“Bless the child! that’s not a bad idea,” said Dr. Wrightson. “So we’ll let him have some of the very poor people, shall we? Yes, yes! so he shall. Excellent practice for a rising man. Give him confidence and experience, won’t it? We’ll hope, though, the poor fellow has not a large family to support, or else that he has some private means of his own. He won’t live in that house for nothing, I can tell him.”
“The rent alone is sixty pounds a year,” remarked Miss Wrightson; “and the garden is being thoroughly set in order, Mudge tells me. Mudge has been employed to do many little odd jobs about the house, and I met him coming out of it just now. Mudge hears Mr. Peirce is a single man—quite a young man—but has his mother living with him. He was doing well in London, and was reckoned very clever there, so the servants told Mudge; but the air did not suit the old lady, and so they have come to settle in the country. I can’t think whoever can have advised them to come to Oakhampton, of all places.
“Some ignorant busybody who did not know what he was about, you may depend upon it,” said Dr. Wrightson. “Now, let’s go to dinner, Penny.”
“It’s not as if you were ever ill, you know, or unable to attend to your duties,” continued Miss Penelope, as she walked into the dining-room, “or as if, when you did go away for a day or two, you could not get Mr. Halliday, from Littleton, to come and look after your patients. It’s such a ridiculous thing of a young man to come down from London, and try to cut you out at Oakhampton, brother.”
“It merely evinces great folly and presumption on the part of the young man, my dear Penny, and so we’ll say no more about the matter.”
But from that day forward the favourite topic in the Wrightson family was the last enormity committed by Mr. Montague Peirce.
“I saw that fellow’s trap standing at Hornibrook’s door,” Dr. Wrightson would suddenly observe; “that fellow” being the very mildest designation that was ever bestowed to Mr. Peirce.
“Oh, yes! I daresay you did. The man makes free with everybody, I hear,” Miss Wrightson would reply, indignantly. “He goes and pays people long visits, and bores them to death, I’ve no doubt, and then hopes all the town will take it for granted that he is attending them.”
It was very disagreeable for poor Dr. Wrightson, when he drove through the streets in his neat, respectable, blue brougham, to meet this young Peirce dashing past in his light, smart-looking dog-cart, drawn by a big chestnut horse; and it was most unpleasant for the whole family to go to church every Sunday, knowing they were liable to be jostled against “those Peirces” in the aisle.
Miss Penelope declared she could hardly bear to walk down the street, lest she should meet her adversaries; and as for Fanny, she could not think how it happened, but she never went near the windows without seeing the “dreadful man” pass by. It was curious, that, under these painful circumstances Fanny should spend the greater part of her time in looking out of the window. To be sure, Mr. Peirce was as good-looking and pleasant a young man as could be met with on a summer’s day, and the old lady, his mother, was quite a picture in her rich black silks; but the Wrightsons insisted upon considering the Peirces as their mortal enemies, and would not listen to a word in their favour.