“Why not a little sooner than usual, for once in a way?”
“I shall be sorry to go away while the people are ill,” she said gravely.
George Greswold forgot that the gong had sounded. He sat, leaning forward, in a despondent attitude. The very mention of sickness in the land had unhinged him. This child was so dear to him, his only one. He had done all that forethought, sense, and science could do to make the village which lay at his doors the perfection of health and purity. Famous sanitarians had been entertained at the Manor, and had held counsel with Mr. Greswold upon the progress of sanitation, and its latest developments. They had wondered with him over the blind ignorance of our forefathers. They had instructed him how to drain his house, and how to ventilate and purify his cottages. They had assured him that, so far as lay within the limits of human intelligence, perfection had been achieved in Enderby village and Enderby Manor House.
And now his idolised daughter hung over his chair and told him that there was fever raging in the land, his land; the land which he loved as if it were a living thing, and on which he had lavished care and money ever since he had owned it. Other men might consider their ancestral estates as something to be lived upon; George Greswold thought of his forefathers’ house and lands as something to be lived for. His cottages were model cottages, and he was known far and wide as a model landlord.
“George, are you quite forgetting luncheon?” asked a voice from one of the open windows, and he looked up to see a beautiful face looking out at him, framed in hair of Lola’s colour.
“My dear Mildred, come here for a moment?” he said, and his wife went to him, smiling still, but with a shade of uneasiness in her face.
“Go in, pet. We’ll follow you directly,” he said to his daughter; and then he rose slowly, with an air of being almost broken down by a great trouble, and put his hand through his wife’s arm, and led her along the velvet turf beyond the cedar.
“Mildred, have you heard of this fever?”
“Yes; Louisa told me this morning when she was doing my hair. It seems to be rather bad; but there cannot be any danger, surely, after all you have done to make the cottages perfect in every way?”
“One cannot tell. There may be a germ of evil brought from somewhere else. I am sorry Lola has been among the people.”