of the movement—their vicar—was dangerously ill. The long strain, physical and mental, of his resolute fight for the right, the senseless opposition his flock had met him with all through those weary months of work and disappointment, had told on him at last, and when the moment of victory came he succumbed, and three days later he was raging in the delirium of fever. And then, but only then, the wiseacres of the village remarked to each other that they had "minded he looked wonderful quare the last few Sundays—kind a' dazed like;" and the old women had noticed his thin cheeks and restless eye. Yet none of them had ever thought of saying a kind word to him when he called at their cottages, and all had greeted him with the sullen manner they had adopted, as if by common consent, since he had begun his crusade against dirt and insanitariness.
On the evening of that day the doctor's dogcart stopped at Mrs. Lummis's door. He had been such a frequent visitor there during her illness that nobody attached any importance to his visit; though Mrs. Lummis was up and about again, but not yet able to do entirely for herself. But the neighbours did stare when, a quarter of an hour later, Geo came out with a bundle and climbed into the cart alongside him, and drove away up the village with him. And they would have stared harder if they had known whither Geo was bound.
Geo and his mother were sitting at their evening meal when the doctor had knocked at their door. And they were not alone; Milly Greenacre was with them. The three were laughing merrily over the old lady's reminiscences of her "courting" days, and there was a pleasant sense of comfort and happiness in the air.
"I am sorry to interrupt you, Mrs. Lummis," said the doctor, putting his kindly face in at the door, "but I have come to ask you for your nurse."
"Come in, sir, come in," said Mrs. Lummis, rising; and the doctor complied, Geo closing the door behind him.
"But nurse have been gone these two days, sir," she said wonderingly.
"Ah yes. It's not Nurse Blunt I want; it is this good fellow here," looking at Geo, who got very red and looked extremely uncomfortable. "The truth is," went on the doctor, "it is not a woman I want, but a man, for the vicar; he is desperately ill, you know."
"Yes, sir, we've heard," said Mrs. Lummis sympathetically. "That's a bad job, poor gentleman, I'm sure; but—-"