"Just see that my black bag is ready, Jessie," was the husband's retort to this tirade. "And you might hurry John round with the pony-chaise."
Dr. Morris felt intensely proud as he drove off to see his august patient. He drew up his rough pony once or twice to announce the fact to any stray passer-by.
"Good-day, Bell,—fine morning, isn't it? I'm just off to the Manor. Mrs. B. not quite the thing. Ah, I see Mrs. Jenkins coming down the street. I must tell her that I can't look in this morning."
He nodded to Mr. Bell, and drove on until he met the angular lady known by this name.
"Good-morning, good-morning," he called in his cheery tones, and scarcely drawing in the pony at all now. "I meant to look round in the course of the forenoon to see how the new tonic agrees with Miss Daisy; but I may be a little late; I'm summoned in haste to the Manor."
Here he touched his little pony's head with the whip, and, before Mrs. Jenkins could utter a word of either astonishment or interest, had turned the corner and was out of sight.
The fashionable disease of nerves had not yet become an epidemic at Northbury, and Dr. Morris was a little puzzled at the symptoms which his great patient exhibited. He was proud to speak of Mrs. Bertram as his "great patient," and told her to her face in rather a fulsome manner that he considered it the highest possible honor to attend her. He ordered his favorite tonic of cod liver oil, told her to stay in bed, and keep on low diet, and, having pocketed his fee drove away.
Mrs. Bertram was outwardly very civil to the Northbury doctor, but when he departed she scolded Catherine and Mabel for having sent for him, tore up his prescription, wrote one for herself, which she sent to the chemist to have made up, and desired Catherine to give her a glass of port wine from one of a treasured few bottles of a rare vintage which she had brought with her to Rosendale.
"It was a few days after her visit to the Meadowsweets that Mrs. Bertram had been taken ill. She soon became quite well again, and then rather astonished Catherine by telling her that she had herself seen Beatrice Meadowsweet; that she had found her daughter's judgment with regard to her to be apparently correct, and that, in consequence, she did not object to Beatrice visiting at the Manor.
"You may make Miss Meadowsweet your friend," she said to both girls. "She may come here, and you may sometimes go to see her. But remember, she is the only Northbury young lady I will admit into my society."