The snow came early. It was nothing like Christmas yet, and here was the ground covered with it. The skies had seemed to threaten it the previous night, but people were not prepared to find everything wearing a white aspect when they rose in the morning.
The Reverend Mr. Hastings was ill. A neglected cold was telling so greatly upon him that his daughter Rose had at length sent for Mr. Snow. Mrs. Hastings was away for a day or two, on a visit to some friends at a distance.
Mr. Hastings sat over the fire, dreamily watching David Jekyl, awaiting the visit of Mr. Snow, and thinking his own thoughts. David was busy in the garden. He had a bit of crape on his old felt hat for his recently-interred father. The crape led the Rector’s thoughts to the old man, and thence to the deprivation brought to the old man’s years, the loss to the sons, through George Godolphin. How many more, besides poor old Jekyl, had George Godolphin ruined! himself, that reverend divine, amongst the rest!
“A good thing when the country shall be rid of him!” spoke the Rector in his bitterness. “I would give all the comfort left in my life that Maria, for her own sake, had not linked her fate with his! But that can’t be remedied now. I hope he will make her happier there, in her new home, than he has made her here!”
By which words you will gather that Mr. Hastings had no suspicion of the change in his daughter’s state. It was so. Lord and Lady Averil were not alone in learning the tidings suddenly; at, as it may be said, the eleventh hour. Maria had not sent word to the Rectory that she was worse. She knew that her mother was absent, that her father was ill, that Rose was occupied; and that the change from bad to worse had come upon herself so imperceptibly, that she saw not its real danger—as was proved by her not writing to her husband. The Rector, as he sits there, has his mind full of Maria’s voyage, and its discomfort: of her changed life in India: and he is saying to himself that he shall get out in the afternoon and call to see her.
The room faced the side of the house, but as Mr. Hastings sat he could catch a glimpse of the garden gate, and presently saw the well-known gig stop at it, and the surgeon descend.
“Well, and who’s ill now?” cried Mr. Snow, as he let himself in at the hall-door, and thence to the room, where he took a seat in front of the Rector, examined his ailment, and gossiped at the same time, as was his wont; gossiped and grumbled.
“Ah, yes; just so: feel worse than you have felt for twenty years. You caught this cold at Thomas Godolphin’s funeral, and you have not chosen to pay attention to it.”
“I think I did. I felt it coming on the next day. I could not read the service in my hat, Snow, over him, and you know that rain was falling. Ah! There was a sufferer! But had it not been for the calamity that fell upon him, he might not have gone to the grave quite so soon.”
“He felt it too keenly,” remarked Mr. Snow. “And your daughter—there’s another sad victim. Ah me! Sometimes I wish I had never been a doctor, when I find all that I can do in the way of treatment comes to nothing.”