XVIII.
To say that George Featherston, Doctor-in-ordinary at Buttermead, felt as if he were standing on his head instead of his heels, would not in the least express his mental condition as he stood in his surgery that September afternoon and read a letter, just delivered, from his sister, Madame Carimon.
“Wants me to go to Sainteville to see Ann Preen; thinks she will die if I refuse, for the French doctors can do nothing for her!” commented Featherston, staring at the letter in intense perplexity, and then looking off it to stare at me.
I wonder whether anything in this world happens by chance? In the days and years that have gone by since, I sometimes ask myself whether that did: that I should be at that particular moment in Featherston’s surgery. Squire Todhetley was staying with Sir John Whitney for partridge shooting. He had taken me with him, Tod being in Gloucestershire; and on this Friday afternoon I had run in to say “How-d’ye-do” to Featherston.
“Sainteville!” repeated he, quite unable to collect his senses. “Why, I must cross the water to get there!”
I laughed. “Did you think Sainteville would cross to you, sir?”
“Bless me! just listen to this,” he went on, reading parts of the letter aloud for my benefit. “‘It is a dreadful story, George; I dare not enter into details here. But I may tell you this much: that she is dying of fright as much as of fever—or whatever it may be that ails her physically. I am sure it is not consumption, though some of the people here think it is. It is fright and superstition. She lives in the belief that the house is haunted: that Lavinia’s ghost walks in it.’”
“Now what on earth can Mary mean by that?” demanded the doctor, looking off to ask me. “Ann Preen’s wits must have left her. And Mary’s too, to repeat so nonsensical a thing.”
Turning to the next page of the letter, Featherston read on.
“‘To see her dying by inches before my eyes, and not make any attempt to, save her is what I cannot reconcile myself to, George. I should have it on my conscience afterwards. I think there is this one chance for her: that you, who have attended her before and must know her constitution, would see her now. You might be able to suggest some remedy or mode of treatment which would restore her. It might even be that the sight of a home face, of her old home doctor, would do for her what the strange doctors here cannot do. No one knows better than you how marvellously in illness the mind influences the body.’