The butler disappeared with a cynical twinkle in his eyes, and turned to where Mr. Stott was standing with his broad back to the hall fire. The surgeon and Mr. Gladden looked at each other with a certain comical flash of sympathy. Stott was a florid and well-complexioned person who wore a blue coat, a scratch wig, brown riding-breeches, and top-boots. The surgeon did not cultivate the town graces and delicacies of “the faculty.” He had to ride through mud and ford streams, dive into hovels where gowns and periwigs would have been a nuisance and the pomposities of the profession more than ridiculous.
The dowager scrutinized Mr. Stott from top to toe with an air of aristocratic insolence as he bowed himself into the red parlor. She scanned his muddy boots, noticed the bourgeois redness of his face and hands, and desired him, with some hauteur, not to approach too near her chair. Surgeon Stott’s humorous mouth twitched expressively. He inhaled the odors of lavender and burned feathers, and seated himself, with the amiable docility of a philosopher, near the door.
The Lady Letitia had cocked her beak at him commandingly.
“Well, sir, what is your business with me?”
“I have come to speak to you about Mr. Jeffray, madam.”
The dowager caught a solemn twinkle in the man’s vulgar, blue eyes; the suave curve of his clean-shaven mouth seemed to suggest that the surgeon possessed a strong sense of humor. The Lady Letitia’s dignity increased. She did not exist to amuse muddy apothecaries peddling boluses in provincial towns. She, to whom the great Dr. Billinghurst, of London, would listen for an hour, was not to be smiled at by this rustic blue-bottle.
“You are the apothecary from Rookhurst, sir, I believe?”
“Surgeon, madam.”
“A member of the company?”
“I claim that distinction.”