On this same hot July afternoon, there came careering down the street, in its usual quick fashion, a handsome open carriage drawn by a pair of beautiful bays. Dr. Davenal did not see why, because he was a doctor, his carriage should be a sober one, his horses tame and rusty. Truth to say, he was given to spend rather than to save. I have told you he had faults, and perhaps you will call that one. He sat in his accustomed seat, low in the carriage, his servant Roger mounted far above him. He rarely drove, himself; never when paying professional visits: a surgeon needs to keep his hands steady. Roger was a favourite servant: fourteen years he had been in his present service, and was getting fat upon it. Dr. Davenal sometimes told him jokingly that he should have to pension him off, for his weight was getting too much for the bays. The same could not be said of Dr. Davenal; he was a spare man of middle height, with a broad white forehead, dark eyes, and a careworn expression.
The carriage was bowling quickly past the market-place--Dr. Davenal's time was too precious to allow of his being driven slowly--when a woman suddenly descried it. Quitting her sitting-place in the market, she set off to run towards it, flinging up her hands in agitation, and overturning her small board of wares with the haste she made. Poor wares!--gooseberries and white and red currants displayed on cabbage leaves to attract the eager eyes and watering lips of juvenile passers-by; and common garden flowers tied up in nosegays--a halfpenny a nosegay, a halfpenny a leaf. Roger saw the movement.
"Here's Dame Hundley flying on to us, sir."
Dr. Davenal, who was very much in the habit of falling into thought, seeing and hearing nothing as he went along, raised his head, and turning it in the direction of the market, met her anxious countenance.
"Pull up, Roger," he said to his servant.
The countenance was a tearful one by the time it had reached the doctor's side; and then the woman seemed to become aware that she had done an unwarrantable thing in thus summarily arresting Dr. Davenal--not that there was anything in his face or manner to remind her of it.
"Oh, sir, I beg ten thousand pardons for making thus bold! Seeing your carriage, I started off in the moment's impulse. I've been a-fearing all the morning as I sat there, that maybe you might be out when I called, after market was over. He is no better, sir: he is worser and weaker."
"Ah!" remarked the doctor. "Couldn't he come in today?"
"I don't believe there'll ever be any more coming in again for him," was the woman's answer, as she strove to suppress her tears. "'Mother,' says he to me this morning, when I tried to get him up, 'it's o' no use trying. I--I'"--She fairly broke down.
"Does the parish doctor see him regularly?"