Mr. Carrington, in his shirt sleeves, and white linen sun-hat crammed down over his eyes, stood under the acacia-tree at his garden gate, chatting to the Reverend Peter Burt, Curate of Cossington, who had tramped three miles to visit some of the sick people on the farm. Mr. Burt was rather a shy little man, very much in earnest, and very much convinced of the responsibility of his position.
“All this must have been a great worry to you,” said the clergyman, with a comprehensive sweep of an oak stick.
“Worry—don’t talk of it, sir. What with the heat, and the Medical Officer of Health, and the Sanitary Inspector, I’ve been pretty near crazy. I don’t know what I should have done, Mr. Burt, but for Murchison and his good lady.”
“Mrs. Murchison seems to have been a local Florence Nightingale.”
Mr. Carrington stared.
“I don’t happen to know the woman’s name,” he said; “but she must have been a good ’un, Mr. Burt, to be showed in the same class as the doctor’s lady. Why—” and the farmer withdrew his hands from his pockets and tapped his left palm with his right forefinger—“why, d’you know what she did when she’d been over here and seen how we were fixed?”
Mr. Carrington paused expressively, and looked the young clergyman in the face, as though defying him to conceive the nature of this unique woman’s genius.
“No, I have not heard.”
“Well, Mr. Burt, there’s religion and there’s religion; some of us wear black coats on a Sunday and put silver in the plate; some of us aren’t so regular and respectable, but we play the game, and that’s more than many of your sitting pew-hens do. Excuse me, sir, I’m rather rough in the tongue. Well, Mrs. Murchison, she doesn’t strike you as a district visiting sort of lady to look at; she’s got a fine face and a head of hair, like the Countess of Camber, who gave the prizes away at our Agricultural Show last season. Well, Mr. Burt, she came over here, and saw what sort of a fix we were in, two grumbling nurses, and not much more than straw and sacking. Well, what does she do but take one of my wagons and my men and go off to Roxton all on her own.”
Mr. Carrington paused for breath, took off his sun-hat and wiped his forehead with it, his eyes remaining fixed emphatically on the Curate’s face.