“The horse! Just as if the dear old thing hadn’t got a name! Poor darling old Dusty, who has carried you, man and boy, for these fifteen years. I’m ashamed of you, Gil.”
“I’m ashamed of him!” replied Gilbert, “the stupid old beast; he hasn’t a bit of spunk left in him, if he ever had any. A nice specimen, isn’t he, Mark?” for Mark and Eveline had not joined them. “What would St. Maur or Tullietudlem say to him? They’d hardly think him fit for dogs’ meat at Cambridge, would they?”
Mark patted the neck of the old horse, who had carried the rector for over twenty years.
“Dusty prefers Sunbridge to Cambridge; he’s quick enough for the rector, and can get over a quantity of ground if need be.”
“He and the rector suit each other, I’ve no doubt; but I wish the rector would keep something a little more up to the mark for his friends. It makes a fellow look such an owl to be astride of such a Rosinante. Mrs. Alderman Jacobson and those black-browed girls of hers passed me ten minutes ago in a splendid barouche with a couple of thoroughbreds—such beauties, Eva, that dark mottled grey that you love so, matched to an inch with silver-plated harness that positively dazzled me. It is scandalous; his grandfather, old Nat Jacobson, used to peregrinate the metropolis in search of cast-off wearing apparel with a black bag and a pyramid of old beavers on his patriarchal head.”
“Oh, Gil, how can you?” remonstrated Elgitha; “it is a case of industry rewarded. If our grandfathers had toiled as Nat Jacobson toiled, and accepted as fish whatever came into their nets, they might have added barn to barn and acre to acre, and left us the wherewithal to skim through the world in barouches drawn by silver-harnessed dappled greys.”
“True enough, most wise maid of Sunbridge, but I don’t think I should ever acquire a taste for making money; people in our position are not fitted for making money; but if our pater instead of being a model curate, had spent his energies on a good milk walk, you wouldn’t have to plod about on foot all your days, and I shouldn’t have had the confounded nuisance of choosing a profession.”
“Pity him—only pity him!” exclaimed Eva, laughing; “the poor young man has to make up his mind within the next twelve months whether he will be a lawyer or a clergyman. There’s yet a doctor, Gilbert. Why don’t you try medicine?”
“Pah! nasty messy work! Do you think I’d be at the call of every hysterical girl or hypochondriac old bachelor, pottering about from one stuffy room to another, with nothing to relieve the tedium but an occasional dish of scandal?”
“Have a care!” cried Mark; “the day may come when you shall need the help of Æsculapius yourself. For my part, I think no one more admirable than the true doctor, who often in the exercise of his art can ‘minister to the mind diseased,’ and, when all other hope is gone, can point the way to hope in heaven.”