Wenderholme: A Story of Lancashire and Yorkshire

by Philip Gilbert Hamerton

Colonel Stanburne's conversation was not always very profound, but his dinners were never dull, for he would talk, and make other people talk too. He solemnly warned the Doctor not to allow himself to be entrapped into giving gratuitous medical advice to Lady Helena. "She thinks she's got fifteen diseases, she does, upon my word; and she's a sort of notion that because you're the regimental doctor, she has a claim on you for gratuitous counsel and assistance. Now I consider that I have such a claim—if a private has it, surely a colonel has it too—and when we come up for our first training I shall expect you to look at my tongue, and feel my pulse, and physic me as a militia-man, at her Majesty's expense. But it is by no means so clear to me that my wife has any right to gratuitous doctoring, and mind she doesn't extort it from you. She's a regular screw, my wife is; and she loses no opportunity of obtaining benefits for nothing." Then he rattled on with a hundred anecdotes about ladies and doctors, in which there was just enough truth to give a pretext for his audacious exaggerations.

When they returned to the drawing-room, the Colonel made Lady Helena sing; and she sang well. The Doctor, like many inhabitants of Shayton, had a very good ear, and greatly enjoyed music. Lady Helena had seldom found so attentive a listener; he sought old favorites of his in her collection of songs, and begged her to sing them one after another. It seemed as if he never would be tired of listening. Her ladyship felt pleased and flattered, and sang with wonderful energy and feeling. The Doctor, though in his innocence he thought only of the pure pleasure her music gave him, could have chosen no better means of ingratiating himself in her favor; and if there had not, unhappily, been that dark and dubious question about church attendance, which made her ladyship look upon him as a sort of Dissenter, or worse, the Doctor would that night have entered into relations of quite frank and cordial friendship with Lady Helena. English ladies are very kind and forgiving on many points. A man may be notoriously immoral, or a gambler, or a drinker, yet if he be well off they will kindly ignore and pass over these little defects; but the unpardonable sin is failure in church attendance, and they will not pass over that. Lady Helena, in her character of inquisitor, had discovered this symptom of heresy, and would have been delighted to find a moral screw of some kind by which the culpable Doctor might be driven churchwards. If the law had permitted it, I have no doubt that she would have applied material screws, and pinched the Doctor's thumbs, or roasted him gently before a slow fire, or at least sent him to church between two policemen with staves; but as these means were beyond her power, she must wait until the moral screw could be found. A good practical means, which she had resorted to in several instances with poor people, had been to deprive them of their means of subsistence; and all men and women whom her ladyship's little arm could reach knew that they must go to church or leave their situations; so they attended with a regularity which, though exemplary in the eyes of men, could scarcely, one would think (considering the motive), be acceptable to Heaven. But Lady Helena acted in this less from a desire to please God than from the instinct of domination, which, in her character of spiritual ruler, naturally exercised itself on this point. It seldom happens that the master of a house is the spiritual ruler of it; he is the temporal power, not the spiritual. Colonel Stanburne felt and knew that he had no spiritual power.

This matter of the Doctor's laxness as a church-goer had been rankling in Lady Helena's mind all the time she had been singing, and when she closed the piano she was ready for an attack. If the Doctor had been shivering blanketless in a bivouac, and she had had the power of giving him a blanket or withholding it, she would have offered it on condition he promised to go to church, and she would have withheld it if he had refused compliance. But the Doctor had blankets of his own, and so could not be touched through a deprivation of blanket. She might, however, deprive the old woman he had recommended, and at the same time give the Doctor a lesson, indirectly.

"I forgot to ask you, Dr. Bardly, whether the old woman you recommended for a blanket was a churchwoman, and regular in her attendance."

"Two questions very easily answered," replied that audacious and unhesitating Doctor; "she is a Wesleyan Methodist, and irregular in her attendance."

"Then I'm—very sorry—Dr. Bardly, but I cannot give her a blanket, as I had promised. I can only give them to our—own people, you know; and I make it essential that they should be good church-people—I mean, very regular church-people."

"Very well; I'll give her a blanket myself."

The opportunity was not to be neglected, and her ladyship fired her gun. She had the less hesitation in doing so, that it seemed monstrously presumptuous in a medical man to give blankets at all! What right had he to usurp the especial prerogative of great ladies? And then to give a blanket to this very woman whom, for good reasons, her ladyship had condemned to a state of blanketlessness!

"I quite understand," she said, with much severity of tone, "that Dr. Bardly, who never attends public worship himself, should have a fellow-feeling with those who are equally negligent."