“No, I have not let out anything about danger. Lola is only too anxious already.”
“I will put the infirmary in hand to-morrow; and I will take my wife and daughter to Scotland on Tuesday.”
“Upon my word, it will be a very good thing to get them away. These fever cases are so mysterious. There’s no knowing what shape infection may take. I have the strongest belief in your system of drainage—”
“Nothing is perfect,” said Greswold impatiently. “The science of sanitation is still in its infancy. I sometimes think we have not advanced very far from the knowledge of our ancestors, whose homes were desolated by the Black Death. However, don’t let us talk, Porter. Let us act, if we can. Come and look at the dairy.”
“You don’t apprehend evil there?”
“There are three sources of typhoid poison—drainage, water, milk. You say the drains and the water are good, and that the milk comes from my own dairy. If you are right as to the first and second, the third must be wrong, no matter whose dairy it may come from.”
He took up his hat, and went out of the house with the doctor. Gardens and shrubberies stretched before them in all their luxuriance of summer verdure, gardens and shrubberies which had been the delight and pride of many generations of Greswolds, but loved more dearly by none than by George Greswold and his wife. In Mildred’s mind the old family house was a part of her husband’s individuality, an attribute rather than a mere possession. Every tree and every shrub was sacred. These, his mother’s own hands had cropped and tended; those, grandfathers and great-grandfathers and arrière great-grandfathers had planted in epochs that distance has made romantic.
On the right of the hall-door a broad gravel path led in a serpentine sweep towards the stables, a long, low building spread over a considerable area, and hidden by shrubberies. The dairy was a little further off, approached by a winding walk through thickets of laurel and arbutus. It had been originally a barn, and was used as a receptacle for all manner of out-of-door lumber when Mildred came to the Manor. She had converted the old stone building into a model dairy, with outside gallery and staircase of solid woodwork, and with a Swiss roof. Other buildings had been added. There were low cowhouses, and tall pigeon-houses, and a picturesque variety of gables and elevations which was delightful to the eye, seen on a summer afternoon such as this June Sunday, amidst the perfume of clove carnations and old English roses, and the cooing of doves.
Mrs. Greswold’s Channel Island cows were her delight—creatures with cream-coloured coats, black noses, and wistful brown eyes. Scarcely a day passed on which she did not waste an hour or so in the cowhouses or in the meadows caressing these favourites. Each cow had her name painted in blue and white above her stall, and the chief, or duchess of the herd, was very severe in the maintenance of cowhouse precedence, and knew how to resent the insolence of a new-comer who should presume to cross the threshold in advance of her.
The dairy itself had a solemn and shadowy air, like a shrine, and was as pretty as the dairy at Frogmore. The walls were lined with Minton tiles, the shallow milk-pans were of Doulton pottery, and quaintly-shaped pitchers of bright colours were ranged on china brackets along the walls. The windows were latticed, and a pane of ruby, rose, or amethyst appeared here and there among the old bottle-green glass, and cast a patch of coloured light upon the cool marble slab below.