He got on, whether possessed of taste or not. It annoyed me to see the way he made friends with everybody who crossed his path, man, woman or child. They were rather slow to consult him professionally; but Doctor Bell, the old physician who had all the practice round here, lives at Hedgeworth Centre, three miles away, so when Miss Phœbe Withers, Miss Maria’s older sister, had an attack of heart failure one day, they sent for Doctor Richmond, and took a tremendous fancy to him. I kept out of his way; to my mind he was the most thoroughly disagreeable man I ever met.
The front yard, meanwhile, had been cleared up. Nick, the black imp who drove, cooked and gardened for the doctor, was known to be mysteriously occupied behind the house for hours at a time, after the rubbish was removed. Mrs. Benjamin saw it all from her back windows, and reported it at the sewing society. He spent hours pottering among paint-cans, starting seeds and what not; and shortly after, the front fence appeared painted grass green, the gate picked out with white cross-bars, and the lamp-post similarly decorated, bearing a brand-new reflector. Then clam-shell borders to the gravel-walk cropped out, and two round clam-edged beds of geraniums stared from the lawn, while a “rockery” of red and blue boulders, with ferns, reared itself where the piles of tin cans had been.
“Do you like that sort of thing, I want to know?” I inquired wrathfully of Mrs. Bunker at our next Village Improvement meeting.
“Well, it looks perfectly neat,” she answered, “and it is in the style of most of the best kept yards here. I can’t say that I should not prefer quieter colors; but he is a young man yet, you know.”
I was silenced. What right had I, any way, to feel as if there were a sort of practical joke on me, personally, in all this? The day after, a new ornament appeared;—a pair of andirons, painted scarlet, and a hollowed out log across them filled with yellow nasturtiums. Mrs. Pitman pointed it out to me delightedly.
“Just like a real fire!” she said. “Do you see, Irene? The doctor is quite a landscape gardener, isn’t he?” I made no reply.
Another decoration was set forth next, on the opposite side of the yard;—this time a crane, also of scarlet hue, and a swinging pot, with money-wort bubbling in it and dribbling down the sides. By ill luck I was passing at the moment when Nick put it there, turning round with a grin for the approval of his master, who stood in the window.
“Very good, indeed, Nick,” I heard the doctor call out. “You’re a regular Village Improvement Society in yourself, boy.” I wondered if it were possible, by Delsartian methods, to throw scorn into the expression of one’s back. The attempt ended weakly in one of those little conscious adjustments of drapery to which one resorts involuntarily at such junctures. Somehow I felt that those gray eyes were upon me. I had occasionally caught the expression of them before, always with the inevitable twinkle, when we met in public.
He grew into the habit of dropping in at the Bunkers’, to my disgust, as it spoiled my own intimacy there. Mr. B., a shadowy figure in the background of the family stage, had been cured, or imagined he had, of rheumatism by the new physician, and took a great fancy to him. Emily, the daughter, who is so fearfully quiet that most people never make any attempt to rouse her, was actually known to chat with him quite naturally and easily; and our beloved president submitted to cruel thrusts from him with a good grace.
“Mrs. Bunker,” he said one evening as we were all sitting on the piazza in a June twilight, “you’ve never told me yet how you liked the arrangement of my front yard. Have you seen the new garden seat I had put out this week? It’s one of the latest fads in outdoor decoration, made of the head-board and frame of an antique bedstead—a very choice thing. I got the idea from a farmhouse up on the north road.”