“It is none of my business,” said General Witherington, “how you became soldiers,—soldiers I found you, and soldiers I will leave you. But I will take especial care, that as soldiers you shall have every thing, to a penny or a pin's head, that you are justly entitled to.” He went to work without fear or favour, reported many abuses to the Board of Directors, had several officers, commissaries, &c. removed from the service, and made his name as great a terror to the peculators at home, as it had been to the enemies of Britain in Hindostan.
Captain Seelencooper, and his associates in the hospital department, heard and trembled, fearing that their turn should come next; but the General, who elsewhere examined all with his own eyes, showed a reluctance to visit the hospital in person. Public report industriously imputed this to fear of infection. Such was certainly the motive; though it was not fear for his own safety that influenced General Witherington, but he dreaded lest he should carry the infection home to the nursery, on which he doated. The alarm of his lady was yet more unreasonably sensitive: she would scarcely suffer the children to walk abroad, if the wind but blew from the quarter where the hospital was situated.
But Providence baffles the precautions of mortals. In a walk across the fields, chosen as the most sheltered and sequestered, the children, with their train of Eastern and European attendants, met a woman who carried a child that was recovering from the small-pox. The anxiety of the father, joined to some religious scruples on the mother's part, had postponed inoculation, which was then scarcely come into general use. The infection caught like a quick-match, and ran like wildfire through all those in the family who had not previously had the disease. One of the General's children, the second boy, died, and two of the Ayas, or black female servants, had the same fate. The hearts of the father and mother would have been broken for the child they had lost, had not their grief been suspended by anxiety for the fate of those who lived, and who were confessed to be in imminent danger. They were like persons distracted, as the symptoms of the poor patients appeared gradually to resemble more nearly that of the child already lost.
While the parents were in this agony of apprehension, the General's principal servant, a native of Northumberland like himself, informed him one morning that there was a young man from the same county among the hospital doctors, who had publicly blamed the mode of treatment observed towards the patients, and spoken of another which he had seen practised with eminent success.
“Some impudent quack,” said the General, “who would force himself into business by bold assertions. Doctor Tourniquet and Doctor Lancelot are men of high reputation.”
“Do not mention their reputation,” said the mother, with a mother's impatience, “did they not let my sweet Reuben die? What avails the reputation of the physician, when the patient perisheth?”
“If his honour would but see Doctor Hartley,” said Winter, turning half towards the lady, then turning back again to his master. “He is a very decent young man, who, I am sure, never expected what he said to reach your honour's ears;—and he is a native of Northumberland.”
“Send a servant with a led horse,” said the General; “let the young man come hither instantly.”
It is well known, that the ancient mode of treating the small-pox was to refuse to the patient every thing which Nature urged him to desire; and, in particular, to confine him to heated rooms, beds loaded with blankets, and spiced wine, when Nature called for cold water and fresh air. A different mode of treatment had of late been adventured upon by some practitioners, who preferred reason to authority, and Gideon Gray had followed it for several years with extraordinary success.
When General Witherington saw Hartley, he was startled at his youth; but when he heard him modestly, but with confidence, state the difference of the two modes of treatment, and the rationale of his practice, he listened with the most serious attention. So did his lady, her streaming eyes turning from Hartley to her husband, as if to watch what impression the arguments of the former were making upon the latter. General Witherington was silent for a few minutes after Hartley had finished his exposition, and seemed buried in profound reflection. “To treat a fever,” he said, “in a manner which tends to produce one, seems indeed to be adding fuel to fire.”