MR. GUILDFORD OF SOTHERNBAY.
Angelina. Can he speak, sir?
Miramont. Faith, yes, but not to women.
His language is to heaven and heavenly wonders,
To Nature and her dark and secret causes.
Beaumont and Fletcher.
DOWN in the smiling south, spring had come even earlier than its wont this year, but in England things had been very different. Since January, the weather had been unusually severe; severe enough to lay low many even of the healthy and strong, to snap asunder the last thread of fragile lives, that for long had been quivering like withered leaves ready at the first stormy blast to drop from the tree.
Even in usually mild and sheltered spots, winter this year had cruelly asserted his power. Many a poor invalid, who had left a comfortable home in search of warmth and sunshine, wished himself back again, where at least, if he died, it would be among his own people, or resolved if he lived another year, never again to trust to English climate even at its best. There was illness everywhere; doctors were worn out; people began to talk of not facing winter again without artificial defences against the cold, double windows, Russian stoves, and other devices not often suggested by our modern experiences of weather.
At Sothernbay—a favourite little winter watering-place, as a rule exempt from frost and snow, north winds or east, from cold, in short, in any form—it was just as bad as everywhere else; in the opinion of the Sothernbay visitors naturally very much worse. It was no use telling all these unhappy people that their sufferings were no greater than those of their neighbours in every other part of England; they had no present personal experience of the climate of every other part of England, and they had of that of Sothernbay. It was no use assuring everybody that such a winter had not been known since the year of the famous whole-ox roasting on the Thames; former winters were past and gone, this one was unmistakably and most disagreeably a matter of now, not of then.
In all the seven or eight years during which Mr. Guildford, one of the younger surgeons of Sothernbay, had been settled there, he had never felt so tired and dispirited as on one wretched February evening, when the thermometer had sunk to unknown depths, and there was not the very faintest sign of thaw or break in the pitiless black frost which had reigned remorselessly for many weeks. Personally, Mr. Guildford, who had never been ill in his life, had no fault to find with the frost. As a boy he had never been so happy as during a good old fashioned winter; but his boyhood had been spent in a more invigorating atmosphere, mental and physical, than that of consumptive, hypochondrical Sothernbay; and there were many times when he seriously doubted if he had done well in choosing it for his home. His love for his profession was deep and ardent, and his faith in its possibilities almost boundless. He realized with unusual vividness, for one comparatively young and untried, the great, sad facts of human suffering, and longed for increased power of relieving it. But the peculiar phase of suffering to be met with at Sothernbay was of all kinds the most depressing to see. It was usually so hopeless. What could a doctor do in nine cases out of ten, for blighted lives, whose knell in many instances may be almost said to have sounded before they were born? How even could he cheer them, when the only comfort they craved lay in assurances and promises he could not bring himself to utter? Or the still more trying class of patients—the crowd of hypochondriacs, young and old, who season after season followed each other to the little watering-place, vainly hoping to recover there, as if by magic, the vigour of mind and body they would take no rational means to obtain—what could an honest, intelligent man do for such but tell them the truth, and risk instant dismissal for his pains? Where the physical suffering was genuine, however hopeless, there was certainly the occasional satisfaction of mitigating or temporarily alleviating it; but such satisfaction was poor and meagre to a man so energetic and enthusiastic as Edmond Guildford, Then, as will happen where the power is genuine and steady—a deep, calm flowing river, not a fitful mountain torrent at one time overwhelming in its impetuosity, at another dwindled to a thread—his pent up energies found for themselves a new channel. They turned naturally to study—study and research bearing indirectly upon his own profession. As a youth he had worked fairly, displaying an intelligence above the average, and some originality; as a man he threw his whole soul into these voluntary labours. And gradually this pursuit of truth—
“Truth tangible and palpable,”
this